And then he blinked and thought… Oh. Crap.
“SO. DID you have a nice time at the party?”
Milo slitted open bloodshot eyes to scowl at his mam. His head felt too huge to be cradled in his hand the way it was, and tender, like a bruised fruit, and Ceri’s voice was very much too loud. And still with that thread of anger all through it.
The constant clatter and sway of the train wasn’t helping. It was far too early to even be up, let alone hungover and slumped in the nearly empty dining car across from his mam while she was clearly still stewing over Milo’s transgressions the evening before.
He poked at the plain porridge in front of him, muttered, “Lilibet outdid herself,” and thought about reaching across the table for the honey. But then he’d have to actually move, and he’d just got the pounding behind his eyes to thump a little less harshly. “Not that you’d know, since you abandoned me without even telling me what—”
“You can’t be that naïve, Milo. You knew exactly—”
She stoppered it when a porter waddled past their table and down the aisle, linens in his hand and a determined look on his face. Ceri instead sipped at her tea and looked out the window.
Still bleary-eyed and fog-brained when he’d been more or less dumped from his guest bed by his mam’s terse demands, Milo had been immediately bustled into packing the small bag he hadn’t really unpacked, then shoved into a hire car before even Rhediad Afon’s cooks were up. He hadn’t shaved. He hadn’t put on a tie. He hadn’t even really woken up properly before he found himself at the East Parish Station, saying, “But I thought we were staying another two days,” and realizing he wasn’t going to get to say goodbye to Ellis.
It was that small cask of brandy Ellis had dug from the depths of the sideboard and tapped after they’d finished both bottles of wine. Probably. Or the jug of… something eye-wateringly strong he’d pulled out later for shots. Maybe. Milo couldn’t remember if anything came after that, but considering that Ellis had kept pulling potables out of that cupboard like a mage pulling scarves from his sleeve....
Ceri took a deep breath as though looking for calm. “Last night was only a taste. And after what you pulled at the rites…” She shook her head, mouth tight. “If anyone knew, if it got out, it wouldn’t only be potential suitors waving contracts at you, Milo. Don’t you understand?”
“I understand you wanted to teach me a lesson. Ta very much, I’ve learnt it quite well—don’t piss off Ceri Priddy or she’ll throw you to the wolves.” Milo made the mistake of rolling his eyes, and then found it necessary to very carefully massage them until the knives behind them dulled some. “Gah.” He blinked, squinted. “Can we do this another time? My head feels like—”
“We could’ve done it last night, if you hadn’t shown up legless.”
Milo vaguely recalled that she’d been waiting up for him in the guest suite, throwing the door open before Ellis could even drag Milo all the way down the hall. To be fair, they’d been pretty loud, though Milo couldn’t remember what it was they’d been laughing about when they’d stumbled their way from Ellis’s rooms. He did remember, though, that Ellis had taken one look at Ceri’s face and abandoned Milo with a meek little “Well. Ehm. Cheers, then.”
Coward.
“It was supposed to be a celebration.” Milo sighed and dropped his spoon. The porridge had gone cold by now, and it wasn’t like he’d been intending to eat it anyway. His stomach had been roiling when he’d been pressganged out of bed the way it was. His mam wasn’t helping. At all. “If you’d wanted to talk last night, you shouldn’t have stormed off the way you—”
“I did not storm.”
“—did, and if you’d wanted me sober, you should’ve....” Milo huffed and shoved his bowl away. “I didn’t do anything wrong! I can’t help the things I can do—”
“Lower your voice!”
“—and sometimes it just happens.”
Damn it all, he’d had such a nice time with Ellis last night. Granted, he’d got much drunker than he should’ve, and some of it was a bit smeary and vague. But they’d talked for hours, getting to know one another again, and Milo’d enjoyed it so much it had mostly blotted out the preceding events of the evening. Now, just like she’d done last night, his mam was yanking the rug out from under what should have been a happy event and leaving Milo flailing for balance.
Ceri was still strung tight, napkin clenched in her lap and back rigid. At Milo’s—granted, rather petulant—complaint, she seemed to deflate some.
