Next❧
Index
ominating the room was the long table, mahogany, very old and very well-maintained, and everyone around it was dressed formally but in regular clothes, so their personalities were more apparent. The only person Aix didn’t recognise was the one between Asher and Heather, their size not doing anything to dwarf him, despite his slender frame.
Rosenrot was an object-head, that was the first thing Aix registered after the scent of roses—the entire plant, wood and leaves and dirt and all, not just the blooms. Rosenrot’s face wasn’t a face at all, it was a rose that was bigger-than-life, the bright colour of arterial spray, with smaller buds—no, fruits, was that was a rose-hip looked like?—around it, and foliage that looked black in the low, warm light of the room. There wasn’t a face, no eyes, nothing, just a rose that was right at the edge of ‘fully open’ and ‘dying’. Below it was a vaguely humanoid body, the way fae always got humanoid slightly… off. He had shoulders and the right amount of arms and legs, but he didn’t have the right amount of joints or digits—though Aix found his rosewood hands very pretty, longer and thinner than a human’s could ever be; and his clothes were certainly sexy, because Aix wasn’t sure who had gotten inspiration from whom, but whichever direction inspiration had gone, it had been between the Faerie Court and Brian Froud—the strange asymmetry, the sparkle that had a very wild primeval forest quality to it, the layers of different translucent fabrics…
Aix glanced at Garnet, further down the table, on Heather’s other side, in his court clothes, and realised that Garnet being Autumnfolk was obvious even if Aix hadn’t just been told—Garnet was very autumnal, but Aix hadn’t noticed before because… because back then, he hadn’t really had a grasp on a four-season climate, since he’d never set foot in one. Rosenrot didn’t register as ‘summer’ to Aix; but that was because Aix was from the Summerland, as in the land of endless summer—the desert. Even though his backyard had been full of fruiting trees, they were arid trees, they fruited all the time. The flowers bloomed all year, where Aix had grown up. Summer, to him, was when it was so dry and hot that everything burned. Summer, to Aix, meant fire and wind like opening an oven, and the smells of chlorine and sunblock and smoke, not green and fruit and flowers.
And, also, Garnet tended to wear human clothes—raver and nightclub fashion—in neon and white; this was the first Aix had seen him looking like one of the sidhe, and he was breathtaking, the froth of his curls not simply red but shining with the multifaceted scarlets of maple leaves in September, his skin the same gold-edged white of birch bark at sunset, the depthless turquoise of his eyes a memory of summer. He had the fashionable points on his ears, but now they were long, turning to twigs right at the very end, just before branching out like the bare fingers of a tree, above his head. His lips were gold, yes, but gold like aspen leaves, not gilt as Aix had first seen in his dreams of Garnet. His clothes were no less wonderful, oranges tinged with red, a specimen of his namesake set into a large gold amulet, gold chains strung with smaller garnets draping over his hands and fingers, shimmering softly in the low light.
Heather was naked, a good counterpoint to the intimidating beauty of the two sidhe; like all marine mammals she was huge, and it wasn’t the deceptive and fragile bigness of when humans approached that size—there was nothing fragile about Heather being seven and a half feet tall and probably weighing several hundred pounds. She had a belly and a copious generous one, as well as solid pillars of leg and arm—it was the kind of fat that hid muscle and very solid bones. Her skin was a sort of ambiguous colour when she was out of her coat, but now it was eerie and silvery, with strange black markings Aix couldn’t remember seeing on any kind of seal. They weren’t the spots of a leopard seal, but they weren’t the strange rings on a ribbon or ringed or Caspian seal either. She had short, clear whiskers, and eyes a little bigger and darker than a human’s, and her wild black hair almost hid the fact that she had no ears at all—but then, of course she didn’t. She yawned, her face turning more muzzle-like as she opened her mouth, showing off a large maw full of larger teeth. It was a casual threat display, and Aix felt a little safer for it, knowing she was on his side.
