Twig

by wildbow

  Absolutely.

  “—there are many paths that can carry you there. I know tonight was a disappointment in some ways, doctor, but you have allies, you have a way forward.”

  Almost, she turned to leave.

  But too many things were weighing on her. She wanted to be sure.

  “Half of the Crown States are gone to plague or black wood, aren’t they?” she asked.

  “Close to.”

  “And more damage has been done by war and by the consequences of war, wood, and plague? We’re even further diminished?”

  “You may well have the sense of it. But we will endure. We have that capability.”

  “Yes, headmaster,” she said. She finished gathering up the letters, and she clasped them as a bundle in her hands. “Thank you for your time, headmaster.”

  “Thank you for yours, doctor,” he said.

  She let herself out of Hayle’s office, closing the door.

  Exhaling slowly, she took a moment to compose herself, moving papers between hands so she could tug on her lapels and get a feel for her coat, and then she set off down the hallway. It was after hours, and only every other light was lit.

  In the transition from darkness to light, Mary moved in complete silence, falling in step beside her.

  “I’m yours,” Mary said.

  Eavesdropping.

  “I don’t like the ownership that implies,” Lillian said.

  “I trust you.”

  “Thank you. I trust you too.”

  “We’ll get you your accolades to go with your grey coat,” Mary said.

  Lillian smiled. She picked through the papers and then handed over the letter. “A message from the Duke, among many other things.”

  “I’ll decode it by the end of the night,” Mary said. “What’s your plan for the evening?”

  “Family,” Lillian said.

  “They’ll be curious about the letters,” Mary said.

  “Naturally,” Lillian said. Being with Mary, being away from the auditorium, away from the office, it was a relief. She could enjoy the coat, and she could put the rest behind her.

  Holding Mary’s hand, she steered the way past crowds, through the doors to the outside. With papers in her one hand and Mary’s hand in the other, she couldn’t flip her hood up to shield against the rain. Without being signaled or asked, Mary reached up and over and flicked her hood up for her, before doing the same for herself.

  There was only a moment’s confusion where they bumped shoulders before Mary realized where Lillian was going. Then they were on the same page, heading away from the thick crowd and off to the right hand, the field office. The stables.

  “Don’t listen to her,” the voice reached them from the other end of the stable. “I’ve seen miscarriages that expressed more sense in the five seconds they were alive than she’s expressed in her whole wretched life.”

  “Terrible sister! Pitiful sister. You speak of sense and you’re the only thing on this living, diverse earth that could be made smarter by being made a stitched.”

  “Yes,” Ashton said. “But you—you two like to fling insults, but you’re both so mean you could make skeletons cry.”

  “Terrible!” one of the twins said.

  “Awful!” the other echoed.

  “I never wanted to play this game,” Ashton protested.

  “For good reason! You’re so dull you enjoy watching paint dry.”

  “So boring you actually derive pleasure from watching grass grow.”

  “I’m fun,” Ashton said. “See? Whee. Good feelings. Whaa.”

  “Let’s not drug our teammates,” Duncan chastized Ashton.

  “It’s not drugs, it’s spores, Doctor Foster.”

  “Don’t call me that, geez. How many times do I have to tell you? I’m still Duncan.”

  “You have to tell him lots. He has a brain like a cow plop.”

  “Or the smelly gunk that you get from a lanced abscess.”

  “Whooo. Waaa.”

  Lillian and Mary approached the end of the stable, seeing where the Lambs were gathered at the end of the stable. Abby was asleep with an absolutely filthy blanket draped over her, nestled into the crook between a warbeast’s leg and its chest. Nora, Lara, and Ashton sat on a hay bale, while Duncan and Emmett were standing on either side of another, a plate of food between them.

  “Any word?” Duncan asked, his voice dropping.

  “From the Duke of Francis? Yes. Mary will decode for us soon,” Lillian said.

  “Excellent.”

  “As for our…”

  Opposition? Errant ally?

