by Dawn Metcalf
“Bailiwick!” Joy called out, but she wasn’t certain whether it was out of concern or fear. Kurt appeared, weapon drawn, and used one hand to support the massive bulk of his otherworldly employer. Joy turned her head and moved her fingers and toes, methodically squeezing her muscles, checking her limbs as she’d been taught back in gymnastics safety training after a spill on the mats. Her back ached, but it felt more like a scrape than a bruise. There was a long, slow moment as Graus Claude pushed himself up on one knee. She saw that he wore argyle socks. Joy felt terrible that she suspected someone who wore argyle socks.
“My apologies,” he hissed through pointy teeth as he stood, yanking out the blade and dropping it contemptuously on the desk. One hand squeezed the wound as he reached out an arm to Joy. “It has been a while since I have been in close proximity of physical threat without my armor, and I had forgotten about the Ricochet.”
Kurt pocketed his weapon as Joy accepted the frog’s clawed hand. He lifted her gingerly with little effort. She was sore, but nothing was broken.
“Did it work?” she asked, rubbing her back.
The Bailiwick paused in his ministrations. His eyes glazed over, and his face slackened like melting candle wax—but it wasn’t the spell. Realization dawned, painting his face gray with angst. He placed a single hand against his heart and pressed it there, crumpling.
“Yes,” he whispered hollowly. “I remember.” He sat down with a great groan. Kurt moved swiftly aside. Joy felt something loosen inside her, shaking like the dowsing rod.
“It was you?” she said in disbelief. “You’re the traitor?”
“No,” he said quickly, tight with insult. “And yes. But certainly...” He sighed and unknotted his tie with two hands. “It was I who cast the spell.”
The admission stung, stapled in the air like a Wanted poster, undeniable and condemning. Joy could barely think beyond the roaring in her ears.
“But it was not for me,” Graus Claude added softly. “And I did not realize what I had done.”
He tied the length of silk over his arm, staunching the wound. It bled through, quickly turning the blue tie a vivid red. He sighed as he fumbled with the knot. Kurt moved to assist, and the Bailiwick relented. He squeezed his arm and blood trickled down. Finishing his ministrations, Kurt silently set the tea service on the desk and lifted Ink’s limp body from the floor. Joy stood up to join him, but Kurt glared. She sat down. He left the room carrying the one thing that made sense in his arms. A piece of her went with him.
“I have failed my Lady,” the Bailiwick said to no one. “Utterly and completely.”
“I don’t understand,” Joy said, turning back to face him. The admission still lingered, tense as a pulled string, a crossbow waiting to loose. “You cast a blanket forget spell, and forgot about it, but you didn’t mean to do it?”
“Oh, no, I did,” Graus Claude said, easing himself into his seat and tucking the gun and the sword back wherever they’d come from as he poured the tea. His hand trembled and the spout rattled against the cup. “As I recall, I cast the spell—but it was not meant to affect me or anyone in the Twixt besides one, and that had nothing to do with...with our King and Queen.” He sighed and pursed his wide lips together. “How strange it feels to say those words again.” His gaze slipped lower in shame. “And to know that I have robbed our people of them for all these years...unthinkable.”
“Please,” Joy said, trying to follow, “tell me.”
Graus Claude looked older under the shadow of his brow. “An explanation is long overdue,” he agreed. He glanced at the intercom and hesitated. “Ah, I see now—Kurt,” the Bailiwick sighed and then sat back. “Of course. He is human—he remembers. As do you, Miss Malone. Humans live outside the borders of the Twixt. And the Scribes—” He nodded. “‘Made not born.’ Yes. It all comes together, then. Very wise, I think, for my manservant to be indisposed elsewhere at this time. I shall not fault him for his suspicions.” He rubbed at his throat. “Nor any of you, for that matter. In fact, I should thank you when the time has come, but at this moment I find that I am not yet so inclined.” He rubbed a kerchief over his face, which had blossomed a sheen of yellowish sweat. Joy had never seen the Bailiwick so shaken and out of sorts. He seemed to deflate in his throne like a mottled green balloon.