On Rosenrot’s left, and next to Aix, was Mr Asher—who was in nothing but lace and silk and straps, looking so confident that Aix felt sexier by proxy, just seeing him—because he wasn’t thin and model-ly, he was a bear, a proper bear, fat and hairy and his very revealing outfit was all delicate fabrics that fit him perfectly and shimmered, showing off his body, not hiding it, not manipulating it with illusions, but showing it all off. He had soft tummy rolls and the soft tits only boys had, and large dark nipples that were pierced with gold rings strung with rubies that caught the light, beneath the black and gauzy silk robe he was wearing. There wasn’t anything overtly otherworldly about him, other than the fire burning in his eyes, and the sangoire colour where most humans had the pink of blood showing—around his eyes, lips, and—Aix saw when Mr Asher smiled at him—his gums and the inside of his mouth. His teeth weren’t pointed at all, which was surprising, though they got pointed as Aix looked at Asher longer, and suddenly Aix knew why—he wasn’t just a demon, Aix realised, he was Aix’s favourite kind of demon: an incubus.
Aix couldn’t see Hext—Hext was at the other end of the same side of the table, between Garnet and Michaela—but he had gotten a strong impression of Hext’s fashion on the flight, and could imagine well enough from the flash of orange-red shot taffeta he’d seen on his way in. He also knew René would be in whore-blue lace and black velvet gothiness, like always, and both Milady and Mistress were in black with gold—albeit in very different styles, Milady in the grand mathematical embroidery and drape of Muslim fashion, and Mistress in the Hollywood geometry of film noir; but Phrixus was the odd one, with his vibrant colours of fabric and lavish beaded embroidery. It was much more odd than even Claudiu’s stark white suit—there were goths that wore all white, but not colour.
Phrixus was definitely the only vampire that wasn’t gothic in his fashion. He very clearly had the opinion that the seventies had been a high point for fashion and he wasn’t going to tone it down in any way. He was wearing a bright purple nudie suit that was dripping with beaded embroidery in rainbow thread and sparkling rhinestones, all in the kind of motifs Aix only ever saw on court suits from the later decades of the 1700s. His makeup and hair were draggy, his long hands were covered in gold rings with enormous gems, and the whole effect was incredibly camp, and Aix adored him a little more for being that kind of person. He was the kind of person that little kids would come up to excitedly, because little kids loved colours and sparkles and having fun, and that was a very admirable sort of style to be, in Aix’s opinion.
It made Roseblade look rather tame, despite the fact that he was in a suit of velveteen in the true, original colour called ‘mauve’, with a painted cravat in teal blues and his own much less colourful but no less draggy makeup, with swooshes of violet and bronze eyeshadow around his olive-green eyes. He clearly knew what his best colours were, and he glowed in them, though like Phrixus, he seemed to also have a favourite recent decade—the 1980s, from the way his hair was styled to be a big curly mane with a part way over on one side. It was the sort of hair Aix had always wanted, but something or other had always nixed his plans to grow it that long.
And then there was Dracula, of course, in a fine black suit—all black, even the shirt, with the ermine cloak of a king around his shoulders, black velvet lined in blood red. He wore it casually, reminding Aix very much of the comfortable attitude one saw in all the portraits of Louis the Sun King—there was nothing awkward or embarrassed about it, nor was it the insecure faux-confidence of the overly-aggressive American style. It was from the Old World, in every sense of the term—in that moment, Aix understood why there were people who would hesitate to dispose of monarchy. You wanted to follow someone that comfortable in their skin, that at peace with power’s weight….
Aix realised, slowly, that all the vampires were focussed on him—probably because of his racing pulse, he realised quickly.
He pulled out the chair and sat down. These were both very deliberate, and very separate, actions, owing to the way his hands were shaking, his heart was racing, and his vision was, at least at close range, wobbly—all from the albuterol, which is why he usually avoided taking it (as much as he could avoid taking something meant to help him breathe).
‘Are you… well, Mr Aix?’ Claudiu asked softly, directly across the table, his right hand holding a pen and poised over a notebook.
‘Nervous we’ll eat you alive?’ came the silken voice from the general vicinity of Rosenrot’s form, dripping sadistic glee.
‘Don’t be a prick, Rosenrot,’ Aix said while getting out his notebook and pen, not looking up. ‘I’m full of potion to counteract you.’
There were a few chuckles, and a giggle from much farther down the table, that must have been Garnet.
Something viney brushed Aix’s ankle, and he just shifted in the roomy chair, slipping off his shoes and tucking his feet up. A moment later, it smelled like burning wood, just slightly, and Aix was grateful to Mr Asher, beside him, for that; he’d not known before that Mr Asher had fire powers, but then again why would he have needed to ask? Mr Asher had said his people were called demons and djann, and that meant fire.
