“Who, me?” Please let it be Cecelia. Please let it be Cecelia.
“Yes, you, my darling.” Color me shocked.
Markus nodded, taking a step closer to bridge the gap between the two of us. Gods, the stench of the man felt like an oily rag had been used for years uncleaned and then strapped to the front of my face. It took a considerable amount of effort not to physically react to the man entering my personal space, something that would have been uncomfortable already had this man not nearly killed us mere hours earlier.
Speaking of our tussle, I noticed a distinct lack of blood on his face from Cecelia’s spiteful spit, had he washed already? If he had, it certainly didn’t smell like it.
“Can I help you?” Whether I liked it or not, I had just created a persona at the front gate with my spectacle. I could use that if the need arises.
“Why of course, dear. Markus, captain of the guard here in Multon, it’s a pleasure to meet you.” He reached down towards my hand, wrapping his own clammy fingers around it to plant a kiss on the top. A writhing wave of disgust practically crawled up my arm and died on my shoulder. “I wanted to warn you. Some dangerous individuals were encountered nearby, and I couldn’t live with myself if a delicate flower such as yourself were trampled in their wake. Do you have sleeping arrangements for this evening?”
This man was truly something else. If I knew nothing of what he was up to hours ago I would have no way of knowing he was hellbent on killing someone. His carefree attitude betrayed a harshness in his heart that set my hair on end.
“Not yet, no. But we were just-” I started.
“Well we can’t have that, now can we? Please, I heard your conversation at the gate and it would truly be an honor to host such a prestigious guest in my manor tonight.” He had a manor?
‘They say that men with large manors compensate for their-’
I don’t want to hear it, Lilith. I obviously needed to find a way out of this offer, the question was how.
“Not necessary, I can assure you. I am working on an exclusive commissioned art piece tonight, and I simply cannot be interrupted.” A smile crept to my lips as I finished my lie. I suppose spending so much time in the Academy around such pretentious royalty gave me the edge I needed to act the part.
“It would truly be my honor, I insist.” A toothy smile crest his bottom lip and he continued. “I’ve been told by many women I would make a good muse if you needed a subject for your art.” His hand, still gripping my, began to pull me towards him with surprising ease. Just how strong was this man?!
“No!” My eyes went wide at my involuntary reaction, my hand already pried from his grasp as I took a step back. His face contorted into one of brief anger, sending my heart on a journey through my chest. “I-I mean, about the muse. My art is nearly finished, you see, I couldn’t dare to restart the process this late.”
“Ah, of course. I won’t question an expert within their own field. I will offer any supplies and assistance you can desire tonight. You three have entered at such a late hour, you must be tired. Please, come with me.”
My eyes flashed towards Phern and Cecelia, catching the tense apprehension in their faces. It looked like the two of them were just as paralyzed as I in this conversation. Shit. We can survive one night in his manor.
‘You don’t seem so certain, my little morsel. I could always peel his face off as a midnight snack for us.’
Deciding to ignore Lilith’s comment, I did my best to compose myself as a wealthy and famous artist. “Very well. But I want no interruptions, I must complete this piece before I leave Multon tomorrow.”
“Why of course, Lady Illona, I wouldn’t dare disrupt the beautiful piece of artistry. Or your commission.” He seemed incredibly pleased with his play on words, even letting out a gruff laugh as he walked us down the street. It was only one night, I could just lock myself in the room and ignore him. For as uncomfortable as being around this man was, I couldn’t deny the ‘Lady Illona’ would be a pleasant respite.
The three of us silently followed Markus towards his manor. I spent the majority of the walk admiring the city in all of its natural glory. It looked as though a city and a forest were superimposed upon each other in a picturesque fashion. The moonlight above us was but a suggestion, peeking through the branches and leaves like it was trying to claw its way into Multon. I took note of the magical lighting that illuminates the city in a warm glow. Small orbs of golden light were embedded in the trees up high coating the streets in a comfortable golden light. It really was a pity we could only spend a day here, I would love to explore what it had to offer.
