Etiquette of Exiles (Senyaza Series Book 4)

by Chrysoula Tzavelas

  “That kid does go on,” said a familiar voice fondly behind her. Branwyn picked up her backpack and turned to see Rhianna, the oldest of her younger sisters, leaning on the open door of the studio.

  “Hey, Rhianna,” Branwyn said, standing up and looking over the younger woman curiously. She’d cut her red hair recently— exactly the same hair that Branwyn would have if she didn’t keep hers dyed green— and had smoothed the curls out so that it framed her face in a sleek bob. “Mom didn’t mention you were in town.”

  “I haven’t told her yet.” Rhianna moved into the studio and looked around. “You’ve changed the place.” It was true. What had once been Branwyn’s art studio was almost a storage space now, with boxes of supplies stacked as high as Branwyn could reach. In one corner a partially open door had been painted on the wall, and the darkness beyond had a depth to it that hinted at its true nature: a passage to the Backworld where Branwyn did much of her real work. Rhianna only gave the door a glance before her gaze fell on the large inscribed metal hammer laying on the table beside Branwyn’s tablet. There was a black gem embedded in the head. “Nice war hammer.”

  Despite the fact that Branwyn was standing, Rhianna then seated herself in the nice chair, the one Branwyn normally offered to potential clients. She spun the chair, lifting her feet up out of her shoes to make it go faster.

  “Ah, you’re not even pretending this is a casual trip. What’s going on?” Branwyn let her backpack slide down to the ground again, but she didn’t sit down. Rhianna worked for the federal government, in the kind of job she couldn’t admit to having, and since the previous October, when the faeries had emerged back into the human world, she’d only been home for the briefest of weekend trips.

  “What makes you think something’s going on?” asked Rhianna absently, watching her feet as she flexed them in and out.

  Branwyn stopped the spinning chair. “Your hair looks nice. Different, but nice. How do you chew on it when you’re studying, though?”

  Rhianna gave her a small smile. “I haven’t figured that out yet.”

  Branwyn waited for a moment but Rhianna didn’t say anything else. “You haven’t come for a commission, have you? I mean, I’ve been a little surprised I haven’t heard anything from your crowd but it’s all good. I’ve got a three page waiting list of private customers.”

  “In a way, that’s why I’m here,” said Rhianna and sighed.

  It was the sigh that did it. It was too much. “You’re softening me up,” said Branwyn flatly. “Either spit it out or come back later, because I’m late for lunch.”

  Rhianna gave her a subdued smile and Branwyn felt a twinge of alarm. Either Rhianna had gotten even better as an actress, or something really was bothering her. Rhianna wouldn’t hesitate to use her own trauma to manipulate somebody else, but she was usually delighted to admit it when Branwyn caught her.

  “All right. Do you remember the key you gave me last October?”

  “The key to this very studio that I impulsively gave you and then regretted later because I’d locked myself out? Yes, I remember.” Branwyn had used her artificing magic on the key before giving it to Rhianna, waking up the inert metal into something with a Geometric node and the beginnings of an intrinsic nature of its own. “Did it become something useful?”

  Rhianna took a deep breath. “Yes. It did. It was incorporated into a device that allows a supernatural entity to fully manifest in our world.” Her eyes widened innocently. “They can’t normally, you know. There’s a field in place that inhibits them. But the device erases the field for the wielder.”

  “It’s called the Hush,” said Branwyn slowly, staring hard at Rhianna, trying to see through all her projected body language. “It was incorporated…. And who did the incorporation, Rhianna?”

  Rhianna shrugged. “A lot of us contributed something, but it was overseen by our Senior Adviser.”

  “Your Senior Adviser,” Branwyn said. “I want to know more about your Senior Adviser. Is he the one who put those empty charms on you?”

  “My protections? Oh yes.” Branwyn gave her a sunny smile. “He’s a supernatural entity too, but he’s not like the faeries. He wants to protect people.”

