Twig

by wildbow

  “Will they?”

  “Boat could arrive whenever.”

  “We know the schedule for the usual boats,” the Devil countered. “It’s unlikely they’ll come at dusk in a borrowed boat, when the sky is overcast, the way in unlit.”

  “Could be an hour,” Gordeux said. “Could be three. Or five. But that’s not too long to wait.”

  “He’s lying,” the Devil said.

  “It’s an eternity,” Sylvester said. “If you could spend one of those hours in my head, you wouldn’t be saying that.”

  Gordeux was silent. Pity marked his expression. Sylvester thought of Cynthia’s words, of the labels.

  “And it’s not going to be one hour, or three, or five. It’s going to be closer to eight, or twelve, or twenty-two,” Sylvester said.

  “What do you want, Sylvester?” Davis asked. “You’ve hurt your own people. You carved up a key piece of your plan and left her in the bathtub. Not that we know the entirety of your plan, despite everything we’ve put into this, but…”

  “She’s alive, isn’t she?” Sylvester asked.

  “She’s alive. We’re getting her new arms and legs. She’s cooperating, but—”

  “If she’s cooperating, then that’s all that’s important.”

  “Why, Sy?” Davis asked. “She was horrendous, but she didn’t deserve that.”

  “I was raised to be a monster and to hunt monsters.”

  “I think you’re more than that,” Shirley said, speaking up from within the crowd.

  She pushed her way forward. Pierre was beside her.

  Sylvester frowned.

  “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have helped me like you did.”

  “You wouldn’t believe the tally I’ve got going on in my head. Especially since I don’t have the memory to keep a proper tally, so it’s more of this impossible, incalculable thing, like a mountain that grows two leagues taller for every league I ascend,” Sylvester said. “But I owe you so much more than you owe me.”

  “It’s not about owing!” Shirley said. “It’s about… just being there. Helping when help is due. And I think you did that for me.”

  “I calculated it. I calculate everything. Every social interaction is manipulation, molding people like putty around me.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “The very first thing I said to you was a tip on how to manipulate people,” he said. “I don’t remember what it was, but I remember that.”

  “It’s not about what was said,” she said. “More how and why. You had no reason to help me.”

  “You were useful.”

  “I don’t think that’s it,” she said, even though her body language suggested she very much worried it was. She sounded almost scared as she asked, “Why are you pushing us away?”

  “Sy,” Gordeux said, before he could respond. “Listen. Come eat. Come into the dining hall. We can talk over food. Helen—Possum made some with Rudy. We’ve got some of the defectors from Hackthorn with us. We’ve actually talked to them and we might’ve sold them on being on our side, and not just because they’re scared. The whole black forest and plague thing is really a good starting point, they have their doubts about the Crown. You might get something out of the discussions.”

  “Throwing me into the mix might not be the best idea, if it’s at all tenuous,” Sylvester said. “As a matter of fact, any of this might be a bad idea. Squadron of soldiers, me, this whole thing. Seems like it ends badly.”

  “Badly?” Davis asked.

  “We—I don’t want to hurt you guys too badly. I sort of took down a few of our own in the course of getting here. I’m not sure I can stop.”

  “Sylvester—do I have to force you to come eat and talk with us on threat of being shot?” Davis asked.

  Sylvester considered.

  “Go,” Percy said.

  Sylvester nodded. “I’ll come with.”

  Davis looked relieved. He really shouldn’t have.

  With twenty students with guns pointing their weapons at Sylvester, they guided him down the remainder of the bridge, into the main building.

  “We spent days looking for you. We didn’t think you left the Academy at first,” Davis said. “Those students you sent into the room to clean up, they came to get me, I immediately set to looking for you. Bea quizzed the Professor as soon as she was lucid, trying to figure out if she’d said anything.”

  “If she did, it might be better not to mention it. I’ve got this sticking thought that she told me some secret of hers under duress, and I didn’t like it, going by the blood. Not sure though, since I don’t remember any of it.”