A reminder of why our stay would be short-lived crossed my vision on our walk. Three wanted posters. One of which was a quite beautiful illustration of Cecelia Sicaria. He must not have been lying about having those ready to go. The other two were much worse in quality being hasty sketches that implied more than identified Phern and I. Phern’s at least captured her eccentrism in her poster. Mine was a grumpy looking figure with tired eyes, a shaggy head of hair, and an oddly androgynous face. My face didn’t look like that, right? I hadn’t checked my reflection recently, making a mental note to do so when I was out of this disguise.
Each poster listed a bounty, with a reward of-
10,000 Gold
That… couldn’t be right. That amount of wealth was so staggering I was already coming up with ways I could possibly turn myself in for the money. I haven’t even done much since waking up like this! How could I be so heavily sought after?
Wanted: Alive, Quarter Reward If Dead.
Cecelia and Phern’s bounty listed the strict conditions for their capture. Cecelia really wasn’t kidding when she said the two of them sacrifice a lot to help me. It only wracked my brain further as to why they would do such a thing. I looked at my own poster’s text.
Wanted: Dead, As Possible.
Cute.
‘Deathless all receive the same treatment. You will adjust, fledgling.’
That didn’t do much to make me feel better.
We arrived at the manor, and I felt myself let out a sigh upon seeing its full glory. It almost physically hurt to see that a man such as Markus had such a luxurious place to live. It was a large red building coated in windows like they were going out of fashion. Each window was trimmed with golden bars, a nauseating display of decadence. The front doors were large varnished wooden doors, which made more sense the more I thought about how nearly every building in Multon had been constructed of wood. This manor lacked all the comfort of the log cabin styled buildings in the rest of the city.
Without much to do but follow, we entered the manor being Markus and followed him through two conjoining hallways before he stopped in front of a door. “Here we are, ladies. The following two rooms are yours, alone. Lady Illona, I believe this first room would be best for you, as it boasts the most space to work your magic.” I was certain Cecelia and Phern were aware just as I, that Markus barely even acknowledged the presence of the two of them. Lucky them.
“Please, bring something to my attention if you don’t find it satisfactory to your standards, and I will deal with it right away. Breakfast will be served in the morning, but don’t fret, guards will notify you when it is ready to be served.” Markus smiled in the same way he always did, with far too much effort, and then kissed my hand once more before turning to walk down the hall. “I look forward to talking more tomorrow, ladies!”
…3…4…5. Once he had been around the corner for long enough, I let my shoulders drop and breathed a sigh of relief. The upright posture required for maintaining a rich persona was more exhausting than I thought it would be. The throbbing pains in the side of my chest reminded me of just why it had been so hard to maintain.
“Thank Gods he’s gone. I thought I was going to throw up five different times.” I let out a relieved laugh and looked at my two teammates, was that the right word?
“For a guy who’s just a nobody, you make for a pretty convincing royal.” Cecelia bumped me with her shoulder in a playful manner as she moved towards the first room to open it up. I felt a pang of sadness roil through my core at the reminder that I was just a guy playing a part of a woman.
“In here, we need to talk before we go back to sleep, bandit.”
Cecelia ushered in Phern and I before sitting down on the edge of the quite magnificent bed and peeling off her heels. The shoes tumbled to the carpet as she fell backwards onto the bed like a limp starfish. I wish I didn’t think this, but Markus had good taste in decor, perhaps only dipping his toe into the gaudy details. The room was a very pleasant arrangement of auburn furniture and red detailed wallpaper that resembled a variety of forest animals. It almost looked like a huntsmans cabin, complete with a cozy fireplace that had already been lit when we arrived. Was he expecting guests, or did they usually leave fires burning to warm the manor?
The three of us took off our shoes and found a place to sit, Phern on the bed with Cecelia, with me shuffling onto a sitting chair with a daunting design of a skullthreader’s head. A lanky but deadly animal native to southern forests. They usually had brown fur spattered with patches of black to blend into the foliage between trees. I was happy that the only time I’d ever seen one was in the books back at the academy. I sunk into the chair with a long drawn out sigh, it practically pulled me into it’s comforting grasp, the softest thing I had felt since awaking in the church.
