“Hell of a night,” Sonny said as he entered the room looking as exhausted as he apparently felt, though his drooping eyes widened when he saw the radio on the desk and his big brother standing behind it, “Oh, did you get that registered or whatever?”

“I’m workin on it,” Junior said, and it seemed to be a sore subject. Orenda felt it was something she would need to ask him about later.

“Go to bed,” Sonny said, “You look awful.”

“Bitch, you go to bed,” Junior shot back, “can’t look no worse than you.”

“You both look like shit,” Mary Sue said, effectively settling the matter, then shrugged and added, “As much as a Brigaddon can.”

“Lorry, you in here?” Sonny asked, “I didn’t know where the hell you went. Bunni was lookin for you outside.”

“I had to come to this stupid thing,” the duke of the Agricultural District replied, “and I had to go put new clothes on and shit- you seen how nasty I was. Believe me, if I didn’t have to be here I’d’a stayed out there to help.”

“Duke Agalon was helping you?” Orenda asked.

“Yeah,” Sonny said, “He’s a healer. He ain’t a doctor but-”

“I’m a medic!” the duke said, “We don’t exactly heal people, we kinda make em more comfortable while they die. But there was a doctor out there and I can listen to orders and brew up some potions if’in I need to. Oh, reminds me, Erl, I’m bought outta fairy dust. I’ma need some more, but, you know, I pay you for the shit I buy.”

“The price might go up,” the duke of the Sage Lake district said.

“That’s unfortunate,” Lorsan said, “on account’a I can set up some traps in the woods out back’a my land and catch me some fairies but y’all can’t grow shit on that cursed land. If I took a mind to raise prices, y’all’d have to starve. Maybe ya’ can eat potion components.”

“Rendy,” Sonny reached into a bag at his side and pulled out yet another folder, and her eyebrows knitted in the middle of her forehead as she set the one she was holding with the rest of the growing pile of paperwork on her desk. The stack was growing nearly as tall as the radio and her head was beginning to ache.

“Thank you,” she said, nonetheless, because her workload was no fault of Sonny’s. “Can you just… summarize it for me? What did you find out?”

“Thirteen casualties altogether,” Sonny said, “but ten of um, I think, was… on purpose. We pulled out ten bodies didn’t nobody recognize, and I know we done away with the whole… look we can’t stand here and pretend it’s exactly common to pull out somebody wearin the uniform of a house servant and see pointy ears. But that’s what we done. I don’t know why they didn’t do military disguises… pure unbridled stupidity? Like if I wanted to sneak into a big ass place like this, I’d pretend to be a houseslave- sorry; force ‘a habit- house servant- but I wanted to sneak in, I dunno, your man there, I’d put him in a military uniform. So… maybe they wanted us to know who they was, or maybe they was just stupid. Either way I’m pretty sure that’s who caused the quake. What’s weird to me… is that it took ten of ‘em to take down one tower? Klin, didn’t you topple a whole castle by your damn self?”

“Um…” Klin said, but to his great relief, Sonny kept talking.

“An if daddy’s to be believed, Tolimaur more or less took down that whole arena at satra by himself- but he had Ronnie’s gunpowder, all he had to do was cause the friction to set it off. We didn’t find nothin like that. I thought it mighta went into the wine cellar, on accounta some of that shit is flammable as hell- y’all got pure corn whiskey down there- but it didn’t. Best I can figure they either wouldn’t tryin to take down the whole castle- it was a targeted attack on you- which is stupid cause you’re an immortal lava monster and whatnot- or we just had us some dumb as hell assasins.”

“I will tell ya now, though,” he continued, leaning on the desk and addressing Orenda directly, “that I’m leanin toward the former- an’ I’ll tell ya why. It’s my guess that whoever hired ‘em was inside the castle at the time, an’ ain’t nobody out here tryin to bring down the house on they boss’s head. Also… I found evidence that they had cast an earth shield- I don’t rightly know why it didn’t hold. I don’t know nothin about magic. So… maybe they wanted to die, maybe not. Why throw up a shield to protect yourself and then take it down?”

“Perhaps they thought the danger had passed,” Orenda suggested, “shields are fairly difficult to control- you have to understand, Sonny, that magic flows so fiercely it can be quite difficult to control- that’s the… the difficulty. It can get out of hand so easily.”

Orenda felt that she was repeating herself, her headache was getting worse, and she wanted more cookies. She didn’t understand why she was feeling so angry and nervous all the time, but her hands were beginning to shake and it rattled the papers she held.

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“Yeah, maybe,” Sonny shrugged, “your guess is as good as mine.”

