Bloodsong Ch. 04

"In, like you are smelling a flower, out, like you are blowing a candle," Mrs. Drakma instructed. Valeriana returned a baffled stare. She shrugged. "You started holding your breath again. Drink hasn't hit yet?"

"It always takes a minute." Longer, depending. One of her body's lesser quirks was its propensity to undergo a deferral period when introduced to anything new, as though it needed time to decide what to do with whatever she'd foisted on it. She had been veritably drunk three times. One had been Jack's fault, another Belladonna's, the last of a girl at manners school who had thought it hilarious to prank her dorm by spiking a shared juice canister with Black Chira. They hadn't been interesting experiences. As far as she was told, her inebriated self was the same as her regular self, except more prone to crying.

Right now, Valeriana perceived trimmings of fog creeping in on her thoughts, but remained clear-headed enough to be on edge.

"Tell me about yourself, Valeriana."

"I'm from Lenosh," she replied, wondering why it was suddenly so easy to speak. Oh. Alcohol. Yes. "I have three sisters; Ange and Bells and I share a mother, Tess is from my father's first mating, but they've all died. Our mothers, that is. I don't think you are likely to know my father if you haven't been to Barashi in the last thousand years, but we live across from your sister. Well, across, as in on the other side of the forest, but it's a short walk."

"And how long have you worked for her for?"

"I don't . . . didn't?" She touched her temple. Odd. She was familiar with the framework for how her own thinking went and therefore knew that having to defend herself against a question like that should have sent her spiraling. Yet the words just flowed. "I never worked for her. She wanted me to, because Jack asked her to help me and I suppose she thought that giving me a job would do that, but. Before today, or maybe that's yesterday already, I'm sorry but I've lost track, we'd never spoken much."

Mrs. Drakma nodded, appearing pensive.

"First day, then?" She looked very, very pleased, which Valeriana didn't know what to do with. "First day, and you just up and decided that you ought to help free one of her victims."

"She asked me." A thought that had come to her earlier but never had the chance to develop sprung to the tip of Valeriana's tongue, aided by the absence of the inhibitions that would have made her keep silent otherwise. It was a little like her state after she'd killed Ralen, except she talked instead of did. "I think it might have been a test. I think that if you hadn't called her away, Lady Marabeth would still have made up an excuse to leave me alone, just to see what I did. Rachel looked so much like me it was frightening. That doesn't feel like a coincidence."

"You are almost certainly right on the mark, there."

"So . . . she wanted me to fail?"

"I think she might have wanted you to succeed. Isn't that a more disturbing prospect? Eat your soup." Mrs. Drakma, she was fast learning, had little in common with Lady Marabeth whether in appearance or demeanor, but one thing they did share was an unshakeable aura of being the person in charge in any space they entered.

She didn't know why that, for the first time since she could recall, tempted her to mutiny.

She looked at the bowl of mystery soup with bread on the side. She felt no more hungry than she had before the chocolate. The soup was a saturated green. Still, for a flicker of a second she could have sworn it turned—

Valeriana pushed the bowl aside as fast as she could pull off without coming across as insane, trying to claw her way out of visions of deep waters and tall flames and the shine of crystals and starlight and the glare of ceiling lamps; blood and burning and other unfair things.

"For what it's worth," Mrs. Drakma said, having thankfully missed her reaction or elected to ignore it, "I am overjoyed. On every world our kind touches, we build settlements over the corpses of the natives and take their children away in chains. That is our way. It's not often that I get to meet someone else who understands that it is the wrong way."

"I . . . don't know about that." Freeing the human had been a matter of many things, foremost among them the conviction that what Lady Marabeth did and proposed to do to her was not something a sapient living being should be put through. It had been a matter of sympathy and seeing herself reflected more starkly than she could bear the sight of. It hadn't been meant as a political or societal statement. "I just wanted to help her, and I — couldn't. That's all it was."

"There are other Rachels. Millions of them, most of whom don't look like you, yet I would risk saying that if faced with them, you wouldn't abandon them to their plight either." Mrs. Drakma paused when she saw her shake her head, pursed her lips. "No? You think you would?"

"What would be the point of trying? If I'd let her be, she'd still . . ." Valeriana's words ran away from her but her thoughts remained as a pinned down butterfly, incapable of wandering down that beaten lane where all was dire and hope was fiction.