  “She wouldn’t say what it was,” Davis said.

  “Yeah,” Sylvester said.

  They made their way into the dining hall proper, above Lab One. It was teeming, filled with defecting Hackthorn students, with Beattle rebels and the whole group of the Hackthorn fairy tale experiments, minus the actual monsters who were no doubt in Lab One.

  The large boy stood at one end of the crowd.

  As Cynthia had suggested, they weren’t all people. The line, at least, was blurred. Every time Sylvester had seen him, the large boy had been busily eating, always eating, a monolithic thing. Now, even though there were tables with food laid out on them, the boy ate without partaking, chewing meat when the only meat in arm’s reach was the population of the crowd.

  The armed guard of soldiers drew attention to him. He had to remind himself that the remainder of the crowd around him wasn’t actually there, even if it almost felt more real than the remainder of this scene, with its fairy tales and more teenagers and children.

  He took his seat at the same table as the Primordial, the eating child.

  He belatedly realized the company he kept. The nobles had appeared before, but they had been conspicuously absent for some time, with the exception of the Falconer, who had been something of a special case. Mustering strength.

  Immediately, his eyes dropped to the table itself, so he wouldn’t look at them, wouldn’t see them. So he wouldn’t see the most dangerous of the nobles he’d met, the one he’d told himself would mean he’d lost himself entirely. He tried to rise out of his seat, and a hand pushed him down.

  “Stay put, please,” Davis said. “Please. Let’s just talk. Talk’s safe. Talk kills time, and we just need to buy enough time for your friends to get back, right?”

  “Right,” Sylvester said. He heard laughter, and recognized it as the Baron’s.

  He knew when the Baron had laughed like this, too. It had been close to the time Sylvester had poisoned his brain with Wyvern.

  He knew why the Baron had laughed.

  The Baron had known.

  He assessed the room, and he saw the others gathered around. His trains of thought, interwoven with the crowd. They were ready for conflict, ready for the calm to be broken, for defector to become doubter, for the harmless fairy tale children to erupt into anger. Many of the guns trained on him would turn elsewhere. He could see it, in abstract, by how the countless dead and lost were woven among the living.

  “Yeah. Talk is safe,” Sylvester said, before sharing the most dangerous words he knew.

  Previous Next

  Enemy IV (Arc 18)

  “Yeah. Talk is safe,” Sylvester said. He paused. “Shall we talk about how the entire balance of power is a lie?”

  Davis tensed at that. “Some of your friends from Lab One said you were saying something like that. I get it. You don’t remember telling me you wanted to be cut out of the proceedings, that you didn’t trust yourself. You’re upset that we’re in charge.”

  Sylvester’s eye was roving across the nobles that were seated along his table, while Davis spoke. He looked at the Doctors who stood by, ones with the full training and reputation like Fray and Avis, and the rogue ones like the Snake Charmer and Percy.

  “Not you,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that’s not the balance o
f power I’m concerned about. I’m talking about the Crown. About the Academy. How every part of it is as much a fairy tale as the ones that inspired a parrot boy, a red-hooded messenger, and a golden-haired troublemaker. In fact, the link between them and the nobility is closer than you think.”

  “Really,” Davis said. His tone was skeptical, and Sylvester was very aware that Davis was trying to weigh the degree to which he could be believed against what he might have heard. He was aware because his friends at and around the table were aware. They were changing posture. Ready, keenly interested, and many had dangerous looks in their eyes. The ones who didn’t have those looks looked cold, instead. Detached.

  Paul the parrot-feathered wasn’t a nemesis, he wasn’t someone Sylvester had plotted against, but there was something very much about him that suggested he was on the same page as the doctors and professors, the back-alley docs, the experiments, the monsters, and the madmen who kept Sylvester company. He had the predatory look, seeing something valuable that he might be able to capitalize on.

