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MILDMAY
“Julian will be leaving tomorrow.”
Then how are you supposed to read after tomorrow, I wondered. But it wouldn't do me no good to ask, so I didn't.
It was the end of the night. Dinner had been large, and slow—plenty of wine—and Felix and me were about to head out, so Kay was standing with us in the front hall even though there was cold air seeping in around the door. I was still trying to fight my way into my overcoat without dropping my cane. Grimglass is a cold, nasty place to live most of the time, but it's worst in the middle of Plouvoise like we were, when the rains just came and came and came, constant as the roar of the ocean. You never got snow in Grimglass, just lots and lots of rain, and in winter it was cold enough you weren’t quite sure of the difference. A thick warm coat was worth the eye-watering price. I’d had to stick sand to the bottom of the cane for a better grip.
"Leaving?" Felix asked. “Leaving for where?”
“I imagine he’ll go to wherever Murtaugh tells him.” Kay was listing toward the wall, his fingers light against the paper but his shoulder pressing more firmly into it. He’d had several glasses of wine at dinner, him and Felix chasing their way to the bottom of the bottle. I’d wondered at the time if there was something bothering him. Looked like there had been. “And I will be without a secretary for another week until the new one arrives to replace him.”
Yup, there it was.
Kay hoarded his independence the way a shopgirl hoards hairpins, counting them and checking them because she can’t afford to replace ‘em if even one gets lost. He was probably about as happy about training up a new secretary as I would be about getting a new wooden leg. Only difference was, I could still gimp around on my shit-ass leg, and Kay didn’t have that option.
So, no, he wouldn’t be happy about training a new secretary, because anyone new wasn’t gonna get it, wasn’t gonna know that though he needed letters read aloud to him, he'd rather dictate his replies, or that while he might need help navigating in the markets, but not in his own home, or even the short walk to Grimglass. (The lighthouse, that is. Local custom is, you just talk about all three Grimglasses—estate, lighthouse, village—the same way, and make folks figure out which one you mean by context. It’s a shit custom, and I hate it, but that’s what they do.)
And— "A whole week?” Kay hated inactivity, hated being pent up like a caged hound. He found purpose in fixing this place—it needed a lot of fixing—and resting would tire him out more than snarling angry letters to half of Corambis. “Powers. What’ll you do with yourself for a week?”
“Suffer,” Kay said darkly.
Felix snorted beside me. His overcoat had gone on smoothly the first time, and he’d already sorted out the buttons and was pulling on his gloves. “Nonsense, darling. I’d be happy to fill in for you.”
He said it airily, as if it meant nothing. I scowled, and didn’t protest.
Kay looked equally taken aback. “Art sure your own work is not more pressing?”
Felix’s work could’ve waited another two millennia and probably been fine, except the sea would’ve rotted all the damned books into mildew and mulch, but we all liked to pretend that wasn’t the case so that Felix didn’t get the housebound crazies and go haring off to Esmer again, which he’d done a dozen times already since we came here. I didn’t mind the travel so much—sometimes I got to see Corbie and Robin and Felix’s friend Hutch—but Felix always got himself in trouble on those trips, and I wasn’t in the mood to deal with the fallout.
“I think it can possess itself in patience for a mere week,” was all Felix said, and after a quick discussion of what time to arrive the next day, the matter was settled. We headed out into the icy, non-stop rain, and I tried to pretend that was all my scowl was about.
FELIX
Mildmay was in a rotten mood this morning, and I hadn’t the foggiest idea why.
On second thought, that wasn’t exactly true: I knew, whatever it was, the cause had to be my own fault. That wasn’t me being self-centered, but rather a fairly simple deduction: we had an arrangement with Mrs. Sevracham, a local woman, to bring us fresh bread and milk every morning and take the laundry once a week. Mildmay was perfectly civil to her.
So, whatever it was I had done to once again wound my brother, it was most certainly I who had done it.
I have never reacted well to guilt—an understatement so large it could have squashed the whole of Nauleverer by stepping on it—and was monstrous in return as I wrapped my good wool overcoat around myself. I stepped out into the rain—the damned rain—which did at least drown out the the sound of Mildmay’s sulky silence.