‘We’re here to speak on a new people come to this world,’ the King began, his voice much easier to understand in person, and this close. ‘And what to do about them.’
‘It is terribly exciting to finally meet an extra-terrestrial person at last,’ Roseblade said keenly to Cthulhu, toying with his fan. ‘New frontiers and all that.’
‘I am told your people natively have more powerful psionics than have been seen on Earth,’ the King had not once broken gaze with Cthulhu, sitting at the other end of the table—Aix could see Cthulhu still had his mask on. He hadn’t taken it off yet, not even during dinner (he’d eaten in their shared room). ‘That must be answerable to a law of some kind.’
‘The Van Helsing has made that clear.’
‘Ooh!’ Garnet said, finally hearing Cthulhu’s ethereally-low voice, and Roseblade agreed by unfurling a fan, fluttering it.
‘There are some records of massacres done by your people—’
‘Not reliable ones,’ Heather said immediately, the only one bold enough to interrupt the King—and, being from New England, she felt she was the most qualified to speak on the topic of, ‘Lovecraft wrote fiction, and Miskatonic University’s library was destroyed in the Calamity.’
‘Yes, the Calamity, I’m curious about that, myself,’ Hext said, and looked curiously at Cthulhu. Unlike some here, he didn’t feel hostile as he asked, ‘What exactly happened? Are you gods, or pretending to be?’
‘We did not understand what gods were. We thought that was the word for “extra-terrestrial person”. We thought humans understood much more than they did, about us. Aix was the first to stop and treat us like people, and ask questions, and explain humanity.’
‘And I’m sure he told you some pretty lie,’ Rosenrot said. ‘About how humans are strong and brave, or something?’ He gave a disdainful rustle of his foliage in a laugh. ‘They’re weak, they rely on other species to live.’ A few more of his rosebuds bloomed wide and proud. ‘Not like us. All we need is the sun.’
Aix waited for someone to call Rosenrot on it.
There was nothing.
‘Is… is nobody gonna—ohhhh okay. I get it. I get it, now,’ Aix said, Michaela’s warning suddenly making sense. ‘So, either you don’t know shit about yourself, or you’ve been coasting on everyone here not knowing shit about biology.’
‘Oh do please lecture the flower about biology. You stink of iron and desperation, changeling.’
It dropped heavy and ugly to the table.
As only a slur could.
Aix nearly climbed over Asher in his rage—he was on his feet without remembering getting up, chest tight and voice lower and louder than he’d spoken since coming here, ears ringing and staticky with anger.
‘You’re not shit without your fungal root network, or the animals that pollinate you!’ he said, loudly but not consciously shouting—though other people, medigans, would think it was shouting because he was a baritone and he was furious. ‘This entire planet is millions of species of everything working together, and we all rely on each other! Fuck off with your fucking exceptionalism! The entire western hemisphere used to be two fucking continents of forest gardens! Before colonisers got to the Americas it was millions of years of symbiosis between humans and the entire rest of the ecosystem—NO! YOU DON’T GET TO SPEAK!’
(now he was yelling)
‘You need our shit on your roots, you need the fungi in the soil to process that and give you the nutrition from it, you make fruit and nectar to lure animals to transport your seeds and to fertilise them! The fuck you talking about, you “don’t rely on anyone to live”?! You rely on the entire fucking ecosystem you’re planted in! You rely on animals to spread your pollen and spread your seeds, you rely on the mycelium network to communicate with other plants, you rely on those other plants when you need help, and you rely on them to give you help! Everyone needs help from everyone else, that’s what being from Earth fucking means!’
It rang into a silence, and Aix’s chest was both tight and heaving, pulse racing as his brain helpfully reminded him last time he’d lost his temper he’d lost a bed to sleep in. Also the time before that. And the time before that. And…
You’re not allowed to be angry— said his Trauma
Mike said to get mad! Aix snapped, feeling like a lawyer in a court room with a fistful of evidence.
You’re nobody—
That’s right, I am Nobody! Nobody can say anything he wants!
