Aterlacus does not so often see new arrivals. It particularly does not see arrivals quite like this - a girl, and one of rather extraordinarily tender years, straight-backed and stony-faced. (In the years to come, no doubt there will be more like her, as even children catch a revolutionary fervor and begin to organize to resist the inhumane conditions of their factories and workhouses - but for now, at least, the union men and suffragettes coming in tend to have at least reached their majority.)
The cell in which she is deposited is across from Ralston's. Irregular again, the mixing of sexes, but what is one to do in such an irregular situation? She does not resist or fight when they lock her in, but the moment the guards are gone, she's pacing and exploring - dragging fingertips over iron bars, feeling at the mortars between the stones, measuring the length of the cell pace by pace.
In all the most cosmetic ways, there is nothing that distinguishes Aterlacus from any similarly behemoth dungeon. There are prisons all over the world and a great many of them appear more imposing or more damp or more dreary than the old stone fort sat on its hill in the grey drizzling North. The iron bars might be the type found in any of a dozen places; the stones and the particular dimensions of the cells and the heavy doors which terminate them are solidly anonymous; and in every place where people are held against their will, there is always going to be some distant sound of someone's personal suffering.
What makes Aterlacus particular isn't the thickness of its walls or the cruelty of its masters. Rather, it is made unique by who it holds and how it does so. It's not easy, you know, to keep magicians where they don't wish to be. The whole world knows that.
The cell across from Kitty Jones is represented by a heavy door. It's closed with a simple but heavy bolt, and while there's no visible padlock the seal of enchantment on the door is evident even in the dim light of this gloomy corridor. The iron inlay grounding the spell work catches the light, glinting like the wet eye of a particularly cold blooded animal.
The particulars of what waits behind that door are more mystery than not. Save that a long time ago, someone put a boy who thought he was very clever in a box for safe keeping.
I'd tell you to slap my hands if I get things wrong about your canon but I know you'll roll with it
It doesn't take long for Kitty to explore the full borders of her cell. There is, as she discovers, not much there: a cot, a door, a chamber-pot, nothing else. She spends a few minutes searching for anonymous inscriptions - she does hope, briefly, that she might find a scratched message from the last resident of this place who had perhaps escaped through a loose stone in the floor or secreted a file in some hidden place, but no such luck.
So, having discovered everything there is to discover within the cell, she turns her attention to what's outside of it. And immediately discovers that that cell is far, far more intriguing than her own.
"Hey." She calls across to the prisoner there, whoever they might be. Her voice has the rasp of someone who knows they ought to be whispering, but she's not very quiet. "Hey. Can you hear me?"
Does that not-whisper penetrate past the heavy door and the binding enchantment into the cell beyond it? Hard to say. It's possible that the door is too thick, or that the spell work is too complex. Or maybe the person behind the door isn't listening. Or they're ignoring her. The lack of reply stretches out long enough so as to be definitive—
It comes at the right moment, right when she's started to despair of hearing anything at all in response. She's nearly turned away, and then there's that rap - and she doesn't think for a moment that it's a coincidence.
"Hi," she says, a bit breathlessly, fingers hooking around the bars. "Can you talk? Rap two times if you can't. For whatever reason."
There is no one to whom Caleb can plead his case. (I cannot be here, I can't, I am needed elsewhere, you don't understand—) Those who wield authority here do not care to listen, and in his more spiteful moments, Caleb suspects they cannot undo whatever it is that brought him to this place to begin with.
There is a castle. It is cavernous and cold and filled with possibility. If he could think of something other than the absence of Nott, or the peril with which he'd left her (and Beauregard, and then the others, Fjord and Jester and Yasha) to navigate, or the fresh-made grave in which they had buried Mollymauk—
Well. It is a place where Caleb could coax out information. He could learn here. No one is stopping him.
No one but the splinter of guilt that reminds him: He had not left them when he was able, and he is surely not excused for leaving on a technicality, so surely he must devote himself to slipping the cage he's found himself in, no matter the gilding of the bars.
Magic hums in every corner of Thorne. It makes Caleb's molars ache for biting down, tearing into it. That same fervor that had driven him through book after book once Beauregard had finally, finally brought him to the library is unchecked but for his own tenuous grip on rickety morality.
His notes diverge. What he should pursue, what will take him home, and the rest. Revenge. Rectification. A scaffolding of scribbling notes in a journal set alongside his spell book, both working in tandem.
It is harder to do on the road.
There are skirmishes at the border and their hosts have been neglectful and disinterested, but they dislodge their guests from the castle to tend to their affairs in what might be a battle, or might resolve itself before reinforcements arrive. Caleb cannot think of it.
He is hunched by the fire now, writing still, mapping what could be a spell, could blow up in someone's face. The ink shimmers faintly, even in the poor light, made worse by—
"Please, you are blocking the fire," is carefully posed, one hand hovering over the page as he looks up. This man, with his cane, who Caleb has seen in passing but said little to before now. What he is capable of is a mystery, one Caleb is not sure he needs answered. Eventually he will need help, yes, but he hardly knows what he needs yet.