The rain in Grimglass-the-vicinity is like a living thing—or, actually, it might be most accurate to say, it's like an undead one. It sticks cold, skeletal fingers through every hole in your defenses, too formless to block but so sharp it can bite you to your bones. Every winter I’m terrified that Mildmay is going to catch another round of pleurisy from it, and have to bite my tongue to hold back coddling words I know he wouldn’t welcome. But it does, at least, smell clean, the musk of wet earth covering the salt-and-fish smell of the sea, and nothing like the Sim; so for that, if nothing else, I find I cannot mind it.
I did opt to take our covered dog-cart up to Grimglass-the-estate, however. If Mildmay didn’t want to be effectively locked into the lighthouse, perhaps he could have been more civil over breakfast.
Julian had already left when I arrived in Kay’s office. In fact, Kay explained, Julian had had to depart to catch the train at a truly revolting hour, and I must say, better him than me. I arrived promptly at ten, and when I got there Kay was pacing already, impatient to begin his day.
I had known that Kay kept a diligent schedule—if nothing else, I would have known it because the local gossips were perpetually disappointed at having nothing to complain of. But also, I couldn’t count the times over the past few years that I had taken a break from my own work only to walk into town and run into him. He had explained before that he kept to a rotation, visiting the local town several times a month, and each of the smaller villages around at least once. We had both long ago invested in umbrellas.
Still, even a martinet like Kay took a break for lunch, and he was gracious enough to thank me gruffly for my help over the meal.
“Oh, please... You’re doing me a favor.” To hide the lie I bit into a pastry, warm and flaky around a fish-and-cheese filling. It had come from a cart not twenty feet away from us, and the proprietess was watching us hawk-like as we consumed them, but they required no acting on my part at least: the fish was fresh enough to be mild, the cheese aged enough to be sharp.
“Cannot persuade me that this was your best plan for the week,” Kay said dryly, tongue flicking out to catch the side of his pasty as it crumbled. He held the thing in both hands, perhaps anticipating that they might split as my own was threatening to do. He wasn’t looking at me—or rather, looking in my direction, eyes disconcertingly failing to focus—but Kay hardly needed his eyes to see through me.
I chewed and swallowed, breathing air through my lips to cool it and buying me time to think of a reply. “It’s a change from the usual, true,” I admitted, “but often some time spent not thinking about problems allows the answer to form itself.”
“In stewardship as well as in magic,” Kay agreed, “but still. I know I'm hardly a pleasant task-master—Julian complained of it often enough.”
I was standing under an awning eating fish pastry in a coat that was probably not going to get completely dry all week, so I could hardly protest that. But I managed to say, mostly by dint of not looking at him at I said it, that, “Perhaps doing things we find moderately unpleasant, in the service of one another, is... is part of being a friend.”
Kay took the keystone bite of his pastry and had to juggle it as the last chunk of it collapsed in his hands. That brought on a lot of cursing and fishing for handkerchiefs from both of us, and I hoped the subject would be dropped by the time we moved on. And for the most part, it was. But Kay did ask as we opened our umbrellas and he took my arm for guidance, “Why didn’t you just let Mildmay do it?”
I covered, badly, by changing the subject; but after that, the subject was dropped. We went back to work—Kay had a meeting to get to with the printmakers down the road—and I focused on not steering us into puddles more than strictly necessary in Grimglass-the-village during the winter.
It had never even occurred to me that Mildmay might have wanted to do it.
MILDMAY
I made soup for dinner, on account of it was easy and mostly cooked itself so I didn’t have to spend a bunch of time thinking about making dinner instead of doing all the other shit I had to do.
Five years ago I could never have seen this coming. Five years ago, I could barely spell my name, much less all the other words in the Marathine tongue. But Felix had done his best to teach me, and the Society for the Advancement of Universal Education had done the rest, and now I could read and write fluidly. Not as fast as Felix—I wasn’t sure anyone read as fast as Felix—but that was okay, because my job was mostly writing, anyhow.
