It was a familiar room, and a familiar situation. The room was one of the secondary dining rooms of Halflance manor, though the only times I’d ever been inside it were times like then, when it was pressed into service as a sort of meeting room. The situation was that we were discussing matters that might have an impact on the fate of the entirety of Bluerose. A map of the country was spread out on the table, and all three pairs of eyes were fixed firmly on it.
That was the main difference between this visit to the meeting room and the previous ones. Before it had always been packed to the gills with staff and security. That afternoon, the only people present were myself, Lady Halflance, and Laura. Laura and Lady Halflance were seated as far apart from each other as possible while still being able to read the map, while I was stuck in the middle.
“Before we get to the most relevant news, I must remind you of the international situation,” Halflance said. “No doubt you’ve heard rumors about Cassandran armies massing?”
“Once or twice,” I said.
“They are false. Nothing so obvious has been seen with any accuracy. But they do represent an underlying truth; tensions are rising between Bluerose and the Cassandran Empire.”
Laura glared down at the map as though it had harmed her personally. She was standing at the table instead of availing herself of the use of a chair, and her knuckles were going white on the table’s edge.
“There are various other activities signaling increased military readiness,” Halflance continued. “These include troop movements and the relocation of warships. But, again, no massing. One particular sign, however, is highly relevant to our situation.”
Halflance leaned forward, tapping her index finger repeatedly against a single mark on the map, along Bluerose’s main western coastline but almost a thousand miles north of Amrinval, where Halflance manor lay. It was the port of Grantval, the largest city in Bluerose and the holy city of its main religion, Vesselism. I’d been there exactly twice, though the second time had been only for a few minutes as the train briefly stopped at Grantval station.
“A Cassandran spy ship was raided near Grantval, four days ago. It was carrying supplies of a nature similar to those used by Tersine for her own ends.”
Laura moved for the first time in what felt like the better part of an hour, shifting her eyes and subtly tensing. “So she’s hiding out in Grantval, then?”
“We cannot afford to be hasty in our assessments, however,” Halflance said. Even when berating her, Halflance could hardly force herself to acknowledge Laura’s presence. “We believe that she may be near Grantval, but there is no confirmation. Yet.”
I rolled my eyes. “But the fact that you’re telling us this at all suggests to me that you feel fairly certain. And presumably that means we’re going to start putting some serious effort into searching the area around Grantval for evidence of Tersine’s presence. Right?”
“I will be leaving for Grantval tomorrow.”
“And we’ll be coming with you.” I turned, giving Halflance a very meaningful glare. “Right?”
“Not immediately,” said Lady Halflance.
Laura slammed her hand down on the table. “Whenever it benefits you, you need me to hold the whole damn weight of the world on my back, but the moment I could actually have a chance to shine, that’s when you stop trusting me, eh? You haven’t changed in the slightest!”
“We can’t afford to waste time,” I said, though Laura was drowning out my voice. “You’re seriously underestimating Doctor Tersine if you think that she’ll just wait around for you to investigate her without making a move of her own. This could get you killed, you understand that?”
“What are you so damn afraid of, anyway? That I’ll take all the glory you deserve? That I’ll do it slightly differently from how you want to do it, prove that for once you didn’t know—”
“I know you’re experienced with spy work and politics, but I’m experienced with Tersine herself. She’s incredibly dangerous, more so than any ordinary human threat, okay? I have my abilities as an alraune and even still I was barely able to take her on, so what makes you think that—”
“Enough!”
Halflance’s voice overpowered both of us in an instant, and the meeting chamber went deathly silent.
“Allow me to justify myself. Both of you will have a part in the investigation. But that part does not come yet.”
“And when the hell will it come, exactly?” Laura said, her voice almost a snarl. “We have more experience with her than you do.”
“Which is exactly why you two must bide your time. At the moment, Tersine’s party and ours are akin to two women trapped together in a pitch-black room. The first to find the other will hold the advantage; but to bring the both of you into it would be akin to firing the revolver we hold in our pocket before we are certain that we know where to aim. It would give too much away.”
I turned the idea over in my head a few times. “And you going to Grantval won’t?”
Lady Halflance shook her head. “I am a member of parliament, I move about Bluerose on a fairly regular basis. Besides, do you have any reason to believe that Doctor Tersine knows or suspects that I am aware of her and working with the two of you?”