Everyone in the room was thinking the same thing, but none of us dared speak first to address our predicament. When the silence had grown so heavy as to press into my body, I spoke up. “Sorry for getting into this.”
“I don’t want to hear sorry, bandit. You’re clearly not an actor or a fighter, but I can tell you know how to survive. You did what you could. We easily could have been lined up in the gallows if you acted differently.” Cecelia didn’t make eye contact with me the entire time she spoke, simply staring up at the ceiling from the plush bed.
“Oh. Thanks. I know it’s not great, but at least we get a night of luxury before leaving Multon.” I was pleasantly surprised at how kind Cecelia was being. I thought for sure I was going to get a talking to about how deep a hole I dug for us, but that wasn’t the case.
“I’m beat, so let’s settle the important details and then we’ll be out of your hair. First up, disguise.” Cecelia looked at Phern and nodded, and like an unspoken agreement, Phern picked up from where Cecelia left off.
“Yes! Our disguise ritual will last until you speak the words ‘I relinquish my identity’, or until the ritual runs out. As long as we aren’t doing too much physical exertion, it’ll last about 2 more days, give or take.” With a lopsided smile that was started to become familiar and comforting, she stretched out across the bed. The give or take was a little scary, but I decided I would attempt to put it out of mind. She knew what she was doing.
“As you picked up at the gate, there’s no way to magically disguise that tattoo of yours, so do not reveal your upper back under any circumstances. I shouldn’t have to tell you we are in the enemy’s nest, so we need to be careful of any slip ups that will land us at the end of the executioner’s blade.”
“Makes sense.” I replied to Cecelia.
“The Marked are nowhere to be seen, and that’s my biggest concern. They rely on magical sight to see.” Before she could finish, I knew where she was going. Magical sight was something traditional advanced to learn and utilized, but it allowed people to see the magical cores within each person. Everyone had them, with the majority of cores lying dormant, unable to cast magic. I suspected if I could have seen my core, it would have been dormant my whole life until now.
The two Marked had seen our cores, which means they could easily see through our disguises were we to come into contact with them.
“Shit. We’ll be discovered as soon as they see us.” I finished Cecelia’s thoughts for her. She nodded in response, even cracking a smile at my interruption.
“Make our bookworm here isn’t hopeless after all, Phern. Our main goal is to get out of Multon as fast as possible. I say we stay for breakfast, leaving any earlier would have them sending guards for us before we could leave the gates. We’re going to stick to our story of travelling to Thrum and depart just before noon. Sound like a plan?”
Phern and I nodded, we were all in agreement with what needed to be done.
“We need a team name!” Phern whined.
“Phern, we don’t need-” Cecelia was cut off mid-sentence by the unstoppable force of the grandmother-form Phern.
“Yes we do! There’s three of us, and you told me a long time ago when we got three people I could give us a group name!”
“I… you’re right.” Cecelia looked defeated, like her past words had come back and closed her mouth.
“I-I don’t really think we need-” I don’t know what I was thinking, there was no way Phern would have let me deny her this privilege.
“Too late! It’s happening, lemme just think for a second.” Phern raised her fingers to her temples and scrunched up her face. I was beginning to worry she would pop a blood vessel or develop a hernia with how intensely she was tensing and thinking.
“I got it! The Tenacious Trio!” Phern paused for applause. There was none.
“No. Try again.” Cecelia looked incredibly unimpressed by Tenacious Trio, and I couldn’t blame her.
“The Unkillable Unit.” Phern growled to add some flair to the name.
“Ugh, no way.”
“Any suggestions if you’re gonna throw mine out?” Phern quipped back
‘I do! Suggest The Heart Eaters.’
I’m not suggesting that Lilith.
