Twig

by wildbow

  Lillian was a better, safer match. They were similar, the academic and the assassin, both dedicated to their individual crafts. With Lillian, she didn’t feel that heady sense of invincibility. With Lillian, she felt like a girl.

  Whatever that was.

  And to Lillian, she imagined, she was a girl, a friend. Lillian lacked guile enough to lie about that. She could share everything with Lillian. Even talk about Percy without feeling like she was betraying the Lambs.

  Hearing Lillian speak about Percy and Lillian’s horror over what Percy had been doing had scared Mary more than any number of monsters or guns. It had led her to make a decision.

  And Gordon. Gordon was the best of both worlds. She knew it, she just wasn’t sure if she felt it. Imagining kissing him made her heart pound, as did thoughts of feeling his hands around hers. She’d drawn nearer and nearer to him, testing the waters, waiting for him to reject her, waiting for the feelings she had to clarify. She just wasn’t sure if she truly liked him, or if it was only that her feelings for the other Lambs were so poignant and confused by other things going on in her head and her heart that he paled a shade in comparison.

  Lillian was her only friend ever, and filled that hole in Mary’s breast that even Percy hadn’t been able to promise to fill. Sylvester was Mary’s counterpart.

  Gordon was… what? He promised to be the only thing that wasn’t mixed in with those complicated other thoughts. He understood her, he was a little bit dangerous, he made her feel like a proper girl. The thought of him dying made her think in all seriousness that she might react like Sy had to Jamie, and that somehow made her more anxious than the idea of losing all of the Lambs together, or any of the Lambs individually.

  Because it felt most real and imminent, she told herself.

  Was that love, fledgling love or otherwise?

  The door opened. Mary looked up, just in time to see Hubris running ahead, zig-zagging.

  “Hubris!” Gordon called. He changed the pitch of his voice, apparently annoyed, “Hubris!”

  Hubris made his way across the hallway, in Sylvester’s direction.

  “Hubris, come!”

  Hubris looked back, pausing, then changed direction. The dog moved through the crowd of doctors and guards, making a beeline toward Mary. Sitting on the floor with her back to the wall, she couldn’t get up and move in time to get out of Hubris’ way. He pressed his face against hers, licking.

  “Good boy,” Mary said. “It’s okay.”

  “Get your dog under control,” one of the doctors said. “No tricks.”

  Gordon sounded exasperated as he explained, “He’s worried. The people inside can tell you, I informed them at the start of the questioning, and several times throughout, my heart is acting up. He’s trained to tell me when there are problems, which is why he kept nudging me, and when I won’t or can’t listen, he’s trained to tell the other Lambs. My doctors are here. They can tell you.”

  Hubris whined.

  “We didn’t train him for that last part.”

  “You didn’t, I did. It’s what he’s for,” Gordon said, patiently.

  “Enough,” another doctor said. “Who’s next?”

  A man Mary couldn’t see spoke. “Mary Cobourn.”

  Mary didn’t move at first, and Hubris leaned forward to lick her again. She imagined the actions she would need to take to attack the key targets here. Soldiers, key doctors, and people that stood in the way. It wasn’t as simple as it might have seemed on the surface. Crossing the hallway to get to Gordon or Sylvester could open up possibilities, in having more fighting strength and having more problem solving ability, but it was more distance to cover, and the Lambs needed to get to the other end of the hallway.

  Her hands gripped Hubris’ collar, and she found a roll of paper slipped into the fold of the collar. Moving her hands suggested there were two more.

  No time to read it.

  She pushed Hubris off her, and stood.

  Mary offered Lillian a reassuring smile. Head up, chin high, back straight. Hubris hadn’t made it to Lillian, so Lillian lacked the small reassurance the piece of paper provided.

  Gordon was being led the opposite way, leaving for his appointment. Mary watched him as they approached one another, each mostly surrounded by soldiers and scholars.

  She met his eyes. They were warm, the colors not entirely matched between the two—something she had only noticed after over a year of paying attention to him. On a dark, gloomy day, there wasn’t enough light to distinguish between them, but on a brighter day, when the light filtered in through the window, one eye was more chestnut than hazel, with flecks of gold.

  A nod would be a giveaway.

  She looked away, and her hands smoothed down the front of her top and her skirt, then went up to her collar, fixing it. She resisted the urge to let the hands linger a moment too long. He would understand. He knew her habits and mannerisms.

  He had managed to direct, even without obvious cues. She suspected a hand signal, then tones of voice to change Hubris’ direction. It was possible there was another mechanism. She would ask later, given the chance.

  For now, knowing there were options if they needed to fight their way out was reassuring. Knowing Gordon was thinking and working to help was reassuring.

  Sy had been silent since stepping out of the room. He wasn’t starting anything, hadn’t made any comments. It didn’t mean nothing was wrong. He could be biding his time, instead of working to signal the rest of the Lambs about the problems.

  For now figuring out the right moment to read the note and answering the questions was the best thing she could do. If it went badly, she would turn her thoughts toward making sure the small blades were in place should she need them to kill a noble of the Crown.

  One chair faced a table. Ten people sat around the sides and back of that table.