I stared down at my hands, trying to come up with a justification for disagreeing with her. There was one. “What if something goes wrong? If Tersine does start something, or if she finds out you’re looking for her and counterattacks, or if it turns out that we’re under some kind of time pressure, and we’re not around…”
“I can arrange for you to be in Grantval in less than a day and a half, if you travel by steam carriage relay and do not take breaks to rest. Would that be enough?”
“You remember how Tersine moves, Emma. In a day and a half, she could be most of the way to the Desolation.”
Again, Lady Halflance refused to look in her daughter’s direction. “If she does move so quickly, then the prime imperative is to ensure she never finds out she is being sought after. If she sees you, she may run. If she sees me, she will think nothing of it.”
They were both making good points. A day and a half seemed too long, far too long, but if it came down to the point where we had to react that quickly then we’d already lost, hadn’t we? I hated to give Lady Halflance the satisfaction of being right, considering she was an abusive murderer, but she was also an excellent tactician. And if she went before us, that meant not having to deal with Lady Halflance for the next several days…
I turned to Laura, and very gently put my arm around her shoulders. “I think she has a point.”
Just as I suspected she would, Laura gave me a withering glare. “Don’t do this to me,” she said softly. “Just because I love you doesn’t mean I don’t still hate the fact that you’re willing to work with her.”
“No, no, listen, I’m not doing this because I like her. It’s the correct course of action. Think of it like… I don’t know, would a street gang metaphor work for you?”
Laura rolled her eyes. “Sure.”
“Right, we’re two rival gangs. Both of us know the other is out there, but neither of us knows exactly what’s going on. If we wanted to scout out the enemy, would we send our leader who the other side already knows about, or do we send the new girl who nobody’s heard of?”
“I know that you think my first mother is your best friend and patron,” Laura hissed, “but I remind you that she’s also a member of parliament from a fucking ancient family. She’s not a nobody.”
“In general, sure. But in this fight, between us and Tersine? Nobody knows she’s involved.”
“Unless she did the research and figured out who I am,” Laura said. “Then she would know immediately, and we wouldn’t be able to stop her from packing up and moving on.”
“How long were you living in New Alderburg? Four years? Did anybody manage to figure out the connection in that time, even the people who knew you for way longer than Tersine did?”
Laura leaned away, her expression fixed in a dour frown. She just kept looking at me, as though judging whether my motives were really pure or not, only rarely flicking her eyes in her mother’s direction. In truth, my motives weren’t pure; but they were tainted in Laura’s favor, not against her, and there was no way for me to convey that.
“Fine. How long before we go? I don’t plan on waiting around forever.” She still couldn’t make eye contact with Lady Halflance.
“I don’t know,” said Lady Halflance. “A week? Ten days? These sorts of things can’t be timed out with a stopwatch.”
“How long are you willing to keep searching if nothing comes up, before you admit that you might need our help, then? Laura is right, I don’t want to be waiting around forever while you try to prove anything.”
Halflance grimaced. She spent several seconds fidgeting, first with her clothes and then with her cane, leaning against the edge of the table. “Ten days. Give me ten days.”
I looked to Laura. “Ten days.”
“Ten days,” she said.
And that was the end of that. No more news, just the hints of something going on just out of sight. Halflance, being used to this sort of travel, had her things packed by the end of the day, and was gone the next morning, leaving the rest of us to just sit and wait.
It wasn’t an unfamiliar situation, in truth. New Alderburg was the first time since my arrival on Selene that I’d had anything approaching a regular daily routine, what with going to all of the classes at the university, then investigating the murder once that had become an ongoing concern. I had gotten used to, or at least I had learned to cope with, long periods of time spent at the manor with nothing much to do at all. Fortunately, Halflance manor had a substantial library, and the ever-present danger of assassination gave me an excuse to work on my athletics and weapons training. Rook had about a million little critiques to give me based on bad habits I’d picked up in New Alderburg.
The difference from every other time I’d been left listless and idle in Halflance manor was, of course, Laura. Laura took up more time than I’d realized. And not just because of sex—though we did have quite a lot of that, and it was incredible—but all of the other little things that come with sharing a home with a partner. Sharing meals together, telling bad jokes, ending up next to each other on the couch and suddenly finding myself irresistibly sleepy so I just have to curl up in her arms and take another extended nap while listening to her heartbeat the entire time. You know, girlfriends stuff.