“Where to start?” Graus Claude murmured to himself as he poured water from his carafe and drank it like a bolt of scotch. He ignored the tea. “As you have no doubt discovered, the role of Bailiwick is more than title. It is a sacred duty—to be the physical gateway between one world and the next. It is our ‘loophole’ as you describe it—a space inside, yet outside of the Twixt where we could safely place a door. My office is manifold, but this one condition was sacrosanct—someone had to personally accept the gateway into their keeping, and I did so with honor and gravity. It is a solemn act and responsibility which I ascribed to my every effort on the Council.” He glanced at her furtively, but with a smoldering passion. “I would have you believe that.”
Joy wrung her fingers in her purse strap. “Of course I do,” she said.
“Indeed,” Graus Claude sighed, unconvinced. “In any case, this placed me in a seniority, although I was not the first to hold the post—at death, the title of Bailiwick must be claimed by another in accordance to the rules.” Joy’s hackles rose, bringing a fresh wave of pain over the bruise on her back. It always comes back to the rules! “The same is true of the Council Head, and for one other role—a secret post—the courier to the King and Queen.”
“But if—?” Joy started, then stopped at Graus Claude’s raised hand.
“Tut-tut, Miss Malone,” he said. “You asked for an explanation, and you deserve one in full, but I request the courtesy of an uninterrupted narrative.” He smiled a little to himself and shook a manicured claw. “Etiquette and decorum,” he said. “I am obliged to remind you that, no matter the circumstances, there are standards we must uphold.” He poured and drank another glass. And another. And a third. He paused at the fourth glass before continuing. “So I became the Bailiwick and assumed the Water Folk seat. There are only four original members of the Council from when—well, from when the King and Queen assembled them, I suppose. The rest of us have had to assume the mantle of those who came before without the benefit of their instruction.” His gaze darted around the room, settling everywhere but on her. “When Ironshod died during the Old War Insurgence, I elected to have the newest Council member placed under my charge, much as I was sponsored by Bùxiŭ de Zhēnzhū himself, and much the same way as I volunteered to be your sponsor.” Graus Claude hissed ruefully as he adjusted the makeshift bandage on his arm. “Both decisions I came to question quite shortly after the fact.” Joy tried to not feel guilty, but it didn’t quite work. “In any case, that is how Aniseed came under my charge.”
“Aniseed?” Joy nearly shrieked. “But she—”
“Stop.” Graus Claude sounded patiently irked. “You must learn to listen, Miss Malone, which is a function of your ears and not your tongue, if you please.” He pushed the carafe aside with one hand as still another fussed with the tie bandage. “Young Aniseed was my charge when she assumed her role on the Council, the Forest Seat—one which, at the time, was not so unlike my own as to cause unrest. Quite the contrary, we once shared a similar mind as to how the Twixt was progressing in the absence of our rightful rulers and what might be done to hasten the reuniting of our people.”
“The Imminent Return,” Joy said.
The Bailiwick looked pained. “Please, Miss Malone,” he said wearily. “Must I resort to physical restraints?”
Joy grimaced. “Sorry.”
“Just as well,” he rumbled in agreement. “The ‘Imminent Return.’ Interesting how the phrase itself escaped the confines of the spell—would that it had never worked at all!” He sighed heavily. “But I digress. As you might imagine, the destruction
of large swaths of forest threatened the bulk of Aniseed’s kin, still bound to their trees. Theirs was a strain of Forest Folk deeply tied to their phylum, dependent on twaining to reproduce—the graftlings could not be moved until their cleaving, and the elders refused to leave their young unguarded. It went against their grain.” He looked introspectively at his banker’s lamp, which outlined his profile in a warm green glow. “They thought to defend their territory based on old knowledge, pre-Industrialite knowledge. It was a slaughter.” The Bailiwick raised his chins to deliver his next words. “This by no means excuses or accounts for what follows—I include these details only to provide proper context, you understand.” Two of his hands thread together and squeezed, their knuckles gone pale. “Full disclosure,” he added, nodding to himself and to her. “I trust you’ll listen well.”
