August 21st, 1963.
“Blood on the wind, I can taste it… the river’s current draws it near. We must strike north!”
Kneeling in the shadow of a bush, Francois couldn’t help but let out a sigh as he watched the red-haired woman conduct what she called ‘hunting’ but what he’d instead prefer be ‘scouting.’ She was up an oak, crouched on one of its branches, with a pair of binoculars dangling about her neck over a blue kerchief.
He tried to hush her, but she wouldn’t have any of it - or perhaps didn’t even hear him, as she lifted the binoculars to her eyes and stared out at the far horizon, far beyond their target. Francois was utterly at her mercy, even as his goal was tantalisingly close: an old two-floor red brick house, healthy vines growing along its south wall making it seem a more mature piece of architecture than it was. In truth it was only built in the 1920s at the behest of some New English speculator, who proceeded to lose everything in the crash - allowing it to fall into the hands of the old English, particularly one Nigel Lancaster.
It was anything but a serendipitous acquisition: Francois knew well that the other Masters in this war had almost all established themselves on the north side of the Potomac in whatever apartments and hotels they could snatch up last minute, while a house like this one was carefully situated away from the heat of the city proper. It blended into its surroundings with its neo-Federalist aesthetic, quaintly bare of most ornamentation save for a classical marble archway fronted by two Venetian lions at its front entryway, maybe the only aspect of its architecture that was to Nigel’s own taste. The only coincidence was the name its original owner had given it, appropriate for its new British resident: Lion House.
Francois tugged his necktie and composed himself, drawing in a deep breath. “One more time… do you see anyone through the windows of that building? Is there a car parked in the garage, or better yet, a bicycle?”
The woman gave an exaggerated shake of her head, and then she leapt down from the tree beside her exasperated French companion.
“I don’t understand this nonsense about spying from afar. Storm the gates! Let fire and iron drive them out, I say!” She reached to her hip where a sword ought to be, but her fingers only touched the belt loop of her trousers, which soured her wild smile into a grimace.
“If we want to win this war, we need to be concerned with the man in that house. He’s dangerous, do you understand? He’s clever and, what’s worse, he’s kind, right up until he puts a bullet in your back.” Still kneeling down in the grass, Francois dug his fingers around in the soil; the bush that shrouded the two from being seen from the street suddenly underwent a growth spurt, its leaves flourishing and its branches entwining more thickly to provide fuller cover.
She spat on the dirt at his feet, staring him down with her flaming blue eyes. “So you’re a coward then, aye? Shaking there like the little leaves you love so much? Come now, get to your feet!”
“Amelie- no, I mean…” Francois gritted his teeth. “Boudicca, if you think we can run in like madmen without regretting it, you’ll soon be proven wrong by his Servant. Nigel and Hannibal nearly won the war that I remember fighting, regardless of your own memories. Nigel Lancaster is a mage-killer and Hannibal has a whole army at his command; they make a terrifying team. Do not underestimate them.”
After a long pause and a long contemplation Francois watched play out in Boudicca’s eyes, she relented with a huff. “Fine, then. But remember this: the druids I knew when I lived would go into battle gripping the heads of their foe’s loved ones by their bloody hair, screaming to the heavens with curses etched upon their breast. You may claim their power by your birthright, but you have yet to live up to their example.”
An unconscious smile played upon his lips. Birthright, was it? No - he never once claimed their power, not willingly.
With Francois leading the way, the two emerged from the foliage onto the street with the Lion House straight ahead. To anyone driving by them, they were simply tourists from abroad: Francois was dressed in navy blue slacks and a black button-down shirt with gold triskelion cufflinks, his scruffy blonde hair unadorned; Boudicca had begrudgingly set aside the conspicuous tunic and cloak and torc of her traditional attire and was instead conspicuously French, in a buttoned black blouse tucked into black trousers and covered in a light jacket, with a flowing blue kerchief almost like a cravat offering a splash of colour to her outfit; in a similar contrast, a black beret topped her striking red hair, which Francois had shown her how to tie into a low ponytail.
A few minutes’ watch proved no one was around to pay them much attention, so Francois led his Servant toward the house’s back garden; Boudicca’s battle-honed arms heaved him easily over the wooden fence.
“Now, for you…” Francois walked gingerly across the grass, noting patches of weeds dotting the untrimmed lawn and an all-but-abandoned vegetable patch amidst the floral disarray. Picking out a few that grew close to the edge of the building’s foundation, he scattered them near a set of steps that led up to a back patio. All at once they took root and sprouted as though a whole season had passed in a blink of an eye, emerging twisted and gnarled with fat flowers blooming from fresh bulbs.