And so: he is polite, quiet, easy to ignore. That has served him well so far in his life.
For the man with the borrowed cane, traveling is a miserable affair. There is no such thing as conducting that business in peace or comfort—either the saddle is uncomfortable, or the riding makes his joints hurt, or whatever wagon or cart or carriage he's stuffed into fails to be properly sprung and so every bump and hole in the road is transmitted directly into his hindquarters and the small of his back. It's almost an exquisite relief to be on his own two feet after so long spent rattling around like a dry pea in a tin cup. Almost, because he can still feel the ache of it in his back. Almost, because the only thing worse than traveling all day is sleeping in a camp cot at night. He can already feel pinch of muscles in his future.
So while it's rare that Ralston stays long on his feet, tonight is an exception: he's stood up, back uncharacteristically very straight in an effort to work the cricks out of his spine, and he's close to the fire as well because it's good for the sore parts of him and because the season is only now just turning from winter into mud and as dark has fallen so too has a chill in the air descended. In his head, he is doing a mental calculation: attempting to discern who out of the contingent would be best to harass for some form of medicinal or herbal aid. Who will capitulate to his demands despite a history of irritation—
(Michael Ralston has not precisely kept his head up, but he's a difficult man to get along with even at his most subtle. The court and it's attachments bear him very little love.)
"Then shift over," he remarks offhand, hardly having heard the—what? Complaint? Request? His attention is focused elsewhere.
There is a ginger cat, slinking between Caleb's ankles then around the log into the shadow as Caleb shifts further. There is room, though it is not a particular comfortable seat.
The mud and cold have not bothered Caleb. Miserable traveling conditions are so familiar as to be unremarkable, apart from the absence of his usual choice in companions. In spite of knowing that one cannot operate alone, even in this magic-drenched place, the urge to stand and cede the log entirely comes and goes.
Still, he closes the spell book over one finger. Would anyone be able to read it's contents? Hard to say. He is not interested in risking it.
"I heard they are breaking into one of the wine casks," is posed cautiously; he does not have the impression that Michael Ralston is the type for roistering with a cup of rich wine. "If you are interested."
Interested in getting up off his log.
i looked at so many maps for this and it doesn't show.
Among the short stack of incidentals in the travel bag to Vienna had been a carton of Senior Service cigarettes. Perhaps they'd been meant as a thoughtful gesture. With their man in Vienna being both something of a chain smoker and unlikely to return set foot on English soil any time soon given the allegedly ignominious nature of his departure, why not send along a little taste of home? Or perhaps they'd been meant as a warning: we recall which brand of cigarettes you like best. What else might we remember?
Or maybe both. Who can say.
"For me? How kind," had been Michael Ralston's droll reply when they'd at last been delivered to him and very shortly before he'd winged the whole carton directly into the Danube. "It's a shame I've quit."
It's easily the poorest lie he tells. Ten minutes later, he had found a cigarette in a pocket and commenced with smoking it. The rest of his untruths, if there were any, had been impossible to discern. Maybe he really does know the owner of the empty theater box into which they're later secreted so they can get their first look at the cadre of men in attendance in one of the boxes opposite. But that follows. One doesn't play the role of courier into the Easten Bloc without learning how to lie.
"Christ, have you ever witnessed such a miserable arrangement?" Is not in reference to the box across the way, but rather must pertain to the music currently occurring in the orchestra pit. "Anyway, the one all the way to the left is your man."
everything's made up and the compass points don't matter
If Emily is irritated by or suspicious of him, she's given no hint so far, the consummate professional for all she's on the young side for this sort of assignment. (Irritated: She certainly is; she'd have taken the cigarettes before he tossed them in the river if she'd been quicker with her hands. Suspicious: Jury's still out.) Her demeanor is such that MI6 might as well have minted her fresh for this assignment, butter wouldn't melt, etc.
For now, she angles her opera glasses to get a closer look with keeping her body turned toward the stage. "He looks like he's fun at parties," she comments, quiet and bone dry. "Either that, or he's as critical of the programme as you are." Regardless, his expression gave the impression of a man sucking on a lemon.
"Good taste might be rare, but it does in fact grow everywhere."
Says the man who hasn't bothered to change into a fresh shirt for the evening. His collar is rumpled. Not that it's very visible given the low light and how deep the shadow is there where he's sat practically tucked behind the box's curtain. Still, Ralston has a particular way of slouching in his seat which has miraculously transformed it from slightly uncomfortable little thing with too little padding to a lounging club chair. He has one foot idly kicked up over a knee and his cane with it's snarling dog handle hooked across his ankle. Were it shaded by a more pleasing disposition and the whole effect might be charmingly rougish.
It is not.
"Merovic plans to meet his French connection at some point during this little cultural tour. My guess is they mean to pass along their great packet of allied secrets under the pretense of this dressing room congratulations, or that little after party, or so on."
