Chapter Text
“Who are you?”
The man at the sink looked up, still wiping blood from his nose, “Wolfram, I take it?”
“Who are you?” Wolfram repeated. There was something about the man that looked familiar but he couldn’t quite place it. Still, if this was someone who wasn’t supposed to be in the flat, shouldn’t he start shouting or something? As burglaries went — not that he had any personal experience — this was quite calm, but what if that was because he was trying to distract Wolfram while his accomplices took— whatever it was that was valuable enough in this flat to risk prison time over. He wasn’t sure he’d seen anything personally but he was open to being mistaken.
“Can you tell Blackburn not to break into my house to leave a note ever again? If she wants to contact me she can send a letter like a normal person or something. I’ve increased my security so—”
“So it’ll take me ten minutes to get past instead of five?” Someone brushed past Wolfram and started pulling things out the fridge. “Those spiders aren’t nearly fast enough. You’re depending too much on a fear factor to get them to work effectively.”
“Why have you brought me here?”
“Morrigan asked me to,” the woman said, still not looking at either of them. Wolfram’s sister — which still felt weird — Morrigan had been away the last two days, doing things she said she wasn’t really supposed to be talking about. “I’m Cadence, Wolfram, if you forgot again.”
He blinked, remembering the third member of the household again. Morrigan’s girlfriend, who was apparently the most forgettable human being in the Unnamed Realm, at least once she disappeared from view.
Now that he remembered her again, she still scared him a little but she was getting out some ginger and garlic and onion and marinated tofu so he couldn’t complain too much.
He’d been at the flat for little under a week now but he hadn’t really gone out yet. A few times, like to the farmer’s market the other day where they’d gone to the stall to get two giant samosas and had left with four of those, three servings of pakora, two naan, and a lamb bhuna. That had lasted them for both dinner and lunch the next day. But that had been about two blocks away and they hadn’t gone any further or stayed more than half an hour.
One thing was, he couldn’t walk especially far yet. His leg was, in phrase, quite fucked and putting weight on it for anything more than a ten minute period straight was genuinely hellish. But another thing was probably the skittish way both Cadence and Morrigan acted around what his legal status was in the Free State.
He didn’t really know what it was either, except that he was going through a different route than Morrigan had, outright claiming asylum instead. Soon he was going to have to get up in front of a judge or something and talk about what had happened on the gallows. But not now. It wasn’t what he wanted to focus on right now.
“Who’s this?” He directed the question at Cadence.
“This,” Cadence said. “Is your Uncle Bertram.”
The man, who looked nothing like the portrait in Grandmother’s favourite room, gagged. “Don’t make this anything it isn’t.”
“What else do you call the brother of someone’s father?” She rolled her eyes at him. She had a really flat, gravelly voice, but Wolfram could hear the amusement come through in the ends of her words.
“An inconvenience,” he said. “What do you want?”
“I don’t want anything from you personally,” she said.
“Neither,” Wolfram jumped to say. “I’m sorry, though.”
Bertram — Wolfram’s Uncle Bertram, very much not dead from a fever aged nine like he’d always (once) been told by Grandmother, the only time she ever spoke about it — looked utterly unimpressed. “From what I hear, I should be saying that to you. Which I am, I suppose. Now,” he circled back to Cadence. “I assume your girlfriend wanted me summoned?”
“Lawyers cost money,” Cadence said. “We can pay for his on our own…”
“Fine. I’m fine paying for the boy’s lawyer,” he started digging through his pockets, pulling out a cheque book. “But I don’t want to be bothered. I’m not remotely interested in…” he made a vague gesture. “Tangential familial connections. I desire none of that.”
Cadence just shrugged and told him a number. Wolfram didn’t think it was terribly high but he wasn’t used to how much stuff should cost here — not that he’d exactly been involved in the weekly shop back in Jackalfax. That was Cook’s and her underlings’ jobs.