“Then you clearly need to practice controlling it more. Perhaps you should go back to the private car and go through the exercises that outrageously expensive school taught you.”
Expensive because it was a Dewin school, private and parochial, and one of the best in the country. Outrageously expensive because it was known for its discretion, else Ceri never would’ve allowed Milo out from beneath her careful eye to attend it in the first place.
“Shan’t.” Milo glowered, stubborn. “Can’t. Headache.”
Ceri leaned in, frowning. “What has that to do with anything?”
“My head hurts? Not really conducive to doing mental exercises that already give me headaches? Would rather not make it worse?”
“You… what?” Ceri sat back in the cushioned seat, bemused. “Your exercises hurt you? You’ve never mentioned that before.”
“I don’t....” Milo hesitated, trying to choose his words more carefully, because conversations like these never seemed to go well. His mam was always more concerned that Milo hide the fact he had this particular talent at all, so it was generally more “never speak of it” than any kind of concerned “aw, poor baby.”
Still, Ceri’s tone was gentler than Milo expected when she said, “Tell me.”
“Sometimes it’s like holding your breath.” Milo chanced a look at his mam’s face. “Like… lungs want to pull air in and let air out—it’s what they do, what they’re meant for—and when you hold a breath in for longer than you should, your muscles cramp up and your head starts pounding.” He shrugged. It was the closest he could come to explaining how it was to constantly keep something that was a natural function from functioning at all. “Most of the time I don’t feel it. But when you’re deliberately not breathing, when you’re concentrating all your will on it....” He reached for his teacup; the tea had gone cold too. He grimaced and set it aside. “Sometimes it hurts, is all.”
Ceri studied him for a moment, sharp, before her expression softened. “You never said.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t have to if you’d ever had to do it, but you don’t have to bury yours, do you?” He didn’t try to hide the resentment, though he was too tired and headachy to maintain it. He huffed and looked away. “And anyway, it’s not as though you’ve ever once wanted to hear anything about it except that I was keeping it secret and under control. Why would I tell you this?”
“It’s only because—”
“I know why. I’ve known why all my life. What I don’t know is why letting it slip—once, when no one but you and I even knew what it was—required you to cut me loose in the middle of the entirety of Wellech like a steak bone thrown into a dog pit. It was unfair and uncalled for, and if it hadn’t been for Ellis—”
“An overwhelming choice of possible contract partners is nothing at all compared to what you’ll face if others find out, Milo. Count on it. You think it was some sort of desperate trial to have people look at you and want something from you as simple as a pleasant night or maybe a courtship? Ask me what it’s like to have generals looking you over, assessing where the things you can do will hit the most targets, kill the right people, and whether the chance of accomplishing those things will be worth it if they lose you in the bargain. Or worse still”—she leaned in over the table, her voice a low hiss—“befriend someone who in another life you could’ve loved, get them to trust you while you’re looking for the right place to slide the blade in.” She sat back, gaze hard. “Spies are
n’t only for wartime, you know. And don’t think for a second you’re not already being watched to see what you might have inherited from the Bl—”
She cut it off, but Milo heard it anyway. The Black Dog.
The fact that Ceri had almost said it was shocking. Milo could do nothing but stare in the wake of such an uncharacteristic outburst. His mam stared back, belatedly throwing a hasty ward around them that fizzed at Milo’s skin like static.
The history books barely spoke of Captain Ceri Priddy, but when they did, it was in terms both respectful and pragmatic. Old Whitpool stock, her matrilineal line—sparse though it may have been with few children born to each generation—nonetheless went back to before Old Forge was Old Forge. Powerful, a Seer, though showing no sign whatsoever of being dragonkin, Ceri Priddy nonetheless emerged early in life as a scholar. Her proficiency in magic grew along with her education, and she reached her meistr rank at an unprecedented age of twenty-three.