They could simply wait of course, he'd remarked earlier, either an unwitting or oddly apt echo of MI6's own debrief. They might waylay Merovic as he is leaving the city when he was sure to have the NATO intelligence on him. Indeed here, moving about the quartered city, is when he would be most vulnerable and so most on guard. But it's not a long trip to the Czechoslovakian border and it's stunningly easy for a Soviet to disappear behind the curtain. Besides, it would leave Merovic's French friend unmasked.
'Just think of how fun it will be to kill two birds with one stone.'
It does, in fact, sounds fun. But in fairness, Emily's sense of fun has been described as "perverse" before.
In contrast to Ralston she looks impeccable; not flashy enough to draw attention, but fashionable enough to blend in a deep green, high-necked gown. (Her dress also, crucially, sports fashionably large pockets at the waist, saving her the bother of hiding her weapon in her clutch.) Her hair is gathered in an elegant twist that keeps it out of her face, and the jewelry is almost certainly borrowed, though not so nice it makes her a target thieves. She hadn't commented on his fashion choices when they left the hotel, and doesn't seem likely to.
Instead, she lowers her glasses, turning toward the stage but watching the target out of the corner of her eye. "Do we know if the French connection is someone he knows by face?"
"I doubt it, the art of photography notwithstanding. Can't rule out the possibility they've met elsewhere of course, but allegedly this is Merovic's first visit to our charming little city."
The dismissive flick of his fingers seems to indicate anything further is above his pay grade, whether it be in service to SIS or Moscow. It also signals what little measure of his attention had ever been turned outside of their box coming home to roost. Ralston's gaze—steel gray eyes that had been bright and cold along the Danube now turned exceptionally dark by the shaded box—settles firmly on her rather than bothering to entertain the pretense of either Merovic or the orchestra.
"Do you expect my medal will be delivered by hand or by post?"
"I expect you'll have to wait until the next time Her Majesty is in Vienna, she'll want to put it directly into your hand," she murmurs, still looking at Merovic while pretending to look at the musicians. "It's a shame, he seems old school enough to be suspicious because I'm a woman, regardless of how good my French is. All those diction lessons and he won't listen to a thing I have to say regardless."
She's mainly thinking (quietly) out loud; she isn't expecting any especially useful suggestions from Ralston, under the circumstances. She lightly drums her fingers against her knee, invisible outside the box.
Every morning on the way from his flat into the home office, Michael Ralston—a sort of analyst, if you will—takes a very minor detour. Nominally, it's to stretch his legs. He spends a great deal of time at a desk, and is somewhat prone to being sedentary, and the first thing his new physician had told him when he'd been released from St. Lawrence's was that vigorous exercise and plenty of air would be key to his recovery and swift reintegration back into the world. In truth, this side trip ensures Ralston's ability to regularly monitor the state of a particular third floor flat's window in which the flat's occupant is sometimes paid or otherwise convinced to string her laundry across.
On days such as this one, he arranges to take the train across town and pay a visit a relation of an old and now dead school friend. She's getting on in years, and he has a key to her flat which is a fact all of her neighbors know, and he thinks nothing at all about letting himself in. It isn't until Ralston is standing in the little hallway with one arm already out of his coat that he pauses. This place is nothing is not one of careful routine, and whatever record is being played at low volumes in the other room is one he's never heard before.
He slowly extracts himself the rest of the way from his coat, folding it over his arm. The dog headed cane is fetched back up from where it had been ambivalently leaned against the wall, but rather than clunking along directly into the sitting room, he simply carries it in hand so he might advance marginally more silently into the doorway.
It feels very inevitable to find a different person entirely waiting for him there among the chintz furniture as opposed to the little old woman who for so long has acted as his contact back to Moscow.
"I wasn't aware Aunt Jane had many guests," he manages rather than Who the fuck are you?
"Does one man count as many?" asks the man with an easy smile.
His accent isn't Russian. If one had to pin it down, one might call it cosmopolitan - maybe a Frenchman who's worked to sound English, maybe an Englishman who's spent time on the continent. Maybe an American with pretensions. His clothes are stylish, with pieces borrowed just a little too liberally from youth culture for a man of his years. The impression he gives, as a whole, is that of a poet, a drunkard, or a homosexual.
But, as some oblique signal - one comprehensible, perhaps, to a clever man who's a-sort-of-analyst - his teacup has a spoon sticking out of it. In the Russian fashion, he doesn't remove it before he takes a sip. And then he smiles at Ralston, and pulls the spoon out, and sets it down on his saucer, and says, "I've always been told I have quite a lot of presence."
(The music, perhaps in some oblique joke, is Sibelius.)
He doesn't have a gun on him. He's never required one—certainly before being put away, and not after in his particular position. His colleagues would be the type to both notice and be suspicious were he suddenly moved to sport a handgun in his coat pocket. This isn't a fact that's ever particularly bothered him. It has always seemed highly unlikely that he will find himself in a position where he might wish for one. But here, standing in the doorway to Jane's little sitting room still in his jacket and tie and looking faintly bedraggled from the day with one arm engaged managing both overcoat and stick, it bothers him enough that he answers that smile and all that ease with a glower.