  Headmaster Travers, Professor Hayle, Professor Ibott, and several other prominent professors sat around the table. So many had been pulled away during the war, and the table was mostly empty now.

  The doors slammed shut behind her.

  I have already figured out how to kill all of you if necessary, Mary told herself.

  She relaxed.

  I am a young lady of Mothmont. I am a skilled killer. I am a step above. I can handle this, and with the Lambs at my back and sufficient preparation, I can handle anything this world might throw at me.

  She smiled.

  “Tell us,” Travers spoke. “What did the Lambs do wrong?”

  She kept the smile from faltering.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “You failed in your duties, you let Genevieve Fray get away. Obviously the Lambs weren’t perfect. What happened?”

  Mary estimated what the people of the room could see, and scooted her chair forward a fraction. They wouldn’t be able to see over the table.

  “Stay right there, please. We know what you’re capable of—”

  You don’t know the half of it.

  “And we’d just as rather you stay where you are.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry,” Mary said. With one hand, she unrolled the paper at her knee. She dropped her eyes.

  ‘Y syG Y gW Y’ The ‘y’ had a curve to the upper prongs. She wasn’t familiar with the shorthand.

  “Mary?”

  Mary raised her head. She thought through the possibilities as her mouth opened, and said, “I don’t like to badmouth the other Lambs.”

  “If you can’t critically assess their performance then there might be deeper problems,” one of the doctors said. “In which case we might want to consider sacrificing them for the greater good of Radham.”

  Sacrifice.

  “To save your own hide, you mean?” another Professor spoke.

  “Calm down,” Hayle cut in. “You were saying, Mary?”

  Mary remembered the hand sign for sacrifice. Thumb folded in, fingers curled forward. It was the thought that connected to the paper Gordon had given her
. The letter G. It meant to sacrifice, a pawn, to put something at risk for greater reward, a gamble.

  Y would be the hand signal with pinky and thumb extended. Cunning, trick.

  The basic signs. W would be… had to be three fingers raised. Thought, plan, strategy.

  Gordon’s plan. Scapegoat Sy? This is a trick.

  “Sy was struggling,” Mary said.

  “Struggling?”

  “The thing with Jamie, it threw him off, emotionally. He was adapting how he operated, trying to compensate for the lack of Jamie, and he was stressing about Jamie coming. When Jamie did come, later on, it was a distraction.”

  “Sending Jamie was our decision. If you’re trying to shift the blame—”

  “No,” Mary hurried to answer. “No. Not at all. There were other problems. Sylvester made other mistakes. It stemmed from similar things, but also, you know he operates best when things are fresh in his mind, and if he picks up something new he forgets other things, or it slips away from him. We were months out of practice, the situation escalated too fast, and Sylvester was spread too thin to compensate.”

  “I see,” the headmaster said. He looked frustrated.

  It dawned on her why.

  Sy had an excuse.

  “Let’s talk about Percy…” another Doctor said. “How did you encounter him?”

  “We got access to the building he and Fray were holed up in,” Mary said. Best to tell the truth when she wasn’t sure. Lie only when it counted. “Fray let us walk in. Sy said she would, we believed him. Percy was one reason it worked. He was attached to me, still, and didn’t want me to come to harm. If someone had, it would have hurt their alliance.”

  “Tell us more about what you understood of Fray’s reasons.”

  Helen

  “Her reasons?” Helen asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I look at faces,” Helen said, narrowing her eyes as she looked at the headmaster. “I’m a very good student of faces. I had to learn it all from the beginning, like Ashton is doing now.”

  “We know this,” Professor Ibott said. His face was annoyed. She would probably get talked at in a mean way when this was over.

  “This information might help for our replacement hires that aren’t familiar with the Lambs,” Hayle said. “Go on.”

  “I saw things in her face. What Sy said, she wants to be right. She has a mission and nothing’s going to shake her from that mission. But she’s very insecure deep down. She was really insecure when we ran into her. Sy did a lot of that.”

  “Sylvester,” Ibott said. “Use his full name like a grown up girl.”

  “Sylvester,” Helen said.

  “Explain.”

  “She lost Cynthia, that was because of us too, I think. Cynthia didn’t like us being there, and she wasn’t happy being there to start with. And there was something about her not liking not being on top if Fray’s plan works and the Crown loses their grip on the West Crown States. I’m not sure.”

  “Be sure,” Ibott said. “This isn’t the time or place for suppositions.”

  “I wasn’t listening,” Helen said. “The others can tell you. I was focused on the room, making sure to listen to other things that were being said. I’m still not used to my new ears, but I wanted to make sure we weren’t attacked. There were a lot of dangerous people there.”

  “That’s not good enough,” Ibott said.

  “It will have to be,” Helen said, firmly. “The Lambs work like a puzzle does. The pieces fit together one way. I’m a piece that does certain things. What I do is I watch. Especially when Jamie isn’t around. I wait, I look for opportunities to attack, and I use my ears better than anyone in the group. They all had their ears pointed one way, and I had my ears pointed the rest of the ways.”

  “You need to keep track of what’s happening,” Ibott said.