Like most in her generation, she was inducted into the Royal Forces at twenty-seven when the United Preidynīg Isles joined their allies in the Green Coast War. She was assigned to the 1st Kymbrygh Battalion as a lieutenant under Eastern Regional Command, and after that… well. After that, her military career seemed to get… murky. There were the usual notations of promotions in rank, commendations, pertinent participation in maneuvers. But after her involvement in the Battle of Namurs and her commendation for distinguishing herself on the fields of Marnet, Ceri Priddy herself seemed to disappear between the lines of written history. All that was left were rumors and wide-eyed speculation.
The Black Dog Corp were myth, that much was true, but only because there was no official acknowledgment of their existence. That didn’t stop them from reputedly being home to two magical divisions dreaded by any enemy unlucky enough to witness myth become reality. Spies, it was said, but not only moles and scouts and agents. Saboteurs. Guerillas. Demolitionists. Assassins.
The people of Preidyn followed the news of the war across the continent like everyone else did. But the covens took special notice of every mysterious factory explosion behind enemy lines. Every unexplained death of an opposing champion, every lost battle turned to victory when what the combatants on both sides swore were wraiths emerged, fierce and cloaked in red-eyed shadows, charging from conjured mists. Breathless tales of vicious black dogs rose from the smoking ruins of battlefields, and the people of Kymbrygh, where the Black Dog legend had been born centuries before, knew. It didn’t take them long to connect it all with the too-powerful-for-anyone’s-good Whitpool girl who’d disappeared into Her Majesty’s ranks just as the stories of the Black Dogs emerged. They didn’t need their government to confirm the existence of the corps; in fact, the consistent denial merely lent life and veracity to rumor and myth.
So it was disconcerting for Milo to sit across the table from this same woman, who’d supposedly struck terror into the hearts of enemies, and watch everything about her just sort of… shrink. All his life, Milo had existed in a queer stasis, both scorning as improbable the tales that made of his mam equal parts war hero and brutal specter, while simultaneously believing every word. Now, he had no idea what to think. And wasn’t entirely sure he wanted clarity either way.
“Oh, sweet.” Ceri looked older, careworn and weary, as the dawn grew into sunrise and thin gray streaks washed through the dining car’s window and slashed the table in halves of shade and light. The silver at her temples somehow stood out more against the black bound at her nape in an untidy bun. She’d taken her glasses off to rub at her eyes and never put them back on again; without them her blue eyes looked huge and bloodshot. “I want you to be safe. That’s all.”
Milo knew that. He did. It was only… he’d forgot how constricting it was to live beneath her critical eye while he’d been away living an entirely different life. He’d got used to being just another student, watched for nothing more than the expression on his face that told his instructors whether or not he’d absorbed the information they were imparting. His trips home had been necessarily short and overwhelmingly focused on the dragons, and therefore full of nothing more than happy reacquainting, favorite meals, and avoiding anything that could result in bad feelings that might spoil the visit.
Now that he was back for good, without Nain as a buffer, he was finding his mam’s attention sometimes reassuring as he tried to fit back into life in Whitpool, and sometimes all but smothering. The low-grade choking discomfort of it only flared all the hotter when his mam went on,
“Which is why I want you to withdraw your application to join the Home Guard.”
“…What?” Milo’s stomach dropped. “Mam, no. No. We talked about this. We agreed it would be—”
“And we also agreed you wouldn’t do what you did last night. And the fact that you did do it—right out in the open, surrounded by witches and sorcerers—makes me wonder how many other times it ‘just happened.’”
“That isn’t—Mam....”
Milo sucked in a tight breath and looked away.
It was only the Home Guard. Marching in formation. Fake rifles at the shoulder. Wooden swords at the hip. “Yes, sir!” and “No, sir!” on demand. Once-a-month bivouacs on someone’s backfield that were more camping out than learning to live on a battlefield.
Pretending, really.
Still.
He’d watched the Whitpool Regiment since he was a boy, loving the sharp look of the uniforms with their shiny buttons and spit-polished boots, and envying wildly every step they marched in the White Day parades behind the Kymbrygh Reserves Regiment. Certainly less bloodthirsty and glorybound now than he’d been as a child—as every child, really—but the appeal was still there.