  Labels didn’t really suffice.

  “…As for Sy, we’ll be ready when he pokes his head up. Whatever he’s doing, it’s liable to be pretty big.”

  “I’m kind of worried about big,” Duncan said.

  Previous Next

  Dog Eat Dog—18.1

  Before

  I peered past my hand of cards to study the cards arrayed in a partial five-by-five grid on the stump. The second column had a three, two, and a king down the middle with empty spaces at the top and bottom, and my hand had a three and two, among other things. Two of a kind.

  The chip count was good too. I liked my numbers stacked at the top of the column.

  I laid down the two, and then I laid down a nine.

  “Pair,” I said. My voice was muffled by my mask.

  “You should have a three in your hand,” Jessie said, her voice similarly muffled.

  She wore a quarantine mask, a tube running to a tank which rested on the log beside her. Every breath was a hiss, but it was barely audible with the way the wind blew. She had donned a kind of robe for her quarantine outfit, everything strapped in and then taped. Her hair peeked out of her hood, and it was already stained black on one side.

  “Helen has the three,” I lied. I indicated Helen.

  “Helen has the joker,” Jessie said, indicating with one gloved hand. Helen wore a similar quarantine outfit. She had painted hers with what might have been a clown face, though black dust had erased most of that, and she had also attached a hook to each glove and foot.

  “Then call her a joker and be done with it,” I said.

  Jessie sighed audibly, the noise carrying with the wind. The sheet we had erected to help keep the wind from blowing away the cards was flapping violently.

  Jessie put down a full house using the top right and to left corners, using my two. She put down her chit. She indicated Helen, hand extended, “Joker.”

  Helen laid down the joker and a nine. “Naught,” she said.

  Jessie sighed audibly again.

  “I get to make a rule,” Helen said.

  Jessie’s hand remained extended toward Helen as she looked at me.

  “What’s the rule?” I asked.

  “Ummm,” she said, her voice picking up a burr as the filter of her mask caught the lower register of the ‘mmm’.

  “You don’t need to pretend,” Jessie said. She put her face in her hands, as much as the mask would let her.

  “I get Sy’s dessert,” Helen said.

  “No, no,” I said. “You’re supposed to make a rule that benefits me as a bribe to later get my dessert.”

  “Low hands win, then,” Helen said.

  Jessie shook her head, mask still resting in gloved hands.

  “Low two, two pair, and low five,” I said. I collected the chits I had bet on the rows and columns.

  The quarantine setup muffled noise, but there was no muffling the noise of the forest around us. Trees rocked back and forth in the wind, branches scraping against branch. The wind hissed as it carried flecks and particles of black, rolling clouds of the stuff that made seeing anything difficult beyond our wind-proofed area. Branches of a hundred trees all around us cracked and snapped as if they were being systematically broken by a small army and yet more branches knocked and clacked together with a deep, hollow clatter.

  The leaves had fallen from the trees and
formed a thorny carpet on the ground, the living wood crumpling leaves as it sought leverage, before growing out into briar-like clusters of reaching branches and twigs. The trees themselves had been sucked dry of every nutrient as the wood grew on them, the existing branches breaking as the wood twisted and pulled on them mid-growth. In appearance, they best resembled trees mummified in black leather and caked in black dust.

  Jessie was shuffling the cards as best as she was able with the gloves on.

  “We could mix it up with the next rule change,” I said.

  “I think I’m done with cards for a long, long while,” Jessie’s voice was hollow as it came through the filter.

  The wind changed direction, and we collectively tensed, my hands moving toward the stump, which had no cards on it. The wind wasn’t strong enough to blow the chits away, but it was strong enough to carry a cloud of black dust into our campsite. Tents flapped and the ridges of the stump’s rings caught the dust, infinitesimally small details marked out in stark clarity by the fine powder.

  All around us, black builder’s wood encased trees and then twisted them into pieces within the black shell as it grew thicker. The splintered wood became another in for the invader, and it crept in before expanding again, causing once-straight trunks to twist even further. Only the relative strength of the black wood kept the entire forest from toppling.