  Branwyn remembered Penny saying something very similar a year ago. It was back when Penny had been entangled with an angel who wanted to destroy two little girls as a way of ‘protecting people’. She sank back down into her desk chair, feeling sick.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Rhianna, moving closer, her smile fading.

  “You’re not in love with this guy or anything, are you?”

  Rhianna drew back in surprise. “You’re kidding, right? Oh my God, Branwyn. He’s like my boss’s boss’s boss. And a lot more freaky than the faeries, to be totally honest. We’re glad to have his help but he’s an adviser, not some kind of celestial playboy.”

  Branwyn went limp with relief. After a minute, she pulled herself together. “Senior Adviser sounds more governmental than you usually admit to. What’s up with that?”

  Rhianna looked self-conscious. “It seemed like the right corporate term for him would have been ‘angel investor.’ Nobody was really comfortable with that.”

  Branwyn laughed despite herself and stretched her legs out. “All right. Your Adviser is a supernatural entity who took what I gave you and made a device that would let him fully manifest on Earth.”

  “Yep! It’s even better than what you and Jaime did for the faeries.”

  Shooting a dirty look at her sister, Branwyn said, “I used the faeries to save Penny; I didn’t give them anything in the end.” Which was a little bit of a lie, but in the context it was true enough. “And they used Jaime to get around their door; he didn’t do anything for them on purpose.”

  Sweetly, Rhianna said, “And now here they are, running all over the world causing trouble. Don’t you watch the news?”

  “I do, but I hardly need to. I have an up close, personal understanding of how dangerous they—and other supernaturals—can be, Rhianna! Penny almost died to one of the ones who wasn’t a faerie, and I—” Branwyn stopped herself. She tried not to think too much about her own brushes with a fate worse than death at the hands of monsters. “But never mind that. You’re not worried about your supernatural guy at all?”

  “Nope. I wasn’t before, because we’ve got nothing else to help us out against the faeries and I’ve seen the unpublicized reports on what they’ve been up to the last year. And I’m definitely not worried about him now. I’ve got something much better to be worried about now.”

  Branwyn wondered what the secret reports said. She’d heard bad things about some of the stuff happening in the rest of the world. In the USA, the most popular face of the faeries was the Nightwell movie production studio that had formed in Hollywood. They were friendly and sociable with the media, and very happy to put on demonstrations of magic. According to interviews they were positively thrilled about the idea of entertaining the masses with special effects-laden films. Their announced list of projects was… ambitious.

  But pretty faeries in Hollywood aside, there’d been some awful clashes between some of the faeries and humans. A lot of the faeries who’d emerged from their Backworld prison weren’t particularly trying to integrate themselves. Many, many humans refused to welcome those who wanted to try. And the faeries had enormous power when they chose to exercise it: over the weather and nature, over the minds of the unprotected, and over illusions.

  On the other hand, humans had numbers and, while less well known, their own magic. It was a problem to be solved and Branwyn was secretly glad that her sister was part of an organization with the resources, information and willingness to try. But…

  “What are you worried about now?”

  Her sister reached for a strand of hair that was too short to chew on. “I’m worried about how the device has been stolen.”

  Slowly, Branwyn leaned her chin onto her palm, letting the silence drag out as she thought of who she didn’t want
to have stolen the device. Then she took a deep breath. “All right. And the million dollar question: why are you here telling me? Do you expect me to make you another one? Because—”

  Rhianna laced her fingers together. “Well… you’ve been doing a lot of work with Senyaza. We’ve got the records. You’re tight with them right now. Do you know about their history with my organization?”

  Branwyn narrowed her eyes. The records. She’d given up almost all of her privacy almost a year earlier, in a dangerous deal with the faerie Queen of Stone. It had been a serious wrench. But she didn’t think Rhianna had been talking to the Queen of Stone about her work schedule. No, Rhianna had records, because she worked for an organization that had zero respect for anybody’s privacy.

  And it didn’t bother Rhianna at all. How had Branwyn’s sister’s ideals ended up so far from her own? It was mind-boggling.