Joy, saying nothing, barely nodded.
“Aniseed was my protégé, but she visited often with many questions, ever eager to learn more.” He cast a weary glance at Joy. “She was an apt pupil. Driven. Passionate.” He coughed and fussed with the things on his desk. “One evening, Aniseed came to me saying that she felt she could no longer continue to serve the Council with the loss of her people clouding her mind. She was, politically and by auspice, a proponent of balance, responsible for holding the peace until the King and Queen could return by Council consent. But after the decimation of her people, she confessed that she harbored a deep resentment of humans and a dark desire for revenge that was eating her heartwood like maggots. I remember those words, ‘like maggots.’” He raised his hands helplessly and shook his head. “She came to me in confidence, begging for answers, for some sort of peace. I devised every way that I could conjure and some that were, in hindsight, well intended but ill wrought. Yet, I feared for her—for her sanity as well as her life. She was the last of her kind and one of our youngest Council members. She was ardent, well-spoken, intelligent and fair. She had become a symbol of the uncertain future of the Twixt, one with few offspring that had dwindled to none, and someone the Folk were watching closely. I believe that is when she gained power—she was a light in the darkness, a candle in the night, the youthful, determined face of our dwindling hope. I will admit that I was desperate to keep that flame alive.”
The Bailiwick’s bulk shifted, his jowls quivering as he touched the ruined tie. “After she had exhausted all efforts, she came to me, hollow and destitute of spirit, with one last request—an ancient spell of forgetting. At the time, it seemed an elegant solution.” One of his claws traced a line in the rich mahogany grain. “As I’ve said, I am no spell-caster, but, as segulah, Aniseed was without peer—able to manipulate the few, latent magics that remained in our shared world. It was her vision and creativity that made her eligible for the Council, and she spearheaded the adaptation of signaturae, replacing our True Names with symbols that could not be spoken, which saved our people in the dark times.” He grew quiet as he remembered who sat before him. “But you know all of this,” he said, “far better than most.”
His claws tapped an irritated pattern as he took a deep breath. “In any event, the spell required a number of difficult conditions which made it quite impossible to be both caster and recipient, clearly a built-in safeguard of the spell, and so she asked that I be the one to perform the spell, following her instructions.” Graus Claude’s voice hinted steel. “She claimed that she wished to forget the loss of her people, which might allow her to carry on as a member of the Council and—by her own admission—make her immortal life bearable.” His hands became fists. “You must remember that, to the best of our knowledge, Aniseed was the very last of her kind. Without such comfort, she feared that she would eventually cause her own people’s extinction by taking her own life and complete the eradication that the humans had begun, which was a fate she considered inexcusable. She had no desire to ever let the enemy win! But, in order to survive, she had to continue living despite her suffering. She had to forget what humanity had done to her if she could not forgive. Surrender was something she did not know how to do.” He wiped a single palm over his face as he shifted in his chair. His voice, when he spoke, was strangled and strange. “She could not bear it any longer—I could see that in her eyes, I could hear it in her voice,” he said. “It was killing her...and that was killing me.”
Realization hit Joy like a fist. She bit her lips and her tongue, but Graus Claude saw it and nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “I loved her once.” His hands rested together like a stack of books. “We were lovers for nearly three hundred years.”
He leaned back as if to put distance between himself and his confession. “But, of course, afterward, I’d forgotten about the spell, forgotten about everything but the fact that she had been sad, and after we last spoke, she was able to go on.” He gave a wan smile, remembering. “I believe I enjoyed taking credit for that accomplishment, knowing that I had done well both as her mentor and her friend, even if I could not pinpoint what it was, exactly, that I had done. Even now, having memory thrust upon me, I remember that my first thoughts were that the spell had not worked, or that, perhaps, she had forgotten, but could not forgive. I had wanted to believe that it was still possible for her to have been other than what she was.” His face fell. “How telling that is. How foolish the heart.”