  But gaps between trees and between branches grew slimmer, the charcoal-black forest floor and the trees absorbed the light that managed to filter through the clouds. It felt increasingly claustrophobic.

  “It’s only been three days for you,” I finally said. “I kind of wanted to keep you for longer.”

  Jessie sighed again.

  “If you want, we could go into the tent,” I said. “Get out of the suits, I could give you a hand washing your hair.”

  Jessie shook her head.

  “Sure,” I said. I would’ve been lying if I said I wasn’t a little put out by that.

  “I mean, it sounds nice, really nice,” Jessie said, pausing in the calculated shuffling to look up at me. “But…”

  She trailed off.

  “It’s fine. All good, Jessie,” I said.

  She nodded, and she resumed shuffling.

  “The other Helen baked me a treat,” Helen said. “I told myself I would wait until tea time, but the anticipation is delicious. I might actually be drooling and—”

  She jerked, wriggling in her seat.

  “—getting my arm through the sleeve and up to my face—”

  She wriggled more, then relaxed. “—is hard. There. Not much drool.”

  “You’ll get some of my dessert too,” I said.

  “Stop! Gee whiz fuck, Sy, you’ll get me going again. I think I’m going to keep my hand here for the time being.”

  “We’ll see what we can do soon,” I said. “Get your face fixed up proper this time around.”

  Another professor, another two steps forward, one step back.

  “Soonish,” I said. Soon.

  Gordon and Fray moved through the trees. As if to remind me of the deadlines. It was a minute before we could put cards down, and I tried not to focus too much on the figures in the trees.

  The wind settled down, and Jessie leaned forward. She laid out the cards in a three-by-three, then dealt out the rest of the cards.

  “Opening gambits,” she said.

  We stacked our chips at different points on the perimeter. Mine were green, Helen’s red, and Jessie’s blue.

  I looked at my hand of cards, and saw how grimy they were. Every movement of branch against branch produced some, every twist and grind grated it, producing air-light flakes ranging from leaf-sized to the finest of specks.

  I held my fanned-out hand so that the faces of the cards caught more of the dust, picked out two, and laid them out.

  “Helen’s rule still stands. Before that was Sy’s rule about the king of hearts, Sy’s rule about the king of diamonds, Sy’s ‘old maid’ rule, and my lunch rule, and Sy’s rule of three winners,” Jessie said.

  Jessie made her play, Helen made her play, and then Jessie announced, “Add to your gambits or make new ones.”

  I stacked more chits on the thing. Looking down at my cards, finding them sufficiently dusty, I began using the edge of one card to scrape dust, moving it. I tried to look very interested in the state of the board to take focus off of what I was doing, then placed down two more cards.

  The round continued, with Jessie getting the much-coveted royals setup.

  “Flush,” I said, as I got my next turn. I slapped down my cards.

  Jessie turned a black-dusted mask toward me. Her expression was hidden, which was a damn shame, but I could very easily guess what that expression was.

  “Have you been keeping that up your sleeve the whole time?” Helen asked. “Why are there two aces of spades? Did you have another deck? I’m confused!”

  Jessie reached down and touched my ace of spades. The spade smudged, revealing the club beneath.

  The wind hissed, the trees cracked and audibly splintered within their black casings, and branch knocked against branch with heavy, hollow knockings. Jessie stood from her seat, and the wood cracked and snapped as it broke away from the seat of her robe-like quarantine suit.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  She shook her head, standing there.

  “I can’t see your face, so it’s hard to calibrate. I thought you’d smile and call me something unkind.”

  “I’m about to do something uncharacteristic and stupid,” Jessie said.

  “Please don’t,” I said.

  “But I hate this place. I hate this forest,” she said. She hung her head. “I hate the lack of color, I hate the lack of anything. I hate that I can smell the stale death of every living thing that died here. I hate the waiting, I hate the fact that I can’t breathe, I hate the quarantine suits, I hate constantly changing the filters, I hate this place so much I could cry.”