  “I did,” Helen said. “Like I said, I kept enough track to know that Cynthia didn’t like it if everyone got those books and she wasn’t special for knowing stuff anymore.”

  He was upset. She knew that. She knew how to act to make him more upset, and she knew how to act to make him less upset. She was less certain about why he was upset.

  She’d known him longer than she had known anyone, and she still didn’t understand him a lot of the time.

  “Nothing she’s saying is contradicting what we heard from other Lambs,” Hayle said.

  “It’s how she’s saying it,” Ibott said.

  Oh.

  Helen knew how to fix that.

  She straightened her back, folding her hands in her lap. All of the right expressions and postures were very well organized in her head. She put the other ones away and brought these ones out. The tones of voice, the ways it affected how people treated her, it was a big, elaborate, spider’s web of a puzzle she had long ago figured out.

  The trick to that puzzle was that everyone wanted something. Sy was good at making people want different things, or taking what they wanted and using it to make them do what he wanted them to do. Gordon wasn’t as clever about it, but could figure out what people didn’t want and hammer at that weak point until they gave. Even if it meant being troublesome to the point that they just wanted him to go away or told him what he wanted to know just to make him stop.

  He didn’t get to do it much.

  Helen could figure out what people wanted and be that.

  The doctors and professors were conferring among themselves in whispers. There were parts of their voices that sounded too sharp, where her ears hadn’t quite adjusted to the very high pitches that voices could reach, that normal ears didn’t always catch.

  She couldn’t hear all of it, but she could put the pieces together from one word in five that was being said. They were talking about focus. Priority number one was to verify if the Lambs were traitors. For some, the word ‘if’ was replaced with ‘that’. Verifying that the Lambs were traitors, as if it had already been decided.

  All of her attention was going towards the act, reading expressions, paying attention to the glances that were cast her way and the faces people wore both when they did the glancing and after the fact.

  Many parts of her brain were built around this kind of thinking and attention-paying.

  “Did the Lambs at any point split up?”

  “Yes, sir,” Helen said, voice crisper than before, but musical enough to be pleasing.

  “When?”

  “The night before last. Sylvester suggested we split up. Then he went after Fray. He was in there for a time, then he came out. That was how he knew we could get close enough to Fray to figure out what she was planning.”

  “You’re talking differently,” Professor Ibott observed.

  “Shh,” the Headmaster shushed the man. “Is it not possible that Sylvester could have acted against the Academy during this time, collaborating with Fray?”

  “No, sir,” Helen said. “He was acting funny. We had an argument about it after. He was acting different, hurrying things along, and making small mistakes. I said, and I said this to everybody, he was trying to replace Jamie. Not on purpose, exactly, but subconsciously. He was too sloppy to do the sort of thing you were talking about.”

  “This role you’re putting on,” Professor Ibott said. “It’s different from the infantile, ‘cute’ behavior before.”

  “That was a role I put on for the Lambs, creator,” Helen said. “They were worried and anxious ever since our first meeting with Genevieve Fray. I tried to inject humor and positivity into things. I was more open about the thoughts that regularly cross my mind, but in a way I thought they could accept.”

  “You’ll cease that immediately,” Professor Ibott told her.

  Helen tilted her head a little to one side. “I already have. You said you didn’t like how I was talking before, Professor. I adjusted my behavior to match this room.”

  “You’ll cease that too. Present yourself to the room as you are, without the act.”

  Helen nodded.
r />   All of the details went away, the facial expressions, the considerations, the balances and her judgments of people around her. Her expression faded, until she was only staring.

  She looked at each of the people around the table, assessing them.

  Ibott spoke, and he sounded a little smug, having shown off his control and his ability to make her go quiet, “Now, focusing on the matter at hand, tell us about the mental state of the others. You reported Sylvester was acting strange. None of the other Lambs stepped in, forcing him to hand over the reins?”

  She didn’t have to make the mental adjustments to fit his feeling of superiority into her ‘act’, because there was no act.

  Helen stood from her chair. In her assessments, she’d found and fixed her eyes on the man at the far left of the table. A young man in a military uniform with the Radham crest on it. A manager of the local armies, organizing and training the local troops, probably. He was, as she had things put in her head, outward facing, a book man, locked in, a decider. She couldn’t help but visualize the notecards that had taught her about faces and people as she deciphered him.

  At a glance, she assessed him as the strongest person in the room. He could probably destroy her in a fight.

  She felt her hearts beat a little faster and harder. She could feel spurting as chemicals flowed from glands in her body. A rush, adrenaline, as if she was about to pick a fight. It all built up to a warmth in her middle.

  She imagined wrapping her arms around his chest until he stopped. Feeling her cheek against his chest as it went from warm to cool. Going to sleep like that. She wanted to put her thumbs on his eyes and press in until they gave away.

  Her hands reached out, touching the table. She leaned forward, hair hanging in front of her face.

  “Helen,” Ibott said, making it a reprimand. “What are you doing?”

  “Thinking,” she said, her voice monotone, glancing only briefly at her creator.

  “We’re asking you questions. Sit down,” Ibott said.