Not that it matters. His aim is probably absolute shit anyway.
"Thank you, but no."
The overcoat comes off his arm and is dumped unceremoniously over the seat of the nearby telephone table. The stick remains in hand, though he forces himself to plant it like one ought to use a cane rather than continuing to hold it like a bludgeon.
There's a knowing sort of smile that curves the man's lips while Ralston thinks of guns. It is, of course, just a coincidence of behavior and thought - and not a particularly unlikely one, given that this man seems full of knowing smiles - but there might still be something uncanny or unnerving about it. The man stirring tea - the man who might have a gun on him, or might not need one at all. Liaison, errand boy, assassin? Who might divine?
"I didn't know you were so attached," the man says, and nothing more on the topic of their auntie. Instead, with pleasantry so warm it circles around to mocking, the man says, "Is your work treating you well? You look so dreadfully tired. And has your limp worsened?"
(He has a crooked little finger, like once it was broken and healed less-than-ideally. His shoes are more well-worn than the rest of his clothes. Light nicotine stains on his fingers, though his nails are kept trim and neat. He crosses his leg at the knee. His smile is unwavering.)
"I don't have a limp," is snipped back, ill tempered. Some days that's true; today it's less so, the ache in his joints making an easy shortcut for suspicion to cross over into dislike.
(Not that it's difficult to inspire him so. Michael Ralston isn't a delicate case, merely one which often chooses to difficult. The impulse, in addition to how well versed he is in the workings of certain government offices, is part of what makes him useful. The bullheadedness and propensity for spite, and his creative application of both, successfully steered, makes up for what he lacks otherwise: that he's in poor favor with his own people, that woman he'd killed and the long stint in hospital which has followed, the fact that he's been stripped of his aptitude like a de-wicked candle.
Though whether Moscow Centre has said so to the cosmopolitan man with his legs crossed at the knee is an entirely different story.)
Some impulses, however, make themselves obvious regardless of what has or hasn't been included in a brief. In the same instant that Ralston decides he dislikes the man, he decides also that he if he's going to be killed then he may as well make himself comfortable for it. Standing in the sitting room doorway does him little good.
"And you can stop pretending we're friends. I would have to know your name for that, to start with."
This while crossing the room to the steady tempo of the cane on the rug. He helps himself to the matching chintz sofa, the dissolute way in which he slouches down into it and immediately seeks out his cigarette case transforming the room instantly from grandmother's parlor to the faintly musty clandestine meeting house it actually is.
"Does this mean I can stop coming here? The trip is murderous at this hour, and I've never been able to pull off the excuse of giving a fuck about some dead man's great grandmother convincingly." A knowing look is cast in his substitute host's direction. "There are a half dozen disreputable clubs I might recommend instead."
Where is his lighter? In the overcoat pocket by the door.
The man hums skeptically. "Aren't you a bit joyless to be frequenting disreputable clubs, my steadfast Mr. Ralston?" He arranges his face into a look that's somewhere between pained and constipated, an apparent imitation of the grim young traitor. "And besides - the imitation of virtues, at times, leads to their practice. Perhaps the hope is that you'll develop some filial piety."
(Whoever this man is, he may well be as adept as Ralston himself at making enemies, though by very different mechanisms.)
"My name's Byerly Rutyer." A droll little smile; Ralston knows full well that's not the man's real name. But at least it's a handle.
Then a flick of his fingers produces a lighter. It's tossed to Ralston - tossed towards the side holding his cane, so that Ralston will likely either have to release his prop or fumble it. That may or may not be an act of deliberate cruelty. Rutyer doesn't exactly give off an impression of nimble athleticism.
"Don't anger a ward-witch, they'll draw a line in the dirt," some scoff derisively. "Don't anger a ward-witch," others mutter furtively. "They'll draw a line 'round your neck."
In some ways, they're even more regulated to being seen as mere tools than other disciplines of magic: shield this, ward that, connect X to Y to Z. In some circles they're even considered outright mundane, the magical equivalent of a blue-collar tradesperson. Nothing exotic and glamourous, just necessary even as the number of them waned over the years, over the decades.
Pela's happy to let those preconceptions work for her, smiling dutifully when expected. Born in a sunny southern colony, this is only the second time she's ever been to Somerset, but any excitement and indulgence she might have for the opportunity to see it again is blunted by the reason that she's here. Recalled by the State as part of an "asset review program", things were changing. Pela knows that she was likely to be reassigned somewhere far from her homeland, perhaps even here in Somerset.
She's not alone, arriving with a contingent of other magic users also from Eajorynn, although she's the only ward-witch among them. Their group is guided in for processing while the necessary administration is handled, and Pela takes the opportunity to look around while waiting her turn.
Once, not so very long ago, there would have been a strict order to this sort of thing. Assignments would have been called up according to some strictly enforced schedule, never with more than two dozen magicians or hedge- or ward-witches or any such Talented folk permitted to mill about this particular wood panelled antechamber. 'Permitted'—both in the sense that at one time it would have generally been understood to be an insult as well as a waste of valuable time to keep a Talented individual loitering for long, and in the one where it's is largely frowned upon to put a full company of magic users in one room. It makes the politicians itchy.