He turned to Boudicca as though for approval. “If he so much as sets one foot into his garden, within a minute his eyes will start watering and he’ll be blind; in five minutes his throat will close and sooner or later suffocation will be the end of him. It’s better this way.”
“Better?” Boudicca snapped, clenching a fist as though to strike him. “Cowardice, again! If you cannot watch him bleed and die before your eyes, then you have no right to his life.”
She didn’t hesitate before tearing Francois’ conjured weeds out to the roots. Her Master was stock stiff, only able to watch as she grabbed a shovel that had been left leaning against the brick wall and covered the noxious plants over until no trace remained. Francois’ heart leapt into his throat seeing her make a mess that’d be far easier to notice than a few loose flowers and vines, and far less lethal. A quick mind like Nigel’s wouldn’t take long to find some trace of their presence here, and now there were no safeguards to prevent him following up on these daylight intruders. Yet, Francois relented.
Boudicca slapped her dirtied hands together and gave her Master a shove. Her piercing eyes directed him to the edge of the property, towards the river, and meekly he obeyed her unspoken command. Something about this felt unnerving in its familiarity to him, but the vagueness of the feeling was more like a dream than a memory. He supposed this was yet one more thing that he’d misremembered about his old Servant.
“I’m sorry, I was only thinking of our chances in the war…” he began once they’d passed beyond the fence again.
“No - you will have forgiveness once those hands of yours are red with blood, not green with poison. In war you may rage, you may burn all that stands before you, but you must look your foe in the eyes while you do it. Above all, you must be nobler than him by far. Otherwise… who do you become when the war ends?”
Francois took the blow to his ego on the chin and looked aside, not giving an answer but simply trudging the long walk to the bank of the Potomac. Any wound his body or his mind may suffer would be worth the pain if it could give his sister the fate she deserved.
And perhaps, a quiet part of him wondered, Boudicca had a greater part to play in that than he’d anticipated. His last Servant left a sour memory; she was a new, better start.
The brown water rushed and churned, drowning out Francois’ idle thoughts. How many times had he seen this river before? It seemed to him like he was laying eyes on it for the first time, but he knew that wasn’t the case. Before, in some past present, he had watched bloodshed and tragedy unfold in this city on the river, a great vein pumping all the blood which spilled into it away to the sea, forgotten forever. If he closed his eyes and let the images in his mind play out, he could almost recall more than faces and names - countless conversations, warm smiles and cold tears, and out of the corner of his mind’s eye a young man fallen to his knees in a house of ash and rain. It brought to him nothing but a sense of loneliness, then a bolt of pain stuck his skull and he let out a gasp.
Reality touched him on the cheek with a warm summer breeze, and he allowed his eyes to open.
Ahead of the two lay the wild, wooded Theodore Roosevelt Island, infringed upon now by the vast, arching skeleton of a bridge under suspended construction. Under the cover of forest and the steel and concrete bones of that bridge… Francois thought for a moment, and stepped ankle-deep into the flowing river.
“Boudicca…” he sighed, addressing her only reluctantly. He imagined that deep disappointment still lingering in her hard yet familiar gaze. “Could you carry me across? I have a hunch about that island, looking at it now in the daylight.”
“Carry you? I could, in a sense.” Boudicca breathed in deeply as she stood by the river’s edge. Then she struck out her arm as though cracking a whip, and out from the rushing flow emerged a wooden chariot, its low edge skimming the water and its team of two horses stamping at the rocks, whinnying at their ancient queen. Boudicca gripped the reins as they seemed to rise in the air towards her, leapt onto her chariot, and grabbed Francois by the arm to set him straight beside her. Without warning she flicked her hand holding the reins and they shot across the river, wheels and hooves alike not dipping one inch below its dark surface, and before Francois could realise what was happening they were on the island in the shade of a stand of ash trees.
Disoriented as he was, he was determined not to show it. He took a fumbling step off the chariot, which just as soon dematerialised into thin air, disappearing on the wind that fluttered downriver against his collar.
There was a set trail, but Francois ignored it and set off into the thick of the woods, ignoring underbrush and tangled branches with the nimbleness of a fox. Boudicca followed after, more roughly, and Francois grimaced at every twig and root that snapped and groaned under her boots. Before long they came to a small, cramped clearing where someone had set up a tent camouflaged against the trees, barely visible to the average eye.