His chest hurt, and he couldn’t breathe, and he couldn’t move, exactly; he jerked when he felt someone touch him, and it was one of those moments he was glad he’d never gotten any combat training, because his body had no muscle memory that might have hit someone before he could take in who it was.
It was Mr Asher, who had been sitting on his right side; and the touch was gentle, very gentle and warm, on his arm. Something… eased. Aix could breathe again, and his pulse slowed down, but not too much, not in the muddy, clumsy way pills did it. So, Mr Asher could affect emotions, or put forth an aura of safety. That was good to know, that was another bit of evidence that he was definitely an incubus. He hadn’t been forthcoming, but Aix only knew one kind of demony creature that affected emotions like that. The thought was a welcome distraction, right now, because he wanted to stop feeling overstimulated by sheer emotional volume, and the feeling of safety was only making tears come to surface.
‘Ooooooh,’ Garnet said in a low voice, which somehow was exactly what Aix needed to hear—the universal tone of all children witnessing someone Getting In Trouble was a visceral trigger for Aix feeling he’d somehow won something. He stifled a laugh, because it was half-hysterical and threatened to turn into crying pretty instantly.
‘I told you if you kept fuckin’ around you’d find out, Rosie,’ Hext said, his grinning tone lightening the mood through sheer force of will if nothing else.
‘Oooooooooooooooooh,’ Garnet said.
‘Shut up!’ Rosenrot snarled.
‘I didn’t know plants could talk to each other,’ Roseblade said, transfixed by this boy, who flung facts like weapons, rather than profanity. And now that boy was shaking and crying, like so many of the young sailors he’d talked through the aftermath of their first boarding. The key was to distract them, remind them of something that made them feel confident—clearly, for this one, it was teaching.
‘Yeah,’ Aix said, shakily sitting back down, starting to cry and trying to ignore it. ‘Yeah, they can. The—the mycelium connect everyone’s roots and—and among other things, they pass extra nutrients to those without.’ His voice was colourless and hitching with tears, which he was wiping away impatiently with a green handkerchief. The mask was getting wet, which was deeply uncomfortable—but dying was far more uncomfortable.
He covered his face with the handkerchief and tried to breathe slowly, still feeling like all of him was shaking on the inside.
He felt Mr Asher’s big, soft, warm hand on his back again, right between his shoulder blades, as he put his head down on his arms on the table. He needed a little darkness right now.
He felt Pippin, dimly, and her determination to help. I tell little brother come see you, Duckie! He comin!
Hidden in his arms, he smiled and his breath hitched, new tears coming for a nicer reason. Thank you.
‘I think the Queen ought to know his representative was deceiving us to the point of putting his people in danger,’ Roseblade said, his gaze on Rosenrot gleeful, fan spread to hide his smile. ‘If we don’t have the ability to trust his information, well… he doesn’t function as a representative and diplomat, does he?’
‘I wasn’t lying,’ Rosenrot said, his thorns getting longer and sharper, but he was also rustling with fear, blossoms half-closing.
‘Weren’t you?’ the King said, very quietly, and somehow it reminded everyone of what, exactly, this entire country they were in lauded him for doing to the Turks. What, exactly, his sobriquet was.
‘Then what were you doin’, sugar?’ Michaela asked.
‘I…’ Rosenrot’s voice went low and he rustled as his leaves trembled. ‘I-I didn’t know,’ he said, almost too quietly to hear. He sounded afraid. ‘Why does a human know more than I about myself?’ he whispered to himself, in horror.
Aix pushed up, immediately changing gears. He was done being angry, he’d said his piece and not been interrupted, so he was done and it was over. That was how his anger worked—an explosion, but not a fire.
‘I’ll teach you!’ Aix said. ‘It’s okay to not know stuff. Humans don’t know everything about how our bodies work, even now. That’s what science is about. Scientists get excited to be wrong, it means we know what isn’t, which teaches us a lot more than just guessing correctly.’
‘But…. I don’t understand. Do you not hate me?’
‘I was angry.’ Aix said, knowing he sounded a bit Big Sister-y, which some people took as condescending. ‘That’s not the same as hate. You were the one saying hateful things—why are you surprised there were consequences?’
‘I didn’t know you would be so… angry.’