Somehow, Mrs. Kew at the Society had gotten wind of the thing where I liked to tell stories. I wasn’t sure who told her—wasn’t completely sure it I didn't do it myself, since yeah, now that you mention it, I do slip into storytelling mode given a two-person audience and half an excuse—but somehow she figured it out, and took it on herself to convince me that there was good money in writing the stories down. I resisted at first—resisted for a whole lot of reasons—but finally Mrs. Kew crossed her arms at me and basically dared me to give it a good shot, and the thing about Mrs. Kew was that I wanted to fuck her, and she knew it and we both knew she wasn't gonna let me, and the whole thing made me so damn stupid I took her fucking dare.
And then I made a fuck-ton of money off it.
I couldn’t goddamn believe it. I kinda thought it was the epitome—Zephyr word—of flashie nonsense, making that kind of money off of just telling some stories, and that was where some of those other reasons for not giving it a go came up—I wasn’t sure I was comfortable being that kind of flashie—but the money was good, and Felix’s books were fucking expensive, and back then I was still needing to practice to really get good at the whole writing thing, so I wrote another one, and somehow that sold even more copies than the first one had done.
So now I’m a professional storyteller, I guess. Sometimes I imagine Keeper’s reaction to this shit and I get so angry I have to climb all the way up to the top of Grimglass just to bring myself back to earth. I bet Cardenio’d be proud of me, though.
Anyway, my day is spent alternately scribbling away and doing chores around the place, since Kethe knows Felix ain’t gonna do ‘em, and part of that is I usually cook something up for dinner. (I also usually go summon Felix down to dinner, since he tends to lose himself in his studies.)
During Plouvoise, I usually make soup.
I half expected it to be just me that night—didn’t make too much soup for that very reason—but no, Felix squelched through the door right as it was finishing up.
“Mrs. Brightmore back, then?”
“What?” He frowned and shook his head, water dripping off his curls despite the hat and umbrella he was hanging on the stand. “Oh. Yes, she got back yesterday, apparently.”
Called it. Mrs. Brightmore didn’t like having Felix over for dinner alone, on account of she worried about his reputation affecting a) Kay and b) her son Richard. On a night like this, she was the only reason Kay wouldn't've asked Felix to stay and eat.
I waited for Felix to hang up his coat, too, then passed him his bowl without comment.
“So you are still angry, then,” Felix observed. He didn’t sound pissy about it himself, at least, which made a nice change. I passed him a spoon, too, and we took our seats at the table.
Felix pushed his soup around in his bowl for a while. Not a problem I had; after four years in Grimglass, freezing my hair off on the edge of the damn ocean, I had gotten fucking good at soup. Eventually, though, as I was lifting another spoonful to my lips, he said, “I”m sorry,” and that was enough to get my to my spoon right back down again.
“For fucking what?”
It wasn’t the right thing to say, and I knew it immediately, but fuck, what else was I supposed to say? I hadn’t expected an apology—I didn’t even know what I was fucking mad about—and I knew exactly how much Felix hated to give them. He’d gotten better, but he’d still rather drink poison.
Felix colored, but pushed on. “It didn’t—I didn’t think you couldn’t do it. I know you can; you’ve proven that. I just... I thought you wouldn’t want to, that’s all. And truly, I don’t mind.” He shoved some soup into his face like it could maybe get him out of this conversation. Which it couldn’t, but it was always good to see Felix eating, so I didn’t call him on it.
I was too stunned, anyway.
Thing was, it never occurred to me that he might’ve thought I couldn’t do it. I knew he’d watched me learn my reading and writing, knew he knew how hard I’d struggled for them. I knew his estimate of what I could do with those was pretty fucking accurate, and yeah, come to think of it, I could’ve filled in for Kay for a week. I’d probably even have had a good time, what with Kay being my friend and all.
But if that hadn’t been the problem, then Felix was apologizing for the wrong thing, so why was I actually fucking pissed all day?
Because it was too fucking quiet in here without him, I think, except that isn’t right, either, because he isn’t usually silent all day, but he is usually pretty fucking quiet. I mean, magic and research don't make much noise unless you really fuck one of them up, you know? I usually couldn’t hear much of anything over the surf outside.
But I’d missed him anyway. Because he was gone all day, same way he would be all week, filling in as Kay's secretary until the new guy arrived. And I'd missed him while he was gone.
I could not fucking tell him that.
I said, “Eat your soup,” instead, and made sure it came out as mush-mouthed as possible. But I was pretty sure he knew what I meant, anyway.