  Her irritation spilled out. “Given that your organization doesn’t even have a name, how could I possibly know about any mutual history?”

  Rhianna flashed a smile. “You don’t like Acme Integrated Solutions?” Branwyn just gave her a steely look and she added, “The President calls us the Office of the Unexpected. OX.”

  Her throat tight with conflicting emotions, Branwyn asked, “Rhianna, have you met the President?”

  Pursing her lips, Rhianna said, “Met? No. Been in the same room as while he talked to my boss’s boss? Yes. Anyhow, OX has been monitoring the exploitation of supernatural resources—magic—for a long time. A lot longer than the faeries have been running around. We used to be just a little office in a basement. But we’ve gotten quite a bit of a budget boost lately.”

  “Yes, I can imagine.”

  “So… Senyaza is the biggest collection of magic users around. OX has never been exactly happy about that. But as long as magic was on the down low and they didn’t use it to influence the economy or anything, all we had to do was monitor them and the other magical weirdos. And Senyaza was so good at managing out of control magic that when it did happen we could just sort of help out with paperwork after. It’s not like we had the resources to do anything else.”

  “How long has your Senior Adviser been on the scene?” Branwyn interrupted.

  “Oh, a while. Years. Though he didn’t always have a formal position. For the longest time it was just my boss and my boss’s boss as the human staff, stuck in a basement below Acme Integrated Solutions. Anyhow, a couple of weeks after our talented stepfather’s song unleashed the faeries, OX contacted Senyaza to find out if they had a remedy planned. We spent a couple months talking about how to send the faeries back where they came from, but apparently there were problems on Senyaza’s end?” Rhianna gave Branwyn an inquisitive look.

  “I wasn’t involved in any of this. All I know is that you were home for a weekend in February, and I made Mr. Black a belt that lets him talk to Titan One.”

  Rhianna shrugged. “February was a quiet month, comparatively. Anyhow… March was the Congressional hearings, and we had to manage those so the faeries didn’t influence them—”

  “Yes, it would be just awful if Congressional hearings for deciding what to do about a group of people were actually influenced by those people.”

  Rhianna gave her a scowl and went on. “Meanwhile Senyaza started—” then hesitated and backtracked. “Actually, wait, really, Branwyn? Really? You really think it was wrong of us to not allow entities with both the ability to influence minds and the ability to manipulate natural forces into the Capitol? They don’t let in people with bombs either, even if they’re discussing what to do about terrorists. At least the faeries were allowed to present video statements.”

  Branwyn ground her teeth. “I’m sorry. Go on.”

  With a severe look, Rhianna went on. “Senyaza started planning a big company meeting, and we started making our own plans. With a lot more fingers in the pie, because yay, Congress. In May Senyaza had their meeting. They invited most of their contractors and OX was invited to observe. All very nice and polite.”

  There’d been an invitation, Branwyn vaguely recalled. She’d been in the middle of something, and she hadn’t been able to imagine why anybody thought she’d want to go to a Senyaza company meeting. She’d assumed it would involve boring financial figures and maybe a few product demos.

  “So, um, yeah, it started out nice and polite. But the new initiative OX has been given didn’t really go over well in the pre-meeting briefing and tensions kind of… flared during the meeting and there was a pretty vocal disagreement and that’s why we think Senyaza has stolen the device.” The words tumbled out of Rhianna in a flood.

  Branwyn, experienced with Rhianna trying to obfuscate something, zeroed right in. “New initiative?”

  “It’s not really relevant to the topic at hand,” Rhianna said airily. “What I’m really hoping for is that you can use your connections to Senyaza to find out if they took the device.”

  “Clearly I’m going to be angry when I find out. I’m already angry now. Let’s get it out of the way so I won’t have to change gears later,” Branwyn urged. “It will be more efficient for everybody.” When Rhianna still hesitated, she added, “Otherwise I’ll find out from Senyaza. Wouldn’t it be better to find out from my own sister?”