‘You shouldn’t have to know,’ Aix said, trying to be patient. ‘You understand that, right? You shouldn’t have to know beforehand. You should understand that calling people worthless, or weak, or less than you, is likely to make them angry. And they’re allowed that anger. You attacked me on purpose, what did you think would happen?’
‘Admittedly, our method of dealing with him is to ignore it,’ Asher said. ‘We could not naysay him, we had not the information, as you did.’
‘Critically, he did not fling a slur at you,’ Heather said, in a hard voice.
‘It’s a slur?’ Roseblade said, softly.
‘It can be, depends on the tone,’ Heather said, glaring at Rosenrot in a way that said he better not claim he was using it otherwise, because nobody would believe him.
‘And the context, I imagine,’ Mistress said, and looked to the King. ‘Slurs are a serious matter, Voivodul.’
‘Very true,’ Hext agreed. ‘I believe the discriminatory language in matters of law was added to the constitution in 1972.’
‘ “No ad hominem attacks without provocation, and no words determined to fall under the category of ‘slur’, and used as such, shall be tolerated in session”, yes, I recall,’ the King said softly. It had been a learning experience, but, like any competent leader, he had listened. Mistress and Hext’s predecessor (also a Hext, they were reliable and the King was resistant to change, as many elders were) were the forefront of that effort, as had been Heather and Michaela’s father. The King was not unfamiliar with slurs—he had knowledge of extinct ones—he just had to have the ones he didn’t experience pointed out. ‘Your conduct is worthy of immediate dismissal, Rosenrot. Leave, and tell your Queen exactly why you were dismissed.’
‘It will cause unrest,’ Rosenrot said, as he rose.
‘Then the Queen may come himself and speak to me about it. If he wants the Summer court’s interests considered, he and his representatives will follow the rules of conduct he agreed his representative would be bound to.’
Rosenrot went to the door, opening it. Aix was terrified at the amount of trust being shown to him—if he was angry, wouldn’t he destroy something, hurt someone on his way out if he wasn’t watched?—but Aix tried to keep a lid on that, suspecting that was a part of copaganda he hadn’t dismantled in practise quite yet.
There was a jingle from the hallway as soon as the door was opened, and Gogo slunk in, completely ignoring Rosenrot and everyone else in the room; Aix pushed his chair out a little bit and patted his lap, and Gogo sped up to a cheerful trot, chirruping in reply and jumping up, already purring and putting his oversized paws up on Aix’s shoulder. Aix gently hitched him up to drape over his shoulder, not talking to him or even making kissy noises, because that felt informal and inappropriate for the setting; but cats didn’t need to be spoken to, they were creatures of gestures and actions. Gogo purred and Aix pet him, and that was all the conversation they really needed to have.
Cthulhu had felt Aix’s distress more acutely than anyone else, but by now he knew that this thing, this ‘confrontation’ that humans did, was something Aix didn’t want constant protection from—it was important, to him, that he learn to stand on his own again, unafraid of defending himself. Cthulhu didn’t understand the complex nature of it, but he could at least understand that in order to communicate respect for Aix, he would do nothing until and unless he was asked to help. It was deeply distressing to have to sit by and watch, and all his chromatophores were tensed up, colour draining from his skin; but the truth of it was, this was not his culture, and he couldn’t hold Aix or anyone else in here to a culture that they didn’t belong to. Humans—any sapient of Earth, it seemed—were hypersocial, and that meant complex behaviours….
⁂
‘So, I need to explain about bullying. Bullying is a really complicated and hateful behaviour that humans engage in sometimes, at their worst. It’s something that happens when people are afraid and insecure, and when they don’t have any constructive ways to express their pain, and nowhere safe to express it, and nobody to ask for help. So they turn on anybody weaker, especially if stronger people that are supposed to protect them have done that to them. We learn bad behaviours from our parents as well as good ones.’
⁂
Cthulhu wondered if he should keep his question private, or speak it aloud, and let the others hear how Aix spoke to him when instructing. Would that be a good display? Would that help them understand Aix’s power? He wasn’t sure… but he couldn’t simply observe forever; he had to try, and perhaps fail, to learn anything certain.
‘Rosenrot was bullying you, yes?’