“I got nothing.” Cecelia shrugged and pushed herself off the bed and back onto her feet. “Just let it simmer, Phern. When you’ve got a name you can let us know. I need to get some sleep.”
“Ugh, fine. But if you murder 3 more of my ideas, I get to pick one with no exceptions.”
“Fine, deal.” Cecelia certified their deal as she picked up her heels. I admired the relationship that the two of them had. It was like watching two sisters antagonize each other with a familial kind of love.
I moved to walk the two of them out of my room. I figured it couldn’t hurt to be safe considering where we were sleeping. Phern slipped out of the room first to walk down to their adjacent room, but to my surprise, Cecelia stopped in my doorway to turn and face me.
“Ester, huh? Pretty name.” For a moment, Cecelia’s blue eyes made me feel like I was back in the Academy. Pretty, huh? I felt a blush spread across my face as I stood frozen in the doorway with her. My breath hitched in my throat, and I waited for what felt like an eternity as she looked me up and down like she was committing my form to memory. Her eyes shifted over me like she was gazing straight through the disguise to the body underneath.
“Have a good night, Lady Illona.”
She turned and left, but I stayed in the doorway for a minute processing what she had said to me. Was she toying with me? Teasing me for putting on a performance in this body that didn’t belong to me? When the heat on my cheeks became too unbearable, I shut the door to my room and went straight to my bed.
‘She is a minx, that Life Hunter.’
I paid no mind to Lilith’s voice as I drifted off to sleep in the puffy bed. The comfort it gave me far exceeded the stone floor of the church, and the stiff bed roll of the tent. I barely got to enjoy the relaxation before I was plucked into unconsciousness.
“Never would have expected to find you here, Xavier.” Vyra feigned surprise with her tongue firmly in her cheek. It was near the end of the school day, and I was exactly where I always was during this gap in my schedule, the secluded room in the top corner of the library.
“Hm? Oh, apologies, it was so funny I completely forgot to laugh. Amazing how it’s funnier the 20th time you’ve said it.” I droned in a monotonous voice, eyes not even bothering to drift up from the book I read.
Vyra, unbothered by my response, sat down next to me on the aged reading bench. She knew I didn’t mean it, and the two of us let out a chuckle at the endless tennis match of insults we seemed to hurl over the net at each other whenever we could. It was endearing. She was endearing.
“What’s it today?” Vyra asked, pointing towards the book I had cracked open on my lap.
“A pain. I’m trying my best to research Florimancy, but it is such a gatekept mess of gendered madness.”
“Yikes, that bad? Why do you want to study the magic of flowers, isn’t that an archaic form of magic? They don’t even teach it in classes anymore.” Vyra leaned against me on the bench, her warmth instantly spreading through me and calming me. She was always so warm to the touch.
“I know, it’s obscure, but that’s why I want to know about it. When things are unknown they-”
“-can sometimes hold incredible discoveries, I know. You go on about that all the time.” Vyra interrupted me to remind me just how much I spoke about unknowns and their significance. I knew she didn’t mean it harshly though, especially since she followed it by saying, “I can’t lie that it’s tempted me in the past. Y’know they have a club for Florimancy ever since they got rid of the class for it. We could always go to the club together!”
“Hah! As if. You know as well as I that the Florimancy club is only available to the female students of Varenthell Academy.” It was an archaic rule just as dated as the study of Florimancy itself, but heavily enforced by the academy. They had certain clubs that were separated by gender, and the royal families on the school’s council had no interest in overruling anything deemed ‘traditional’.
“Okay? So we dress you up as a girl and go together, simple.” Vyra spoke like her inane plan was as simple as going on a walk through the classroom hallways. I didn’t understand why she thought it was so simple, there is a reason that nobody did that kind of thing.
“No! I-I can’t just pretend to be a girl, could you imagine how bad that would be?”
“What’s so bad about it?”