In some ways, Laura being around made Halflance Manor feel like less of a home than ever before. Her being around meant that I couldn’t take the building and its inhabitants for granted or let them fade into the background. I had to be aware, now, of where I was. Every hallway and decoration was only kept clean by the servants, and every servant was only there because they were being paid by the money of Sir Margaret Halflance’s family, whose industry was sustained by factories somewhere that I had never even been.
And most of all, all of that finery hadn’t been enough to stop Laura from running away from it all. I hadn’t been there for it, so I couldn’t imagine what it had been like. Laura certainly wasn’t going to tell me more than she already had. But I could see the afterimage, like a too-bright picture burned into the retinas, the vague shape of the pain that had been left, both in the way that Laura could barely bring herself to acknowledge her first mother’s existence, and in the way that the house rendered her so terribly uncomfortable.
Laura could never treat Halflance Manor as anything but a holding cell. She didn’t make use of the library, and when she did her sword drills she set up the gear she’d shipped in from New Alderburg in a far corner of the yard instead of using Rook’s training ground. It hurt my heart to watch, but I couldn’t exactly fault her for it.
There was exactly one other thing ruining the idyll of life at Halflance Manor, and that was one Doctor Amina Charcharias. I had known that she wouldn’t handle the news about Tersine well, but I don’t think anybody would have been able to predict just how poorly she took it. The first sign of the sheer scale of Amina’s trauma came a few days after Halflance’s departure; I was upstairs in the manor, washing my face in one of the bathrooms, when I heard a scream, followed by loud arguing.
I rushed downstairs, obviously, and by the time I arrived at the room where the commotion had come from I had my saber out as well. There was no reason for it, as I quickly learned. It was Halflance Manor’s ballroom, smaller than usual for a house of that size, and Amina was using it for one of her experiments.
There were what must have been over a hundred feet of copper wiring suspended from the ceiling in huge arcs, connected at either end to massive galvanic stacks. The only concession made to safety was a few strips of red cloth affixed to the floor around the batteries. At the center of it all was Amina herself, along with a beaker full of what could have only been blood, and a massive pile of electromagnetically-shielded test equipment. She wasn’t paying attention to any of that, of course, because she was in the middle of a massive, heated argument with Anna.
Anna Plurabelle was, out of everyone on Selene, probably my second-closest friend after Laura. She was the first person I had spoken to after my transportation, my guide to the world whenever Lady Halflance wasn’t available, and my personal assistant and minder. With the entire staff of Halflance manor to take care of things, we hadn’t been quite so close to each other, but Anna was still a friend.
“Doctor Charcharias! What in the… blazes are you doing!”
“Blazes” was strong profanity by her standards.
“My job,” Amina replied. “Nobody was using the ballroom, I made certain.”
“Just because nobody is using it doesn’t mean you have the right to start stringing up whatever this is. Are these wires? Are they charged? You could kill someone!”
“I had a ‘do not enter’ sign on the door, it’s not my fault you ignored it.”
Anna growled with frustration. “That is a bottle of blood!”
“Yes.”
“Is that your blood? I hope it is!”
“It is, indeed, my blood,” Amina said. “Your point?”
“You cannot be doing experiments with— a bottle of your blood and a pile of electrical wiring without consulting with the rest of the household!”
That was when I finally stepped in. “Amina. What’s going on here?”
She shrugged. “It’s the same research I’ve been doing ever since we met. I’m trying to detect perturbations in the élan vital. The only difference is, I needed to detect interactions with large-scale fields that I couldn’t replicate in my office.”
“And the bottle of blood? Your blood?”
Amina’s eyes narrowed. “You’re smart, Emma. Figure it out.”
I did, pretty much immediately. The realization got me to soften my tone, but I wasn’t going to let her off the hook.
“At least ask Sir Margaret about it. You know how enthusiastic she is, and she has the resources to make sure you can do things like this without risking getting someone hurt.”
“The only person who could have gotten hurt in this experiment was me,” Amina said. “I had a switch ready to shut off the electricity the moment someone entered the room.” She turned to Anna. “But if you would like to help me take all this down, I’d be much obliged.”
I helped as well. And the entire time, I couldn’t help but think about how Amina hadn’t even counted herself in the calculation of people getting hurt. As far as she was concerned, she was already dead.