Perhaps this regimented shuffling about—dividing up rosters, the handling of orders, the curt reviews and businesslike commissionings—would have still held true when Pela had last found herself in the circuitous rooms of Drayton Hall, the formal headquarters of Their Majesty's Royal Magicians. Today however, there is no such trace of that strict administrative management.
What there is in abundance is quite a bit of talk, the volume of the antechamber being more or less in the range of cacophonous as various knots of men and women in their green uniforms have come to stuff the vestibule full to bursting. Here are pale faced junior officers, largely young children looking for all the world like pretend dolls made up in clothes better suited to their adult peers; there is a contingent of young men gone ruggedly tan and wind chapped, almost certainly dumped here from off some fleet of ships anxiously tugging at their anchors somewhere in the harbor; there is even a pair of senior Fellows, a woman so old she makes the wrinkled man at her elbow seem young, over from the College; and nearly everywhere there are hellos and news and, vitally, gossip being exchanged, interrupted only by the occasional opening and closing of the door at the end of the hall where a harried clerk might appear and so labor to usher along the next handful of magicians to whatever dates may as wait them in the adjacent room.
This holds true throughout the hall save for in one place. Above the center of the long bench which stretches along the interior wall in a single continuous line from one side of the chamber to the other is a niche. Inside this niche is white marble bust of a woman with a fine patrician. And below this niche, flanked on either side by empty seats made outrageously conspicuous by the fact that there is hardly standing room left in the vestibule, sits a man in a black coat to whom no one is speaking at all.
He has one leg crossed over the other at the knee. The metal tipped end of the cane laid over both juts menacingly outward.
It was true that Pela's first experience with Drayton Hall had been much different, but she preferred this. Not specifically because she disliked the regimented formality but because in such a boisterous surrounding, people paid less attention to her. There were other louder, flashier, Talented in the room, hoping to catch the stray eye of someone who would take interest in them. Many of her fellow Eajorynnea had been ecstatic to receive these summons, to be given the idea that they may be taken away from the sleepy southern islands and assigned somewhere with more prestige. Pela was not one of them. She had been happy in her infrequent callings-upon, to maintain her existing wards and sigils as needed, and otherwise be free of obligation.
The crowd shuffled again as the harried clerk came back and read the names for another set of individuals, although it hardly seemed to lessen the press of bodies in the antechamber. In effort to stay out of the way at least until her name is called, Pela sidled up against the wall until her path is interrupted by the seated man with the pointed cane, and the ways it's positioned means she can't get past without shoving into the crowd.
He isn't wearing the same sort of nervous, anticipatory energy that the rest of the room's occupants is, nor does he immediately strike her as someone unfamiliar with the proceedings. No, he radiates an extremely I belong here mien.
"If you were hoping for a quiet spot of contemplation here, sorré, I'm afraid you've picked the wrong day for it," she addressed him with rueful and hopefully disarming courtesy. The unfamiliar word was a respectful mode of address native to the southern colonies, and the same accent tinged her speech.
Well, if she can't get past... she'll just sit in the empty seat next to him like it's nothing at all.
If the abrupt tilt of his attention in her direction is any indication, the man sitting in the niche bust's shadow hadn't expected to be addressed—not by the crowding Somerset magicians in their starched uniforms, or the College Fellows, and certainly not by some young woman in the colors of the colony outposts. For a briefly flashing instant, the surprise plays clearly out in his sagging face. He looks almost boyish there: a lad with sloppily combed curls in a rumpled shirt stuffed into a very black coat as if that might pass him off as respectable.
Then she sits. And, like a cracked door closing to erase the slit of a view into the adjacent room, that surprise disappears from off of his face. In it's place, the handle of the cane in the shape of a snarling dog has flicked round. Its muzzle sets between her ribs as a barricade to preserve the inches remaining between her hip and his. Surely she of all people must recognize a ward: Keep your damned distance.
His ward practically singes the air, makes her own power stir against the inside of her fingertips below the skin, but she only offers him a sunny smile. "I suppose it could be easily missed," she replies with light laugh, and the sound vibrates up the shaft of the cane from her ribcage to his hand.
She neither leans closer nor pulls away, like the pointed jab — both the physical and spoken one — isn't something to be rebuffed by just yet. Acknowledging the threat, but not being reactive to it.
"And yet," she says after a moment. "There are other, far less sonorous places here at the Hall you could enjoy the quiet of, if you really wanted to. So: here to observe of your own volition, or been ordered? My condolences, either way."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prison break au? prison break au.
The cell in which she is deposited is across from Ralston's. Irregular again, the mixing of sexes, but what is one to do in such an irregular situation? She does not resist or fight when they lock her in, but the moment the guards are gone, she's pacing and exploring - dragging fingertips over iron bars, feeling at the mortars between the stones, measuring the length of the cell pace by pace.
hell yea
What makes Aterlacus particular isn't the thickness of its walls or the cruelty of its masters. Rather, it is made unique by who it holds and how it does so. It's not easy, you know, to keep magicians where they don't wish to be. The whole world knows that.