Francois touched the bark of a small ash that stood near the tent. “Hmm… this is recent. The ground is disturbed, and no new leaves have fallen to cover it. And here… ah!”
While Boudicca bent down and peered into the tent, Francois’ roving fingers found a tuft of matted grey fur. He brought it up to his nose and sniffed, recoiling at its musky scent. There was a tinge of blood to it, too, and he envisioned some kind of struggle between the owner of the tent and whatever had chunks of fur torn from it.
“Are there wolves in these parts? Seems unusual, in the middle of a city.” Boudicca inquired.
“Unusual it is, yes. I know more of flora than fauna, but this must be either a wolf or a very large wolflike dog… a wolfhound, I think they call it in English? If that’s the case, it might be the familiar of whoever lives here.”
She shrugged in response, her own knowledge no deeper than his. “I can feel the connection between a Master and Servant strongly here, but they’ve been gone since before dawn as far as I can tell. Do you recognise them?”
Francois shook his head, and looked down again at the grey fur. “No… I can’t think of anyone at all from the war. An intruder? I suspected there might be a few of those. But they could not have been here long: see, there’s no firepit, or anything for boiling water and cooking food.”
“A wolf needs neither cooked food nor boiled water, you know.”
“But their master is human… I can only assume. Or maybe their Servant can create food for them through some personal magecraft. The possibilities are endless, but this fur I think remains our best lead.”
Boudicca patted her hip where her sword ought to be, were she in her battle attire. Her disappointment at that realisation showed again. “Wolves love the night, and so must this mage.” She looked to the west, where the sun, still high in the sky, inched ever closer to the horizon. “I only hope they are no coward.”
Hearing those words, Francois let out a sigh which faded on the wind as it rustled through the trees. Summer days were long, and the nights were short and hot. Even now he couldn’t shake the memory of that last war, even as nothing about it seemed to be real. Yet, if that was the case, he asked himself silently as he looked on at the ever-flowing river - then, what had happened to his sister?
“Amelie…” he whispered to the wind, like a prayer offered to an unknown god.
-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-
“This isn’t a dream, you know. Open your eyes and it’ll all be real.”
The voice echoed in her head as though it came from all directions. Unbidden she awoke, mind swirling and the surroundings she could see through bleary eyes indistinct and unformed. She opened them wider, and suddenly felt a pain in the back of her neck. Last night it seemed she hadn’t gone to bed, but fell asleep in her armchair. On the nightstand was a copy of Camus’ L’Etranger, dog-eared at a page halfway through the book.
Right - the call! Her hand snapped to the telephone, raising it to her ear in reflex, but there was nothing. She knew no way to contact her agent back in Europe; indeed, unless they made contact with her, she was stranded. It was strange, though: shouldn’t the call have awoken her? She rolled her shoulders to get out the aches of a long, awkward sleep.
Though no lights were on in her hotel room, she could see the clock on the wall read half past eight. No sunlight filtered in through the curtains, so she assumed it was night. Furtively peeking with one eye out the window, her judgement was found correct. For the sun to set so late, it must have been sometime in the summer, she mused. Why was she here in summer? The Mages Association had sent her in winter, so her memory told her. Somehow she found it unlikely that she’d slept for half a year, but nothing else explained the discrepancy. All she could do was slump back in her chair, exhausted at the unknowability of her place in the world.
“Come on now, get up!” The voice was louder now, pounding in her skull like a hangover. She remembered having a glass of whiskey, but this was too much. “Nighttime is when everything interesting can happen, and the night is young.”
Jacqueline massaged her temples, trying to soothe this hallucination away before she started thinking it, too, might be real.
“That won’t work, old friend. How do I put it… our existences are tied together, not on the level of the soul, but more like, hmm… two images superimposed on one another. That’s a good enough explanation for now.”
Old friend? Now Jacqueline closed her eyes, wishing for sleep or death to take her. Yet, something about that voice was familiar. It sounded like a woman, and on the backs of her eyelids she could very nearly conjure an image of her, like a photograph taken of a moving object, not detailed enough to give it a distinct identity, only the label of something-that-exists.
It couldn’t hurt to try, then.
She started in a whisper. “Where are you, and how do you know me?”