  “Crying can be good,” Helen said.

  “Crying can be good, but you shouldn’t inflict this situation on yourself if it makes you that miserable,” I said. “I hate the idea of you crying if it’s not because of me.”

  Jessie hiccuped a laugh at that.

  “Come on,” I said. “Back to the tent with you. Hair wash and sponge down, I can massage and tend to any places the quarantine suit is pressing at you.”

  “I’m spending more and more time in the tent. It’s only been three days and six hours. I’m already sleeping three-quarters of every day. At this rate, by tomorrow I’ll be in the tent all the time, sleeping for five-sixths of the time, and then what’s the point?”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” I said. “Read, rest, keep the tent nice, then when I get back in through the airlock I can be all, ‘honey, I’m home!’ and stuff.”

  Jessie looked skyward.

  “Gee,” I said. “I’m really not hitting the mark today, am I?”

  Still looking skyward, Jessie said, “You can’t see my face right now, Sy, but I want you to imagine my most disapproving look, and then up it by a factor of two.”

  I bit back my witty banter and teasing. It wasn’t the time, and I wasn’t hitting the mark.

  “Are you going back, Jessie?” Helen asked.

  I leaned forward, “You do a good job watching over our guys. I’d be sorry to see you go, but I’d really be happy knowing you were watching over things, keeping the peace. There’s nobody I trust more than you. I might even trust you more than I trust myself.”

  “If I go back then I miss you guys,” Jessie said. “And I end up worrying, because the last time I checked on you, Sy, Helen was taking a break to see if she could hunt deer at the edge of the black wood while wearing a quarantine suit—”

  “Which I can,” Helen said, waving the hook she’d attached to her quarantine suit.

  “—and you were having long, intensive conversations with Mauer. You didn’t even recognize me.”

  “
I recognized you,” I said. “I wouldn’t not recognize you. But maybe I didn’t think you were real. Sometimes they get crafty.”

  “Sometimes they get crafty. Yeah. That makes me feel a lot better about leaving you on your own.”

  “I’m managing,” I said.

  “Are you?” Jessie asked. She paused, very deliberately. “How sure are you that I’m real? Right now?”

  “Right now? Geez. Well, you and Helen come as a package deal, because you’re interacting and they aren’t quite that canny. Sometimes they wedge themselves into ongoing conversations, like Fray did back in Sedge, but honestly—”

  “How sure?” Jessie asked, no-nonsense.

  “Mostly?” I asked, sounding less than mostly sure.

  Jessie looked to Helen. “Help me out. Please? Give me something to work with.”

  “I’ll watch him more carefully,” Helen said. “I promise.”

  “You’ve been here for eleven days, you two. I can barely tolerate it for three. Most of the others can’t even do a full day before their nerves start fraying. I’m worried about you two.”

  “Helen’s as happy as a clam,” I said. “And I’m staying because I have to stay. If I’m not available when this all comes together then there’s no point. So I keep going because if I stop then it makes all the suffering that led up to it worthless.”

  “I am as happy as a clam,” Helen said. “I caught a deer, I have cake, I have you two.”

  “I’ll rephrase. I’m worried about you, Sy. I hate not being able to talk to you, I hate these woods, I hate the black dust—”

  In the workings of my head, something clicked. Transference. She was accusing me of losing my mind when…

  “I’m sorry,” I told her.

  “—the—what?” she asked. Then she startled a bit, before clenching her fists, “Because I was hiding it from you, you dolt.”

  Helen was looking at me. I spoke before she asked the question, “Dropped a memory.”

  “And I know three is a completely arbitrary number, but I feel like three is it,” she said.

  “You could have told me,” I said. “Us. You could have told us and you should have told us. So don’t call me a dolt, you nubmunch.”

  “I—heh,” Jessie started. “Stop trying to make me laugh when I’m working myself into a state here.”