‘Yes,’ Aix said, immediately grateful for the distance teaching Cthulhu gave him from the confusing pain, ‘Did you hear him? Contrast his words with his tone. He was doing what I explained earlier, about using the culture that prioritises volume over content. He learned somewhere and somehow that if he spoke calmly and softly, he could say very hateful things and anybody getting upset would look Unreasonable. That’s a word those cultures use for anybody being angry at all. They say “unreasonable” and it’s a dismissing word, it means they stop listening if you go over a certain volume, no matter if you are right or not. And that is how oppression begins. It begins with bullying. That’s why I told you, volume-over-content is toxic. It’s a toxic part of any culture that has it.’
Cthulhu nodded, feeling that the question—and answering it—had calmed Aix down. I hope it was right, that I asked you aloud. I wanted them to witness you teaching me. So they would understand, and respect you.
‘Oh,’ Mistress said to Aix, quietly smiling, ‘I see. You are teaching him correctly.’
‘I try my best?’ Aix said, unsure if ‘thank you’ was an appropriate response to that kind of compliment; but he felt like melting into a puddle of submissive pleasure at her approval, at her smile, and with all the emotional rollercoastering, it was hard to puzzle out the nuances of social justice lessons.
‘Aix says it is the most important to learn to separate what does the least harm with what people believe is normal.’
‘That’s a very functional base to build upon,’ Mistress said.
‘Practical too,’ Heather said.
‘Told you. Scientist,’ Michaela said, with the tone of someone who had their boots up on the table; except she didn’t, and that kept startling Aix somewhat.
‘I don’t see why that’s special—I’m not being modest,’ Aix said, ‘I’m just deeply confused. Why doesn’t it occur to other people that you have to be able to explain cultural mores?’
‘Because we don’t notice them, darling,’ Roseblade said. ‘If I may ask a delicate question—you have mentioned being half-English, and half-Italian? You grew up with an awareness of more than one culture. Many people don’t.’
‘Monoglots are ignorant,’ René reminded Aix, the first he’d spoken; Aix knew he was nervous, because René had told him that he was nervous, that he might well go completely mute for the duration of the meeting, that he could not be relied on to be Domine and that he was sorry for it. He sounded so different, so young, like he was only Aix’s age.
But I’m white, really. I’m just white, how could I have this insight you’re saying I have?! ran through Aix’s head, even though it flew in the face of his actual experiences. His family was in many ways very much older than the modern idea of what ‘white’ meant. His father hadn’t ever had that privilege, nor any of his father’s siblings, or parents, or anybody. Aix was the first generation of his Italian family to live in a world where Italian-American was a form of white—and Aix had never behaved White Enough for it to stick once he interacted for more than six minutes. And white wasn’t a real culture anyway, it was assimilating into the culture that had been designed, maintained, and violently enforced by the Anglo-Saxon Protestant colonists. But most people Aix’s age and younger had grown up farther forward in progress than Aix had, and it was hard to explain when Aix struggled with feeling he was even allowed to have had the experiences he had with prejudice, to even call it ‘racism’. It often felt like he wasn’t allowed, even though they’d happened, to acknowledge them: they hadn’t been on-sight, so they didn’t count, that was the message he had mostly gotten by listening quietly and trying to learn.
‘I am told you are familiar with French as well as English,’ the king said, addressing Aix directly, which wasn’t as terrifying as Aix assumed it would be.
‘I—yeah, sort of. Almost bilingual, getting there again with René’s help. Why?’
‘If you learned Latin,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you could explain as you do for Cthulhu. To our elders. To me.’
‘You mean Liturgical Latin, not Vulgar Latin, right?’ Aix said. At the nod, he sat back, petting Gogo and thinking. The lingua franca being Latin and not French made sense, and it wasn’t like someone as familiar and enthusiastic about zoology was unfamiliar with Latin, but… ‘Aren’t you a psion, Your Grace? Do you ever Dreamwalk? I have a particular corner of the Dreaming that Morpheus has partitioned off for my use.’
‘That is very much trust I would have to give you.’
‘Oh? As much trust as you broke when you tried to read my mind earlier?’ Aix said innocently, the first he’d let on that he’d noticed. He meant it to sting, to be sharp.
‘Do you expect an apology?’