“Did you need to ask him for the money?” he asked Cadence once Bertram had left and she was setting out food for them. She’d pan fried some vegetables and cooked some rice to go along with the tofu. It was nice but Wolfram didn’t have much of an appetite today so he preferred to push his food around his plate with his fork. “Did you really break into his house?”
“I mean, not really,” she said thoughtfully. “A lot of places would take your case pro bono but in the case we did pay, we don’t need his money. But it’s always fun to take it,” she grinned at him with all her teeth showing. “And yes. Why not?”
Wolfram could think of a lot of reasons why breaking and entering might be a bad idea, but he thought that Cadence probably didn’t care about the law, nor did Bertram seem to care about enforcing it past… whatever was meant by spiders.
“He didn’t seem to care much,” he noted after pushing his food around a bit more.
“No,” she made a face. “I don’t think so. Sorry.”
“Not your fault,” he sighed. He wasn’t sure how he’d feel if Guntram were still— if he met Guntram’s children decades from now, after not having seen his brother decades, if Guntram had gotten to live… not his full lifespan but more than twelve years. If he had been Bertram and Guntram Corvus… he didn’t know how he’d look on that child but he hoped he would have been warmer than his uncle had been.
But he wasn’t Bertram, and at that minute, he might have given anything to be. Or, not to be Bertram who seemed quite nasty and miserable but have his brother live to full adulthood, see his children, help them in a way that wasn’t just throwing a cheque at them and sodding off to increase his home security so his family could never talk to him again. He wanted to be better than that.
And he hated Bertram, he thought, because he would have killed to have his chance. He would have stuck his hand down the neck of another human being and ripped their heart straight out their convulsing chest to have the opportunity to have Guntram for five more minutes in whatever way he could.
“Fuck him,” he said out loud.
Cadence snorted and didn’t tell him off. “Eat up,” she said instead, picking up her plate and starting the washing up. “It’s important for your rehab and Morrigan would kill me if I neglected you.” Her tone made it clear that she was kidding but it was true, he supposed. He might not have had an uncle, and his brother would never be with him again, but he had a sister who had exactly the same obligations that Bertram had to take care of him right now, make sure he wasn’t deported, actually deal with a lawyer not just pay for it and not care further. He decided, no matter whom else in life he might begrudge, he didn’t think he would ever begrudge Morrigan anything.
Or Cadence, he thought, scooping up the end of the food into his mouth. It was okay, actually. The rice was nice and fluffy and the tofu was well seasoned. A lot of the meals in Crow Manor were very formal and meaty. It was nice to have something different to that, he supposed.
Cadence had broken into someone’s house at least partially for him. And she’d given up a space in her home as much as Morrigan had done, and was under even less obligation than her. And she was feeding him and making sure he actually ate the food.
“I’ve got the afternoon free,” she said, half-nonchalant. “Do you want to do something?”
When he woke in the night, it was to a half-lit room where the yellowed street lighting broke through his curtains. He could hear breathing. He could smell a light, floral perfume.
His hand scrambled for something he could use but all he could come up with in the seconds he thought he had was his pillow. He tossed it, his aim true as the intruder uttered a soft oof. He thought he might have got them in the face.
Was that the only one? Was he going to be dragged away? Was this Nevermoor’s police or a Wintersea agent come to take him away, or not even take him, just finish the job?
“Hold up,” the person said. Their voice was high and they had an odd, pronounced accent. “Sorry. I’m not here to hurt you. Please don’t shout.”
“Why shouldn’t I?” he hissed. Why hadn’t he? That would have been smart. Especially since he had no way to run with his leg like this and he had no idea how to do the thing that had brought him into Nevermoor in the first place.
A light switch turned on and he could see who’d decided to invade his bedroom in the middle of the night. She had long, blonde hair and big brown eyes. And she wasn’t very old, he realised. Older than him, certainly, but not like… older than twenty, if that.
For the second time that day he found himself asking, “Who are you?”
She brightened a little, perking up. “I’m Marigold. Are you my cousin too?”