“Everyone does their service in the Home Guard.” Milo set his jaw and looked back at his mam. “Everyone. It would be more noticeable if I didn’t do my part. It would—”
“Ellis won’t be joining. And Dilys—”
“Elly is a Warden. And Dillie will be once she’s done with the training. The Home Guard wishes they were as competent and prepared for trouble as the Wardens. It’s not the same, and you know it.”
“Your work with the dragons is just as valuable to the Crown as any Warden, or anything you might do in the Home Guard. More. Dragonkin have a right to exemption. A duty, actually. There are only so many who can do what you do.”
“I don’t want exemption. I want....”
It wouldn’t come, lodged up in Milo’s throat hot and tight, because he wasn’t sure he could put it into coherent thought, let alone words. To belong, maybe. To figure out how to fit back in with neighbors who looked at him funny now when he waved to them at the village shops, a vaguely familiar stranger who’d been one of them once, but had gone away and sort of wasn’t anymore. To find a skin he could fit into, one they would accept.
“Darling boy.” Ceri sighed and reached across the table to set her hand lightly atop Milo’s. “Sometimes it doesn’t matter what we want.” She squeezed. “I’m sorry. It’s done.”
“…You.” Milo swallowed. “You don’t need me to withdraw.” He pulled his hand away. “You’ve already spoken to the Colonel-in-Chief.”
“I have.” Plain, and entirely unapologetic.
It really shouldn’t have hit Milo in the solar plexus the way it did. He didn’t think there was a military, or former military, person in the whole of Kymbrygh his mam didn’t know personally. And as the Holder of Old Forge, it wasn’t as though she needed to—she could have knocked the legs out from under Milo’s intentions just as easily with a simple word to Whitpool’s council, or even the Sisters, if she’d wanted to make bloody sure.
“Well.” Milo’s voice was humiliatingly gruff. He cleared his throat and stood. “There’s my life sorted, I reckon.”
“Milo, don’t—”
“If you’ll excuse me, Captain Priddy, I believe your orders were to retire and practice my exercises.” Refusing to shake or let his voice quaver, Milo straightened his back and shift
ed a deliberately over-the-top salute. “By your leave.”
He didn’t wait for her to give it, merely executed a smart about-face and stomped down the aisle of the dining car like the thwarted child he apparently was, thinking miserably that the already long train ride home had just got infinitely longer.
Chapter 4—Tonality
: music centered around a "home" key
“Listen, you.” Milo stood from his crouch, hands held out so he didn’t smear plaster all over his good work coat. He strode around from where he’d been working on the dragon’s foreclaw and stood far enough back it could see him with both eyes. “I can’t repack it unless you stay still. You’re getting mud all in the plaster, and it’ll never set.”
The dragon blinked moss-green eyes twice the size of Milo’s head, unimpressed. Her snout quivered, a burgeoning snarl, and smoke puffed from her nostrils as her frill flared out, but since Milo knew it was only for show, he stood his ground. Yellow-tailed spitters packed venom that could stick to their prey like tar, and eat right through skin and bone while paralyzing the nervous system. This one, for all her snarly attitude, was still a calf and had lived on the Old Forge preserve for all of her short life, and would likely remain for the rest of her days whether she liked it or not. And while she’d never allowed anyone else—even Glynn—to get close enough to so much as throw her a haunch of venison, her show of annoyance with Milo was only a show. The drugged meat he’d fed her to calm her down and coax her out into the open couldn’t be hurting, either. The sleep charms he’d been layering over her for the past hour might be helping, though magic on dragons was iffy, and mostly useless. But her nimbus was cool and sedate, gray-streaked indigo shot through with playful coral, though all of it was edged in small jags of muddy red pain Milo could absolutely take care of. If she’d only sit still and let him finish.
“See that?” Milo pointed a hand dripping with gooey plaster to where his violin sat in its case on the back of the sturdy old cart hooked to Poppy, Milo’s grumpy little dappled mare. His mam’s mongrel, Lleu, kept a bored eye on them from the cart’s bed, desultorily gnawing on a deer antler, his reward for helping Milo track the spitter across the preserve and lure her out of the thicket where she’d gone to ground when her wound hobbled her.
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