‘Do you expect a witch to cower from you?’ Aix shot back, his voice rising again. Gogo hissed at the King, from Aix’s arms. Aix met the king’s green eyes, and it was effort to not say more, so he tried to put it in his gaze. I know who you are. I know what you’ve done. I know what you’re capable of doing. I don’t care, you do not get to do as you like just because you have a crown on; I am a witch and nobody frightens me. I am the thing bumps back when something goes bump in the night. I am the most frightening thing in the woods. I walk by myself, and bow to no one.
‘…You did not kill her,’ he said at last. ‘You have never killed anything in your life.’ He sat back, regarding Aix with slightly narrowed eyes. ‘The truth, soothsayer. Who killed the Heeren? Whose glory do you steal?’
Aix… wasn’t sure why that didn’t offend him; possibly because ‘glory’ was so alien a concept that he couldn’t even countenance how not wanting it could be insulting. He certainly couldn’t understand why killing people yourself was supposed to be something that indicated one’s worth.
‘I’m protecting someone else. I’m taking the blame and the consequences, not the glory,’ he specified, just to be clear.
‘You cannot begin in this world on a lie,’ Milady said.
‘Or a conspiracy,’ the King said, glancing around at Van Helsing, René, and all the other Americans. ‘I notice all of you have reported the same to me.’
‘Leave them alone, it’s not like that,’ Aix said. ‘It’s a guardian taking responsibility for the actions of those under their care, okay? You understand that, don’t you?’
‘We cannot hide this forever,’ Phrixus said ruefully; then louder, more formally, he went on: ‘My clown. The littlest one. She summoned Sai—she summoned the god Jocosa to slay my master all those years ago.’
Aix didn’t want to answer.
‘Aix, please,’ Phrixus said, softly—but he was an opera singer, he could make ‘soft’ carry.
‘…And the same when I asked for help when the Heeren kidnapped me,’ Aix said, relenting. He’d never been good at secrets, anyway, and he couldn’t see any other way for this to end. ‘I was trying to contact Cthulhu, but I wasn’t very adept at dream-travel yet, and went a little sideways. I told Pippin to get help.’ He looked at Phrixus. ‘You call her Jocosa. That may be so. Cthulhu calls her Shob-Zhiggurath. Joeys call her Grandmother Clown.’
‘Shob-Zhiggurath had thought herself quite successful in understanding this world. She—though I am unsure we really understand genders, we don’t have them ourselves—gave birth to the first of what you call clowns. I am unclear on the particulars.’
‘Then they are sapient, people that should be governed—’ the King began.
‘No!’ Aix interrupted. ‘No, see, this is why I was taking the blame! They don’t want to be people! If they were people you’d make them slaves or—or politicians, and they wouldn’t be allowed to be clowns anymore. You’d make them talk, and work, and argue; you’d hold them to all the shitty standards people are held to!’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘I know that!’
‘Pippin said it,’ Phrixus said, seeing the danger, seeing how it sounded to other people. ‘When Aix pulled me aside to see her. They refuse to speak, but they will speak to a witch.’
‘Of course they will,’ Mistress said coldly. ‘How convenient.’
Aix didn’t answer, frustrated. He knew what it looked like, and he knew the clowns weren’t going to be able to stop this, either. The cat was out of the bag.
Pippin, I tried, but… you have to speak for yourselves, now. You have to tell everyone in the council, they won’t believe me.
Columbina fix it.
It held more than just those words. It was assurance and threat all at once; Columbina solved the troupe’s problems.
Pippin was solving the whole troupe’s problems.
It only took a minute for the Flash of a clown to glow and blink slowly from the balcony outside, the one that looked over the walled garden, and spanned from one of the tall gothic-arched windows beside the fireplace to the other. Gogo chirruped, and Aix was glad he’d been able to explain about claws as the kitten climbed up to stand on his shoulders, paws on his head, meow-honking.
‘Hhaaow!’
The window opened.
‘Hallo, Pipkin!’ Roseblade cooed at Pippin. Pippin didn’t answer, not even a beep, as she shut the door and then turned to all the people looking at her.
Expectantly.
No clown had ever wanted that kind of look on them, ever.
But you could only fool all of the people some of the time.
She took a deep breath, and let it out in a sigh, changing her Mask to be very serious and Ancient—to be the clown that all the humans had forgotten all about.
‘No,’ she said, in a stout little voice she used especially for being serious. ‘Columbina bees. Columbina for all joeys.’
Next❧