The cell across from Kitty Jones is represented by a heavy door. It's closed with a simple but heavy bolt, and while there's no visible padlock the seal of enchantment on the door is evident even in the dim light of this gloomy corridor. The iron inlay grounding the spell work catches the light, glinting like the wet eye of a particularly cold blooded animal.
The particulars of what waits behind that door are more mystery than not. Save that a long time ago, someone put a boy who thought he was very clever in a box for safe keeping.
I'd tell you to slap my hands if I get things wrong about your canon but I know you'll roll with it
So, having discovered everything there is to discover within the cell, she turns her attention to what's outside of it. And immediately discovers that that cell is far, far more intriguing than her own.
"Hey." She calls across to the prisoner there, whoever they might be. Her voice has the rasp of someone who knows they ought to be whispering, but she's not very quiet. "Hey. Can you hear me?"
me out loud: "what canon"
And then there is a single rap on the door.
Coincidence?
damn right
"Hi," she says, a bit breathlessly, fingers hooking around the bars. "Can you talk? Rap two times if you can't. For whatever reason."
let me here.
There is a castle. It is cavernous and cold and filled with possibility. If he could think of something other than the absence of Nott, or the peril with which he'd left her (and Beauregard, and then the others, Fjord and Jester and Yasha) to navigate, or the fresh-made grave in which they had buried Mollymauk—
Well. It is a place where Caleb could coax out information. He could learn here. No one is stopping him.
No one but the splinter of guilt that reminds him: He had not left them when he was able, and he is surely not excused for leaving on a technicality, so surely he must devote himself to slipping the cage he's found himself in, no matter the gilding of the bars.
Magic hums in every corner of Thorne. It makes Caleb's molars ache for biting down, tearing into it. That same fervor that had driven him through book after book once Beauregard had finally, finally brought him to the library is unchecked but for his own tenuous grip on rickety morality.
His notes diverge. What he should pursue, what will take him home, and the rest. Revenge. Rectification. A scaffolding of scribbling notes in a journal set alongside his spell book, both working in tandem.
It is harder to do on the road.
There are skirmishes at the border and their hosts have been neglectful and disinterested, but they dislodge their guests from the castle to tend to their affairs in what might be a battle, or might resolve itself before reinforcements arrive. Caleb cannot think of it.
He is hunched by the fire now, writing still, mapping what could be a spell, could blow up in someone's face. The ink shimmers faintly, even in the poor light, made worse by—
"Please, you are blocking the fire," is carefully posed, one hand hovering over the page as he looks up. This man, with his cane, who Caleb has seen in passing but said little to before now. What he is capable of is a mystery, one Caleb is not sure he needs answered. Eventually he will need help, yes, but he hardly knows what he needs yet.
And so: he is polite, quiet, easy to ignore. That has served him well so far in his life.
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So while it's rare that Ralston stays long on his feet, tonight is an exception: he's stood up, back uncharacteristically very straight in an effort to work the cricks out of his spine, and he's close to the fire as well because it's good for the sore parts of him and because the season is only now just turning from winter into mud and as dark has fallen so too has a chill in the air descended. In his head, he is doing a mental calculation: attempting to discern who out of the contingent would be best to harass for some form of medicinal or herbal aid. Who will capitulate to his demands despite a history of irritation—
(Michael Ralston has not precisely kept his head up, but he's a difficult man to get along with even at his most subtle. The court and it's attachments bear him very little love.)
"Then shift over," he remarks offhand, hardly having heard the—what? Complaint? Request? His attention is focused elsewhere.
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The mud and cold have not bothered Caleb. Miserable traveling conditions are so familiar as to be unremarkable, apart from the absence of his usual choice in companions. In spite of knowing that one cannot operate alone, even in this magic-drenched place, the urge to stand and cede the log entirely comes and goes.
Still, he closes the spell book over one finger. Would anyone be able to read it's contents? Hard to say. He is not interested in risking it.
"I heard they are breaking into one of the wine casks," is posed cautiously; he does not have the impression that Michael Ralston is the type for roistering with a cup of rich wine. "If you are interested."
Interested in getting up off his log.
i looked at so many maps for this and it doesn't show.
Or maybe both. Who can say.
"For me? How kind," had been Michael Ralston's droll reply when they'd at last been delivered to him and very shortly before he'd winged the whole carton directly into the Danube. "It's a shame I've quit."
It's easily the poorest lie he tells. Ten minutes later, he had found a cigarette in a pocket and commenced with smoking it. The rest of his untruths, if there were any, had been impossible to discern. Maybe he really does know the owner of the empty theater box into which they're later secreted so they can get their first look at the cadre of men in attendance in one of the boxes opposite. But that follows. One doesn't play the role of courier into the Easten Bloc without learning how to lie.