Graus Claude lifted one delicate teacup and took a sip. “In any case, as the years continued, Aniseed’s disquiet became more pronounced, her official stance on the Council became more extremist, our political positions became diametrically opposed, and our desires wandered into other beds, which is often the way of the immortal heart and the price of longevity.” He shrugged and winced as the wound gave a small gush of blood. He pressed his pocket kerchief against his sleeve. “I did not overburden myself with the parting. I thought, perhaps, that not even my best efforts were enough to heal one so wounded or that her pain ran deeper than the roots of her lost kin. We privately went our separate ways and publicly clashed evermore.” Joy shook her head, and the Bailiwick stopped sipping. “Do you have comment, Miss Malone?”
Her mouth barely shaped the words. “You loved her?” she said, her voice hitched in disbelief. “How could you say you loved her? I heard how you talked about her, the witch, the betrayer. I watched you flip out when you figured out what she’d done with the signaturae—piggybacking hers on to everyone else’s in order to spread her antihuman plague. I saw you leading an army, demanding that she surrender or die!” Confusion grappled with anger and scratched in her throat. “You raised her killer in your own home, extending his life for the chance to murder her—which he did—and you...?” But Joy stopped, remembering how the Bailiwick had prayed over the dead, his hands of benediction outstretched across the warehouse floor. Who had he been mourning? She whispered, still confused, “How could you have loved her?”
Graus Claude looked at her pityingly, his voice once again a fatherly burr. “Ah, Miss Malone, you are new to Cupid’s game,” he said. “Know that the greater the love, the greater the risk of its reverse—love and hate are two halves of the same coin, flipped. There is no greater pain than that which is caused by a loved one, and no greater fury than that which was once fanned by love’s flame.” His head shook gently. “It is a deeply destructive game we play with one another’s hearts, and I would not wish it on anyone nor trade it for the world.”
With that, the Bailiwick hauled himself upright and, with great dignity, came out from behind the desk, draped his suit jacket over one of his arms, proud and noble, and walked toward his double doors. Joy watched him pass her, uncertain whether to stay seated or run.
“You should take your belongings before you go,” he said. “And be sure to include the velvet box next to the printer—it has your pearls as well as Master Ink’s cuff links. Don’t forget the clasp. And do remember to go for your fitting—the calling card is in the box and has my tailor’s complete information.” He patted his pockets as if searching fo
r lost keys. “I must apologize for not continuing your tutelage as is my duty as your sponsor, but, circumstances being what they are, I find that I have pressing obligations elsewhere.” He lifted a walking stick from a stand by the bookshelves, his wounded arm tucked close to his chest. “I regret to say that I doubt I shall be able to attend the gala, after all. I can only offer my profound and sincerest apologies for the unforgivable lapse and beg your leave not to take it as a personal slight,” he said with a sparkle of a smile. “On the contrary, I am quite proud of your achievements, and I am certain that yours will be an event to remember.”
Joy leaped to her feet. “Where are you going?” she asked.
“I am going,” he said grandly, “to turn myself in.”
“What?”
He’d reached the coatrack and busied himself by draping a cloak over his wounded arm, buttoning it at the collar to hide the bloody stain. “I am going to the Council to confess my crimes and submit myself to their justice,” he said, picking lint from the shoulder. “I could hope for leniency, but, given the extent of the transgression, it is an unlikely outcome.”
“But—!” Joy sputtered, trying to include the words you can’t! because, obviously, he could and would and was.
Kurt appeared in the double doors looking professionally grim. Without a word, he adjusted the Bailiwick’s travel cloak and ran a lint roller briskly down the front and sides. Graus Claude submitted to his butler’s ministrations with quiet dignity.
“And how are our Scribes?” the frog said while loosening his collar.
“Master Ink is resting and Mistress Inq watches over him,” Kurt said crisply, but spared Joy a glance. “Both are well, considering.” He tugged the shoulders straight and lifted his chin, flashing the long, serrated scar. “They accept your confession and will abide by your decision.”
“Very well,” the Bailiwick said. “Thank you, Kurt. You have your orders.”