  Rhianna stood up and deliberately moved so the chair was directly between Branwyn and herself. “They—the government—we want to license magic users. I mean, we license drivers. So we need existing magic users to register. Including the faeries and the nephilim.” She squeezed her eyes shut as if afraid of a conflagration.

  “Including faeries and nephilim, who can’t not be magic?”

  Rhianna nodded.

  Branwyn put her hands behind her back. “Right.”

  Rhianna opened one eye and then the other. “You aren’t mad?”

  “I’m furious,” Branwyn assured her. “I’m going to tell Grandma that you’re working for cryptofascists. You’d better go visit the kids while you can because once I talk to her you’re going to be disowned and barred from the house.”

  “Branwyn!” Rhianna protested. “Don’t be a jerk. These people are dangerous. We have to find some way of managing the situation and this lets us find out who’s willing to work with us. It lets us identify those who are willing to try to avoid being dangerous. It’s barely more than an extra field on a census form. And the faeries, at least, are undocumented. And once the licensing system is in place, we can provide training, we can provide verification, they can sell their services to ordinary people who have some recourse against scams—”

  “Were you surprised when Senyaza didn’t like this idea?” Branwyn demanded.

  Rhianna looked at her sidelong. “No.”

  Nodding, Branwyn said, “That’s your guilty conscience at work. You know it’s wrong to declare an entire group of people illegal just for existing.”

  “We’re not doing that,” said Rhianna sullenly. She turned around and went over to look at Branwyn’s hammer, avoiding Branwyn’s gaze.

  “I have no idea how you expect to compel the faeries or Senyaza to register—God, no wonder you think Senyaza stole the device, no wonder you built it. It’s your enforcement stick. What did Senyaza actually say at the meeting?”

  Rhianna gave her a wide-eyed look that reminded Branwyn of a child about to confide an impressive discovery. “Um… they told my boss that they were more powerful than the federal government. In not very nice language.”

  Branwyn laughed despite herself and guessed, “Your boss said, ‘How do you expect to stop us?’ and somebody there said, ‘Fuck you, that’s how.’”

  “Pretty much,” Rhianna agreed. “So will you help us?”

  Branwyn groaned and pushed her hands against her head. “Rhianna. Why should I? You pretty much know that there’s no way I’m going to support some kind of Nonhuman Registration Act, even if you dip it into training/licensing/profit chocolate.”

  “Well,” said Rhianna earnestly, “We’re pretty sure Senyaza
stole it, but we’d like to be absolutely sure. Because if Senyaza stole it, we’re not worried they’re going to use it. They’ll just stick it in that Repository of theirs. But if somebody else stole it…. We may have a bigger problem. So if you could confirm Senyaza has it, it would be so nice.”

  Once again, Branwyn thought of who she hoped wasn’t involved. There was one—and another—and another. So many. She didn’t want any celestial able to manifest completely. Once even one could, everything was going to hell fast. She dropped her face into her hands, contemplating the horrifying possibilities ahead.

  “I’ll see what I can find out.”

  Acknowledgments

  These stories wouldn’t exist without everybody who took a gamble on the Senyaza Kickstarters. Thank you. I learned a lot. More specifically, I have to thank Raymond Wood, Rachel Hunt, Kevin Maginn, Michelle Curtis and Jenna Moran, as first readers and copyeditors.

  About the Author

  As an Air Force kid, Chrysoula went to twelve schools in twelve years and spent a lot of time wondering what made people tick. Books, it turned out, helped with that question.These days she lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family, which includes many small and demanding creatures who fight over her attention. This is Chrysoula’s sixth book.

  For more information

  @chrysoula

  chrysoula.tzavelas

  www.dreamfarmer.net

  Also by Chrysoula Tzavelas

  Senyaza Series

  Matchbox Girls

  Infinity Key

  Wolf Interval

  Thrones of the Firstborn

  Citadel of the Sky

  Guardians of the Precipice

  Nightlights