"Christ, have you ever witnessed such a miserable arrangement?" Is not in reference to the box across the way, but rather must pertain to the music currently occurring in the orchestra pit. "Anyway, the one all the way to the left is your man."
everything's made up and the compass points don't matter
For now, she angles her opera glasses to get a closer look with keeping her body turned toward the stage. "He looks like he's fun at parties," she comments, quiet and bone dry. "Either that, or he's as critical of the programme as you are." Regardless, his expression gave the impression of a man sucking on a lemon.
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Says the man who hasn't bothered to change into a fresh shirt for the evening. His collar is rumpled. Not that it's very visible given the low light and how deep the shadow is there where he's sat practically tucked behind the box's curtain. Still, Ralston has a particular way of slouching in his seat which has miraculously transformed it from slightly uncomfortable little thing with too little padding to a lounging club chair. He has one foot idly kicked up over a knee and his cane with it's snarling dog handle hooked across his ankle. Were it shaded by a more pleasing disposition and the whole effect might be charmingly rougish.
It is not.
"Merovic plans to meet his French connection at some point during this little cultural tour. My guess is they mean to pass along their great packet of allied secrets under the pretense of this dressing room congratulations, or that little after party, or so on."
They could simply wait of course, he'd remarked earlier, either an unwitting or oddly apt echo of MI6's own debrief. They might waylay Merovic as he is leaving the city when he was sure to have the NATO intelligence on him. Indeed here, moving about the quartered city, is when he would be most vulnerable and so most on guard. But it's not a long trip to the Czechoslovakian border and it's stunningly easy for a Soviet to disappear behind the curtain. Besides, it would leave Merovic's French friend unmasked.
'Just think of how fun it will be to kill two birds with one stone.'
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In contrast to Ralston she looks impeccable; not flashy enough to draw attention, but fashionable enough to blend in a deep green, high-necked gown. (Her dress also, crucially, sports fashionably large pockets at the waist, saving her the bother of hiding her weapon in her clutch.) Her hair is gathered in an elegant twist that keeps it out of her face, and the jewelry is almost certainly borrowed, though not so nice it makes her a target thieves. She hadn't commented on his fashion choices when they left the hotel, and doesn't seem likely to.
Instead, she lowers her glasses, turning toward the stage but watching the target out of the corner of her eye. "Do we know if the French connection is someone he knows by face?"
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The dismissive flick of his fingers seems to indicate anything further is above his pay grade, whether it be in service to SIS or Moscow. It also signals what little measure of his attention had ever been turned outside of their box coming home to roost. Ralston's gaze—steel gray eyes that had been bright and cold along the Danube now turned exceptionally dark by the shaded box—settles firmly on her rather than bothering to entertain the pretense of either Merovic or the orchestra.
"Do you expect my medal will be delivered by hand or by post?"
Ha ha.
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She's mainly thinking (quietly) out loud; she isn't expecting any especially useful suggestions from Ralston, under the circumstances. She lightly drums her fingers against her knee, invisible outside the box.
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byerly;
On days such as this one, he arranges to take the train across town and pay a visit a relation of an old and now dead school friend. She's getting on in years, and he has a key to her flat which is a fact all of her neighbors know, and he thinks nothing at all about letting himself in. It isn't until Ralston is standing in the little hallway with one arm already out of his coat that he pauses. This place is nothing is not one of careful routine, and whatever record is being played at low volumes in the other room is one he's never heard before.
He slowly extracts himself the rest of the way from his coat, folding it over his arm. The dog headed cane is fetched back up from where it had been ambivalently leaned against the wall, but rather than clunking along directly into the sitting room, he simply carries it in hand so he might advance marginally more silently into the doorway.
It feels very inevitable to find a different person entirely waiting for him there among the chintz furniture as opposed to the little old woman who for so long has acted as his contact back to Moscow.
"I wasn't aware Aunt Jane had many guests," he manages rather than Who the fuck are you?
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His accent isn't Russian. If one had to pin it down, one might call it cosmopolitan - maybe a Frenchman who's worked to sound English, maybe an Englishman who's spent time on the continent. Maybe an American with pretensions. His clothes are stylish, with pieces borrowed just a little too liberally from youth culture for a man of his years. The impression he gives, as a whole, is that of a poet, a drunkard, or a homosexual.
But, as some oblique signal - one comprehensible, perhaps, to a clever man who's a-sort-of-analyst - his teacup has a spoon sticking out of it. In the Russian fashion, he doesn't remove it before he takes a sip. And then he smiles at Ralston, and pulls the spoon out, and sets it down on his saucer, and says, "I've always been told I have quite a lot of presence."
(The music, perhaps in some oblique joke, is Sibelius.)
"Tea?"
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Not that it matters. His aim is probably absolute shit anyway.
"Thank you, but no."
The overcoat comes off his arm and is dumped unceremoniously over the seat of the nearby telephone table. The stick remains in hand, though he forces himself to plant it like one ought to use a cane rather than continuing to hold it like a bludgeon.