“It’s. I-I mean. You just can’t do that! It would be creepy!” My face felt hot. I felt stupid having to explain all of this to Vyra, but I thought it would be common sense. Boys who dressed up as girls were seen as weird, that’s just how it is from everything I had seen. The way she talked about it so casually almost made me believe it didn’t matter as much as I had been led to believe.
“Oh come on, I know you, Xavier. Would you be creepy about it?”
“No, but-”
“Then what are you so worried about?” Vyra had such a calm expression as she spoke. I, on the other hand, had anything but a calm expression.
“You’re acting like this whole thing is so much more serious than it is. Florimancy club meets on Wednesdays, so how about you meet me in my room this time tomorrow and I’ll get you ready to go.”
“Wha- But I can’t do it, Vyra! Are you listening to me?” I stuttered and stammered my way through the conversation, feeling like my heart was one beat away from leaping out of my chest.
Vyra turned to face me on the bench. I watched as she pulled my left hand up to her right hand and drew into my palm with her index finger. She outlined the letter ‘V’, and then waited for me to respond. I knew what she was doing, and responded in kind by drawing the letter ‘X’ into her palm with my finger. “Swear on my name, it will be okay.”
That settles it then. Vyra and I had developed a ‘name swear’ when we had first met each other in the academy. It was our way of making a promise to each other that we couldn’t break. It wasn’t magically binding, but it didn’t need to be with the two of us. We had an unspoken agreement that a swearing on our names was only done when we meant it with utmost sincerity.
Vyra had been working silently for the past 20 minutes. As she had told me, my eyes had stayed shut as she worked her magic on my face. Not real magic, mind you, just her unnatural ease at applying makeup. I could tell I was sweating badly. She had gotten me dressed in her spare uniform earlier, telling me it would make for a better ‘grand reveal’. I couldn’t help but feel like an imposter when I sat down in the chair.
“...and that’s it. Let me grab the mirror and you can open your eyes in a second.”
I heard some shuffling in the room as she dragged a standing mirror near the chair and propped it up against some sort of furniture.
“Okay! Open your eyes!”
Was that me?
An air of what felt loosely like dissociation floated through the air as I watched an uncanny version of me staring back. It was me, but so fantastically feminine. Green eyes peered back at me through the mirror, my somewhat long hair for a boy had been styled to shape my face favorably. The entire experience had my stomach curling, but not with remorse like I originally thought. It was intense joy that was slowly burning brighter in the pit of my stomach. The woman in the mirror was smiling back at me. When did I start smiling?
“Do you like it? I’d say I did a pretty good job.” Vyra smirked, standing next to the mirror and watching my reaction. “I’ve always wanted to do this kind of makeover on someone, it’s truly amazing how much can change with a few alterations.
“It’s so- I’m so pretty. It’s amazing.” As much as I tried to stop it, I couldn’t stop grinning ear to ear at the person looking back at me.
“Well as much as I’m sure you’d like to look at my work, we’re going to be late for Florimancy club if we don’t leave now.”
“Oh, r-right. You think they’ll just let me in?”
“It’s a club, silly, they don’t check that harshly. Just have a fake name if anyone asks and you’ll be good. I thought of suggesting Rose, but I think that’s a little on the nose for Florimancy club.” She giggled to herself as she grabbed her back from aside the dorm door and threw it over her shoulder.
“Yeah, Rose doesn’t feel right.” I mulled over a few names in my mind. I tried to settle on one that felt ‘right’ when I looked at myself in the mirror. It felt like a guessing game I was playing with myself and losing. I could see Vyra in the mirror by the door, waiting to leave. I knew we had to go, but she didn’t seem impatient as she waited.
Eventually I settled on a name that finally clicked. If I saw this version of myself walking through the hallways, I would think this name would fit her perfectly. The idea of the name being attached to me made my eyes misty. I had no idea why my body was having such a strange reaction.
“Okay, I’m ready.” I smiled.
“Got the name?”
“Ester.”
Vyra gave me a big toothy grin as I walked over to her. She looked happy for me. Well and truly happy, like this was something she’d waited decades for.
“Nice to meet you, Ester.”