Rather than winding herself up, she kept breathing sedately, as though a much saner person had slunk behind the wheel and taken over. Strang— or, no, not strange. She was drunk or halfway there. She just kept forgetting because despite the heaviness of her head, the thoughts that had dwelled there beforehand had been so unpleasant that not even a kiss of spirits could turn them fluffy.

"So you didn't succeed at something on your first try." Short, chewed on nails in a pallette of purples, blues and greens drummed on grainy wood. "That's an incentive to do better next time, not your cue to give up. Would you agree that what you saw happen to that young woman was, in its essence, wrong?"

"Yes, but—"

"Do you feel like returning to Maz and trying your luck with groveling, see if she takes you back in?"

"No, but . . ." Valeriana was held back from growing agitated by a tempest of fishing lines reeling in her most skittish and panicky thoughts. It probably wasn't the drink doing that, though she didn't know what other part of herself might possess such an ability. She didn't, as was becoming obvious, know her own head as well as she'd believed. "I don't have anywhere to go. I didn't plan anything with Jack before leaving. I don't know how I'll reach him or how he'd find me if he shows up and I'm not where I'm supposed to be, or even when he'll come to Earth, if he's even still coming. I mean, I don't suppose . . . would you know a way to get a message to him? Tell him what happened?"

What Jack would make of it all Valeriana couldn't guess, but it felt, for many reasons, vital that he know her side of the story.

Mrs. Drakma lapsed into thought.

"I'm not sure. I've never spoken to the boy, and the contact I have with anyone back in Barashi is limited, given that . . ." A beat, short and delicate. "You're a friend of one of my nephews, my sister's neighbor. How much do you know about me? There must have been talk."

"Uh." In fact, Valeriana had learned more about her in the past day than in all the years she'd known Jack, who'd mentioned her existence and left it at that. What information she possessed, however, was not complimentary. "I know that you have, uh, standing legal issues back in Barashi. And you don't seem to get along with your sister very well—"

The snort that followed was epic.

"You could say that, yes."

"And that you have been living on Earth for a long time, and . . ." Tessalia's words at the ball came to her, even if Tessalia or the ball in themselves seemed a lifetime removed from the present moment. Still, she'd rather go with what she had witnessed herself. "You like humans. Or appear to. You treated Rachel kindly, like she was an actual person."

Another snort, but one that brought a tension to the conversation that before, had hung only on Valeriana's end.

Mrs. Drakma's eyes . . . turned. She couldn't explain it better than that, couldn't describe what they'd turned from and what into. She inched the chair back, sobering herself up without denouement, worried that the woman would lash out at her; it wouldn't be the first time someone appeared perfectly civil at first only to turn out to—

—glassy eyes and a severed head and magic thick in the air and a door not opened in time. Blood and burning. Violation and villainy. Futures bright and futures dull, all crushed.

Mrs. Drakma collected herself. The previous warmth crept back in, and although her smile was too thin, too little mouth stretched over too much face, it was as close to a reassurance as Valeriana hoped to get.

"Look around you," the woman said, encompassing the nearby tables, the counter, the street outside, with a swoop of her arm. She spoke sternly, but receiving a lecture was among Valeriana's lesser fears. "Then look me in the eye and tell me that these aren't people."

"I didn't mean to—"

"Of course not. You seem like a sweet girl, and I'm sure that you didn't intend to imply that my attitude towards humanity is comparable to that of those enlightened souls who believe cats and dogs should wear trousers. But humor me all the same."

Valeriana didn't dare do otherwise.

She looked at Gino, who noticed her looking and balled his hand in a fist and stuck his thumb out — she'd need to figure out what that meant later — before going back to stacking bottles on a rack. She looked at the booths, where the father of the family she'd observed earlier had gotten into an argument with a portly man who'd tried lighting his pipe next to one of the children. She looked at the man reading alone and the couple speaking in hushed tones over their food.

She looked back at Mrs. Drakma. The expectant look the woman returned suggested that her aim might have been to bring about a teachable moment rather than to shame her into a shivering, shriveled husk.

That was . . . novel.

"Well?"

"I really am very sorry."

"Just trying to give you something to think about, love. No harm done." The woman put a hand on her shoulder, making Valeriana's insides feel pleasantly liquid as the tension vanished like it had never been. "Really, eat your soup. Then we'll see about getting your situation sorted."

"Where are we going?"

