tear me to pieces
skin to bone.
skin to bone.
“C
ome now, another!” hiccuped the ruddy-cheeked boy draped across the peeling tavern table. The remnants of a now bone dry pitcher of amber liquor—ale, if Caine remembered correctly; or had that been the last one?—dribbled down the slope of his whiskery chin.“Gods. Get up, Ru,” grunted Lorne, a Denoctian-born but Solterran-sworn spy, as he slammed his goblet down just shy of Rudolph’s bloodshot eyes. Leaned precariously against the legs of a toppled chair. “It’s late... time for us to go. Morning patrols tomorrow, ‘member?”
Caine laughed as he slid his own empty goblet across the splintered table towards Lorne’s. With enough force to ensure they clinked, like tinkling chandeliers. Crystal to crystal.
Saints, they were drunk.
“Lay off him, Lorne,” he said, with a curling smile. He surveyed the man’s stained blue livery, left pocket embroidered with the coat of arms of a Denoctian noble house, with contempt. Why he hadn’t changed out of it before heading to the Boar’s Head with the rest of Raum’s Denocte-sent spy crew was beyond him. “You and Ru patrolled this morning. Do you think the good captain would’ve let you two drink yourselves to death if you had patrols tomorrow?”
“Shit,” Lorne said, groaning in relief as he flopped back down onto the shuddering bench. The floorboards shrieked their dissent. “You’re right.”
A given, Caine clucked. He hadn’t drank the obscene amounts they had, for one. And for two, he thought, batting a strand of ink-black hair away from his eyes, he knew the weekly patrol schedules better than the scribes who penned them. Better than the king who decreed them.
The dark oak beams crisscrossing the ceiling spun cartwheels above him as Caine pushed himself off the lip of the table. Let hang his heavy head, loosened hair skimming the floorboards, to stifle the roar of his ale-deadened brain.
“Leaving already, Caine?” Rudolph chirped, before breaking into a peal of high-pitched laughter as a man at the table next to them doubled over and hurled into a refuse bucket.
Stifling a gag, Caine threw an irritated glance towards the young spy’s sprawled form. Watery blue eyes like crescent moons stared out of the disembodied head hanging backwards over the edge of the wood. He’s going to fall, Caine thought, and he’s going to break his neck.
Not that he cared. Shrugging, he reached towards the coat rack—a fancy term for a row of five nails horribly crooked in the wall—for his shadow cloak, missing it twice (damned cloak) before pulling it down on his third try and throwing it theatrically over his shoulders.
“I have business,” he said, to Rudolph’s lolling head. ‘Business’ being the one word among them that, once invoked, was never challenged. Besides their tenuously shared allegiance, they weren’t privy to each other’s specific assignments—a spy’s secrets were his lifeblood, and they would have to drink themselves to Death’s door before any of them forgot it. “Don’t forget about that morning patrol, dear Ru.”
He stepped through the exit to a backdrop of uproarious laughter, the stench of regurgitated alcohol, sweat-stained livery, and mold-eaten wood chasing him off into the sickenly lively Denoctian night.
An ache pounded a drumbeat inside Caine’s temples as he walked bleary eyed through the bustling, incense-choked streets. No matter how hard he willed it away, there the ache was. Pounding, sounding, grounding.
A dog-sized rat gnawed on the ankle bone of a cat skeleton in the long shadows of an alley, wedged between a closed shop and an abandoned cottage. Frowning, Caine kicked a pebble at it and watched as it bounced against the rat’s fatty pelt. It hissed furiously at him before scurrying away, ankle bone prize clamped between its teeth.
“A rat eating a cat,” he whispered, appalled, to no one. The rat was gone. He was alone. Always—
Alone.
He leaned his head against the cool, weathered sandstone of the shop’s outer wall. Wished for his head to quiet, yet relieved the incessant drumbeat ache drowned out the suffocating silence.
Brows scrunched against rock as Caine tried to remember how he’d been dragged to the weekly tavern crawl. Avoided it for weeks he had, procuring a name of another spy to serve as his sacrifice whenever he’d been asked. The ghost king had plenty of spies, and Caine had never thought it wouldn’t have been plenty enough.
Until the day (today) his hat had run out of names, and his mouth had run dry of excuses. The secret-starved spies had started to doubt his camaraderie. Did he think himself above them? They were avoided and hissed at by their people, by their own mothers. They wouldn’t stand to be avoided (and hissed at) by one of their own.
And one of their own, he was.
He didn’t want to go back to the castle. Back to the castle, back to Raum, back to lies and duplicity and tiptoeing on a frozen lake, covered with a skin of ice. Where one sudden move, one heavy step, and—
A muffled rustle underfoot pulled Caine’s attention to the ground. A crinkled parchment corner was speared into a miniature dune of sand; his enchanted map had fallen out from the shallow pocket of his cloak. “Saints,” he muttered, as he picked it up and shook the sand off—how careless! what if he’d lost it?—until, overcome by a sudden urge, he froze in his dusting, rolled the map open, and pressed it flat against the bumpy wall.
Searched for a certain name above a certain dot.
[ FIA ] he found at last, head swimming as he traced the dot. Eyes narrowing as he yanked the parchment closer while willing furiously for the letters to stay still.
He’d had a little too much to drink, he admitted, because surely the Resistance leader wasn’t in… Denocte? He looked at his own black dot, [ CAINE ]. Looked back at hers, and counted the squares of grid between them under his breath to make sure.
Five squares he counted. Five blocks away. A laugh bubbled out his throat. A passing merchant stared questioningly at him, mumbled something about “Denocte... going to the dogs,” before hurrying his hooves away.
How brightly fate shined when you were drunk.
“Audierunt autem umbrae.” He sighed as the familiar coldness, numbness, nothingness, seeped into his bones.
May the shadows obey me.
He was puzzling how best to approach her, when silver flashed through the door across the street. He stifled the urge to duck back into the alley—he was nothing more than shadow, now.
For all intents and purposes, Verona really did have new information to hand over. If his map hadn’t dropped from his pocket, if he hadn’t searched for Fia’s dot and found it in Denocte, if he hadn’t summoned his shadows around him, Caine would’ve been on his way to a quiet booth on the edges of the markets where one black raven waited to carry his message.
No longer needed now, he thought with a smile. The Raven of Vectaeryn, he’d been named. Tonight, a Verona-donned Raven he would be. Paper rustled in his grip as he sealed the envelope closed, signed it with a swirling capital V. (Pen and ink were the two other things besides the enchanted map lining the shallow pockets of his cloak.) Pushed it back into said pocket, and swept silently across the street. Tripped a bit in the middle, over an especially wide pavement crack, but who could see?
Creeping up to the half-open window, he adjusted his cloak with a final tug, rid his voice of his polished Solterran accent (the ‘r’s curled to native perfection), and knocked two knocks on the glass.
If Fia looked over, she would see nothing but shadow. So to help the girl out, he said, high-bred Taeryn accent dripping like ale-laced honey:
“My dearest Fia. How wonderful for you to visit Denocte.” He leaned closer to the window and laid his burning cheek to the cool stone. “As you were in town, I thought I'd deliver my next letter personally.”
{ @Seraphina "speaks" notes: here's my humble offering for your pile of 40 threads ;__; }