  Like greed, avarice, hunger, but it wasn’t gold or food so much as the promise of someone else being made to bleed

  The effect on Paul was enough that it drew the attention of the others near Paul. They had been rounded up to be questioned, it looked like, and they were being kept somewhat removed from one another, with students sitting around them, one or two Beattle rebels between each of the Lab One experiments, some students removed to nearby benches.

  All the same, Paul’s change in how he sat and the look in his eyes was something noticed by those closest to him, which was noticed by others they had associated with. There was an elegance to it. As Paul’s hair was red and gold to go with the feathers he’d once had flowing with his hair, it was Red and Goldilocks who noticed that he was paying keen attention, and they became more ready, more wary, anticipating what came next. They got along more with the various delinquents, including one of the girls who had spent more time herding the younger fairy tales, and so those delinquents absorbed the sentiment and passed it down.

  By the time it reached the very last members of the group, including Bo Peep, the effect was less like anticipation and more like fear. It was around then that the ones guarding the group seemed to sense something was amiss.

  “Sylvester?” Davis asked, patient. “I’m curious where you’re going with this. Like, I could understand if you think you’ve found a weak point to hammer at, or if you’re just musing aloud—”

  “No,” Sylvester said.

  “No?”

  “No, this is a known fact, Davis. Jessie and I have been sitting on it for a while now. The nobility is an outright lie.”

  Davis’ attention piqued at that. There were a few murmurs.

  Paul was stock still, though. Waiting, sensing there was more to it. A lot of the older fairy tales, young nobles, and delinquents in that circle were. Like a skulk of foxes who had sighted food, they were holding still so they wouldn’t disturb their quarry.

  Sylvester was their quarry, in a way. Or his words were.

  “Sylvester,” Shirley said. “Maybe we should leave this topic alone.”

  “You don’t want to hear it?” Davis asked. “Or is there something I don’t know?”

  “I’ve been with Sylvester and Jessie for the last year, I know more than most. Sy, you were working hard to keep this secret for a reason. It’s dangerous knowledge.”

  Davis ran his hand over his head, where his hair had been smoothed down into a part. “Darn it.”

  “I know it sounds tantalizing, but I’ve seen Sylvester like this before…” Shirley said. She trailed off to look at him.

  Sylvester watched Shirley by equal measure, quiet.

  “…where he’s not himself, exactly, but he isn’t much diminished in terms of his ability to… I don’t even know. Hurt people. Cause havoc.”

  “I know, you, Sy and Jessie explained that to us lieutenants before,” Davis said.

  “She’s not explaining for your benefit, Davis,” a voice whispered beside Sylvester’s ear. Mauer. “She’s talking to the room. We taught her well, didn’t we, Sylvester?”

  Sylvester remained silent, content to let the conversation continue for now.

  “This seems like him sowing havoc. We should change topics. Revisit it at a later date, if Jessie and the others agree it makes sense.”

  “Don’t we deserve to know?” a delinquent asked. He was one of the ones who would have partied with the Lab One fairy tales and other more rebellious rebels.

  “Enough, Fang,” Bea spoke. She was sitting on a table with her feet on a bench.

  “The cat’s mostly out of the bag already, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “I imagine there’s a lot more going on,” she said. “Please, let us handle this. You’ve trusted us this far.”

  “Thank you, Bea,” Davis said.

  “I don’t know about you, Davis,” Paul said, from a distant table, his voice carrying, “But I have a personal stake in this. They carved me up. Carved up some of the girls and little ones here. And apparently what happened to us has something to do with the nobles?”

  “Paul, please.”

  “Please don’t, Paul,” a small voice said. Bo Peep.

  “My imagination is afire, sir,” Paul said. The look in his eyes had only intensified.

  “I want to chime in,” Gordeux said. “If I may, Davis?”

  “I trust you. Feel welcome.”

  “Thank you. I haven’t been with Sy for as long as Shirley, but I’ve seen him work, and I was one of the first people in Beattle he reached out to, I think. Besides Junior’s group.”