“I sent out scribes like you told me, Rendy!” Anilla announced, “to all the families like you asked, and also for everybody who was hurt.”

“Did you say ‘scribes’ or ‘scries’?” Orenda asked.

“Scribes!” Anilla said, “Um… what are they called? Those young people who take letters and give them to people.”

“Why didn’t you scry them?” Orenda asked, “That would have been so much faster!”

“Nobody around here uses air magic,” Anilla said, “are you ok, Rendy? You look stressed.”

“I’m fine,” Orenda lied, then asked Sonny, “has everyone been extracted?”

“Yeah, we got the whole thing cleared out,” Sonny said, “but there’s been some structural damage to the foundation so the rebuild’s gonna be a pain in the ass- Junior? Bubby? You alright- nope, down he goes.”

Junior Brigaddon had swayed on his feet and eventually fell forward where he slammed into the desk.

“I’m awake!” He proclaimed, “I’m awake!”

“Can we please have a room arranged for him?” Orenda asked the guard by the door.

“Yes, your majesty,” the guard bowed with his hand fisted over his heart and the other folded in the small of his back, then turned and walked into the hall to ring for a servant.

Orenda massaged her temples in an attempt to get the headache to subside.

“Do you have any idea who sent them?” Orenda asked.

“Dead folks ain’t known to tell no tales,” Sonny said, “they was all dressed in uniforms like the houseslaves- servants, goddamn it, I don’t know why I keep doin that- that looked… pretty authentic. I got some a’ them little teenagers that pass for a military around here lookin around for clues, but,” he paused, swayed a little himself, and supported himself heavily on the desk, “actually wouldn’t hurt my feelins none if Klin come down to help us with that. He’s the only one what lived here before- I don’t know how much time a concubine got to spend downstairs like that- I don’t know if y’all was locked up like pleasure slaves or not.”

Klin blinked too many times to be simply moistening his eyes in Orenda’s direction, as if Sonny’s request confused him.

“I… uh… I went down there… sometimes…” he said, “I can help ya look around.”

“You’ve both been up all night,” Orenda said with imposed practicality, “And all day. It’s nearly noon. A meal and a nap would do you both some good. You can’t be expected to find anything in the state you’re in now.”

“I’d settle for a cup a’ coffee,” Sonny said.

Orenda sat at the head of the large table and smiled at the feast laid out before her. This, if nothing else, was exactly like the dreams she had had as a child, when she had pretended to be a princess. Orenda had grown up in a workhouse where meals were rationed and timed, and had decided that, if she had the means, she would never go hungry again. The rations in the servant’s dining hall, as well as in the military academy, a school attached to and connected with the castle itself housing children Orenda thought were shockingly young, had improved as well.

The majority of the food served was on a strict form of vegetarianism, out of respect for the Brigaddons, something that Orenda had decided to make known with place cards before each dish. She enjoyed problems like those- simple, easily solved, practical problems.

Klin, for whatever reason, had to be constantly reminded to sit at the table like a civilized person, because his preferred method of attending to any mealtime was to hover behind and slightly to the left of her like some sort of specter making a poor attempt at haunting.

As if a ghost were passing

Every inch in green.

Sarya had disappeared and Orenda had no idea where she went, but she wondered if Anilla had gone with her, because she was also not in attendance at the formal luncheon. Orenda wished she could join them- she found that she tired of formal luncheons fairly easily. She had never done particularly well in her etiquette classes, partially because she considered her partner an idiot, and partially because she just did not care enough about the lessons to commit them to memory. She had spoken the truth when she had said that she didn’t care what the nobility thought of her, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to spend so much time with people who’s approval or disapproval could mean nothing to her. Every interaction felt somehow both shallow and hollow; they all sat on top of her skin and could not permeate her brain. She could not bring herself to pay particular attention.

Mary Sue and Sonny sat to her right, talking to each other about the tower collapse, the radio, the land they were planning to buy, the book their father had written that they were planning to publish, but even they seemed strange and far away- as if there was a wall between them; a little fuzzy and difficult to hear.

She felt someone squeezing her hand and turned to see that it was Klin.

She saw his lips move and heard his voice a moment later; the effect was off putting.

“All rulin’ is,” The Emerald Knight’s floating voice informed her, “is gettin’ constantly waylaid by jackassery. It’s part’a what drove her crazy.”

He had already released her hand and was taking a long drink of his wine by the time he had finished this sentence, then sat at the table tearing his dinner roll into smaller and smaller chunks until they had gone from bite-sized to infantesimal. He didn’t seem to eat anything.