Valeriana wasn't certain it was a question that she could ask. Mrs. Drakma seemed to think nothing of it, however, seeing them safely to the sidewalk across the street before replying.

"You need a place to stay." Denials or bashful assurances to the contrary were steamrolled under the reality that relying on Mrs. Drakma's charity was the only viable alternative to sleeping on the street. She started a flurry of regrets about imposing, but was waved to silence. "None of that. I would not let you return to my sister one way or another, and my reasoning for that isn't entirely unselfish. If you came crawling back, she'd be smug about it until the day I end her."

"But that would be a—I mean, she's your— the High Council—"

"You'll find this an odd thing to hear, but one learns not to care abound committing a blood crime when one has a sister like Maz. I care even less for what the Council has to say. Or, well, Abe is on there now, so I'll listen very politely and sisterly if he wants to have our first real conversation since . . . I can't remember, twas after the Ring was cast and before humanity relearned that you can't sail to the edge of the world and plop off." Mrs. Drakma shook her head, making the beehive of hair even more of a ruin. "Anyhow. Do you know for how long there's been a kill-on-sight directive with my name on it?"

"Uhm. No." Valeriana wanted to ask what the woman had done to warrant it more than she wanted to know how long ago she'd done it, but Mrs. Drakma sped up her pace, and it didn't seem like the time to ask unless it got brought up on its own.

They were out of what she'd gathered to be the town centre; the buildings on the outskirts weren't set so close together. They were also smaller, and most only came up to one story high. Valeriana thought of the towering constructions of Alkarosh, every one of them a behemoth, and the traditional Lenoshi houses that made up in width for what they lacked in height.

None of what she saw could hope to be as impressive, which had the welcome effect of divesting them from any menace their unfamiliarity might have lent them.

"I've seen more than one empire rise and fall in the time since our world decided I had to die." Mrs. Drakma winked, her smile catlike in its self-satisfaction. "Look how that worked out. Frankly, I can't think of any reason why I ought to mind laws passed by a government too lazy to chase me if I break them."

A take on life which Valeriana hadn't encountered before. She was still mulling it over when Mrs. Drakma stopped without warning, nearly making her trip.

"Here we are." It seemed to occur to the woman, as she showed off a house similar to the boxy wooden ones surrounding it, except built of stone, that she'd moved away from answering the question of where here was and then never gotten back to it. "Your temporary residence. I can't, for several reasons including but not limited to the gnarly messy state of my residence, keep you myself, so you'll be staying with some of my associates. Provided that they are amenable, of course. FRANK! TONYA!"

It was quickly becoming apparent to Valeriana that Mrs. Drakma was someone in whose company she could never have let herself be seen at home.

A head popped up behind the tall fence surrounding the house. The absence of a blood song meant it was a human, specifically a female human of undetermined age, with wrinkles around the eyes but no white in her hair.

"Frank's off working, Mrs. D!" she called. Valeriana could divine the gist of what she'd said, since work was a very recognizable piece of slave dialect, but didn't catch any of the conversation that followed except for her name being said every so often. The human's eyes skidded towards her throughout, curious and alert.

"This is Tonya," Mrs. Drakma told her, once the conversation appeared over. "You can have her spare room. She speaks Barashnik, so does her husband. Don't be rude about their accent."

"I wouldn't," Valeriana protested, appalled that she could have unwittingly made some observation about Mrs. Drakma's own peculiar way of speaking that had led her to conclude that she'd be likely to make such a comment. She thought back and couldn't recall any such instances, but . . . "It's nice to meet you, T—uh . . ."

"That's okay, I won't get your name right either, without making an effort." The human actually spoke more intelligible Barashnik than the Tsikalayan beside her, which was surreal. "You're joining the Front?"

"The what?"

"Another time, Tonya." There was a note of warning in Mrs. Drakma's voice, a look traded between the two that put Valeriana in mind of the ones exchanged by her sisters when they were leaving her out of a secret.

In and out. Flowers and candles. She wouldn't let herself wonder about more webs being woven around her that she was part of, but not party to. In and out. Flow and follow.

"I'm only staying until my friend comes," she mumbled, edging through the fence. It was an explanation, and it was an apology, but mostly it was an attempt to reassure herself.

Mrs. Drakma laid a hand on her shoulder and said nothing.

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Happy 2021, and please stay safe. - Alice