  Sylvester looked at Junior’s group. Was that bloody avarice in their eyes too?

  Gordeux went on, “If my opinion as a near-veteran of the group counts for much of anything, I think we should leave this alone. I think we should drop this, eat breakfast, talk about things in general, introduce ourselves to the people who’ve crossed the bridge from the Hackthorn dorms. Treat them to the good side of the rebel life, without faculty and rules over our heads. I think Helen and Rudy did a good job in the kitchens. Is there dessert?”

  “Hot frosted buns,” Possum said.

  “Good food, weather’s not too bad, it’s quiet, there’s more serious stuff we can discuss over the course of today and tomorrow while we wait for Jessie and the Lambs to turn up, but we can do that at our leisure. Team leaders know what we need to hammer out if you want to stay busy, and…”

  Gordeux spread his hands, he chuckled a bit.

  “…if you don’t want to play a part in bringing meaningful change to the world, well, I don’t want to get into details, but there’s a wine cellar with enough wine to keep all of us tipsy through to the end of next year, and we’re not exactly separating dorms by gender, if you know what I mean.”

  There was some general amusement at that, and some confusion from the younger years and experiments.

  “Frosted buns, red wine, good company, sunshine, and maybe some hope for the future. With the rest of the nation reeling with plague and the black wood, I gotta say I’m pretty happy with that status quo. Everything else can wait for tomorrow, and speaking as someone who’s seen some fighting and rebellion already, we’ll be darn fucking glad we had the time to rest before we got properly underway.”

  “Ya know, I have some buns I know I’d like to get my frosting on,” someone at one table joked.

  “Oh fuck you and fuck your joke! We’re better than that!” one of his friends said, raising his voice to be heard over the laughter. It was an insult made in good fun, one friend to another, and it only made others laugh louder at the dumb joke.

  Only the ones who looked hungriest for blood looked like they weren’t swayed or amused by any of this. Paul, Red, Goldi, Fang. They composed a small fraction of the people gathered. One in fifty. One in thirty if Sylvester didn’t count the people he was fairly sure only he could see.

  Sylvester watched as Davis clapped a hand on
Gordeux’s shoulder, leaning in close to whisper in his ear.

  “So many of them have learned from you,” Mauer said.

  Sylvester nodded.

  Shirley was approaching him. Others were glancing his way. Thinking, trying to figure out how to manage him, rein him in, how to use him. The ones with red lights in their eyes were looking at him from another angle, too hungry to think straight. It wasn’t quite bloodlust—they wanted answers, they wanted vindication and revenge in a way that didn’t necessarily have to do with blood.

  “You know what to say,” the Snake Charmer said. “You know what to give them.”

  Sylvester nodded.

  All around him, others were talking. Beattle rebel, the occasional experiment, students getting up to get first dibs on dessert, talking, laughing. It was good amusement in a way that was almost more boisterous and exaggerated because the students were pushing against the doubts, pulling friends away from the glances in Sylvester’s direction, and trying very hard not to think about the big questions, doubts, and fears that loomed.

  “But for a different roll of the dice, you might have been a beautiful noble lord, Paul,” Sylvester said. His voice was more or less drowned out by the conversation, by the laughter, and the noise of people moving.

  But others were listening, paying attention, or keeping an eye on him, and some were close enough to hear. Paul was one of them. So were Red, Shirley, Davis, and Junior.

  Again, it was like something voltaic, a current like a horrific accident in one of the labs where stitched were mass produced, the excess charge ripping over every available surface, dancing across the path of least resistance, before diffusing out into the grounded objects.

  Slowly, step by step, from one group to the next, or from one member of a group to the rest of that group, people fell silent, or noticed that others had fallen silent.

  The amusement and good nature faded more swiftly than it had set in.

  The Baron, sitting near the Primordial, laughed in the silence. Sylvester smiled.