A pause. “I’m wherever you are. And somewhere else, but even I haven’t figured that out yet. I know you because, of course, you’re my saviour. You’ve helped me so much so far that it’s really a shame you don’t remember me.” The voice was strangely casual and nonchalant, as if the speaker really was just floating around in Jacqueline’s mind.
“So, you don’t know who you are, then?” Jacqueline inquired, grabbing a pencil and a notebook, jotting down the scraps of information she had. If she could piece this all together…
“You know when you see someone across the street and you get this palpable sensation in your heart that they’re someone you know, but you can’t be exactly, one-hundred-percent sure, so you’re anxious that it might not be them in case you call their name? That’s the best way to describe my situation.”
She nodded, writing a couple more lines on the page, then drawing a circle around them. “In other words, if instead of calling out you get closer…”
The voice let out a happy laugh. “... I can figure out who’s me. Precisely! You’re catching on just as well as I’d hoped, now that you’ve got your gears turning. I knew I picked the right woman for the job.”
“That implies there could be a wrong woman for the job. Am I somehow special?” Jacqueline stood up and walked to the bathroom, where she poured herself a glass of water from the sink and drank it all at once.
“Believe me when I say this wouldn’t be possible without you. I won’t say anymore, though: you need to figure out some things on your own, after all, or else it doesn’t really have any meaning.”
“Is that so?” She stared into the mirror, finding nothing unusual about herself besides a few unseemly wrinkles in her dress. “Could you at least tell me your name?”
“My name? Hmm…” The voice seemed to be thinking for a while, leaving Jacqueline to wonder if they even remembered even that about themselves.
And then: “You can call me whatever you’d like, really; names stopped meaning anything to me long ago. But if you insist… how about Clemence? I think I remember it from a book, and it’s appropriate. That’s the name of what this is all about, after all. Especially since I need to ask you for some help, which only you can provide.”
Jacqueline downed another glass of water, expecting now that the night wouldn’t be so short after all.
“Clemence… fine, then. If I can help you, that gives me a reason not to stay in that chair and fall asleep reading again. God knows, next time I might be unconscious for years or more, no?”
“No,” Clemence answered flatly. “It would be a month at most, but we haven’t got that kind of time. As you guessed, what I need is for you to find me out there, somewhere. I’d give you a hint or something if I could, but all this didn’t go exactly as planned and I’ve got a lot of questions to be answered myself. Because of how this works, the more I figure out, the more answers you’ll have, too.”
From the way Clemence spoke about everything, Jacqueline wondered just how much they were obscuring, and how weighted the scales of this partnership were in their favour. She knew from similarly weaselly people she’d dealt with in the Mages Association that, without a doubt, Clemence was hiding something: but was it a matter of malice, or to create a pretense of knowledge and certainty as a mask for confusion and doubt?
“Only time will tell, Jacqueline,” said Clemence, then nothing more. That was the first time the voice in Jacqueline’s head called her by her name. How much did they really know?
But that was a question the answer to which could only be blindly grasped at now. Proper dedication could wait until more evidence had been acquired. Jacqueline grabbed Camus and her notebook and pencil, dropped them in her purse, and set off for the door. It was nearly nine o’clock now, the moon hanging a thin crescent in a clear sky.
As foreign as this city was to her, she nonetheless imagined there must be somewhere particularly ideal to begin her investigation. The hotel lobby had fold-out maps she could pick-up on her way out; consulting it, she’d orient herself in this strange place that seemed to lie between consciousness and dreams, a reality detached from reality where anything was possible.
Hello everyone! Sorry about the late update - it turns out grad school is pretty hard. Thankfully now it's my term break so I can try to do some relaxing things for a change.
I'm not entirely happy with the first half of this chapter, introducing Francois and a strangely familiar Servant. Something about the style of it feels incomplete, but it's one of those situations where you don't know what changes to make to improve it and not just double down on making it worse. I wrote most of it drunk. So, here it is. Writing Jacqueline and her "friend" was much easier, and by the time I got to their half I was sober and exhausted which is an entirely different combo for enabling productive writing.
Originally Posted by
Tabris
Keeping tabs on this, for the time being.
Hello new reader!! Don't forget, you can vote after each chapter and choose the path the story takes! Speaking of... below is the map for the current night. I've gotten a bit fancier and added outlines and SUBTLE DROP SHADOW which I hope will make it both more legible and aesthetically pleasing. Also, this choice should be more straightforward than the last one given how this chapter ends. It's nightly adventures with Jacqueline time!
Reply With Quote