"Will she be joining us?"
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"I didn't know you were so attached," the man says, and nothing more on the topic of their auntie. Instead, with pleasantry so warm it circles around to mocking, the man says, "Is your work treating you well? You look so dreadfully tired. And has your limp worsened?"
(He has a crooked little finger, like once it was broken and healed less-than-ideally. His shoes are more well-worn than the rest of his clothes. Light nicotine stains on his fingers, though his nails are kept trim and neat. He crosses his leg at the knee. His smile is unwavering.)
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(Not that it's difficult to inspire him so. Michael Ralston isn't a delicate case, merely one which often chooses to difficult. The impulse, in addition to how well versed he is in the workings of certain government offices, is part of what makes him useful. The bullheadedness and propensity for spite, and his creative application of both, successfully steered, makes up for what he lacks otherwise: that he's in poor favor with his own people, that woman he'd killed and the long stint in hospital which has followed, the fact that he's been stripped of his aptitude like a de-wicked candle.
Though whether Moscow Centre has said so to the cosmopolitan man with his legs crossed at the knee is an entirely different story.)
Some impulses, however, make themselves obvious regardless of what has or hasn't been included in a brief. In the same instant that Ralston decides he dislikes the man, he decides also that he if he's going to be killed then he may as well make himself comfortable for it. Standing in the sitting room doorway does him little good.
"And you can stop pretending we're friends. I would have to know your name for that, to start with."
This while crossing the room to the steady tempo of the cane on the rug. He helps himself to the matching chintz sofa, the dissolute way in which he slouches down into it and immediately seeks out his cigarette case transforming the room instantly from grandmother's parlor to the faintly musty clandestine meeting house it actually is.
"Does this mean I can stop coming here? The trip is murderous at this hour, and I've never been able to pull off the excuse of giving a fuck about some dead man's great grandmother convincingly." A knowing look is cast in his substitute host's direction. "There are a half dozen disreputable clubs I might recommend instead."
Where is his lighter? In the overcoat pocket by the door.
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(Whoever this man is, he may well be as adept as Ralston himself at making enemies, though by very different mechanisms.)
"My name's Byerly Rutyer." A droll little smile; Ralston knows full well that's not the man's real name. But at least it's a handle.
Then a flick of his fingers produces a lighter. It's tossed to Ralston - tossed towards the side holding his cane, so that Ralston will likely either have to release his prop or fumble it. That may or may not be an act of deliberate cruelty. Rutyer doesn't exactly give off an impression of nimble athleticism.
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WE'RE WINGING IT HERE WE GO
"Don't anger a ward-witch, they'll draw a line in the dirt," some scoff derisively. "Don't anger a ward-witch," others mutter furtively. "They'll draw a line 'round your neck."
In some ways, they're even more regulated to being seen as mere tools than other disciplines of magic: shield this, ward that, connect X to Y to Z. In some circles they're even considered outright mundane, the magical equivalent of a blue-collar tradesperson. Nothing exotic and glamourous, just necessary even as the number of them waned over the years, over the decades.
Pela's happy to let those preconceptions work for her, smiling dutifully when expected. Born in a sunny southern colony, this is only the second time she's ever been to Somerset, but any excitement and indulgence she might have for the opportunity to see it again is blunted by the reason that she's here. Recalled by the State as part of an "asset review program", things were changing. Pela knows that she was likely to be reassigned somewhere far from her homeland, perhaps even here in Somerset.
She's not alone, arriving with a contingent of other magic users also from Eajorynn, although she's the only ward-witch among them. Their group is guided in for processing while the necessary administration is handled, and Pela takes the opportunity to look around while waiting her turn.
hell yeah ✨
Perhaps this regimented shuffling about—dividing up rosters, the handling of orders, the curt reviews and businesslike commissionings—would have still held true when Pela had last found herself in the circuitous rooms of Drayton Hall, the formal headquarters of Their Majesty's Royal Magicians. Today however, there is no such trace of that strict administrative management.
What there is in abundance is quite a bit of talk, the volume of the antechamber being more or less in the range of cacophonous as various knots of men and women in their green uniforms have come to stuff the vestibule full to bursting. Here are pale faced junior officers, largely young children looking for all the world like pretend dolls made up in clothes better suited to their adult peers; there is a contingent of young men gone ruggedly tan and wind chapped, almost certainly dumped here from off some fleet of ships anxiously tugging at their anchors somewhere in the harbor; there is even a pair of senior Fellows, a woman so old she makes the wrinkled man at her elbow seem young, over from the College; and nearly everywhere there are hellos and news and, vitally, gossip being exchanged, interrupted only by the occasional opening and closing of the door at the end of the hall where a harried clerk might appear and so labor to usher along the next handful of magicians to whatever dates may as wait them in the adjacent room.
This holds true throughout the hall save for in one place. Above the center of the long bench which stretches along the interior wall in a single continuous line from one side of the chamber to the other is a niche. Inside this niche is white marble bust of a woman with a fine patrician. And below this niche, flanked on either side by empty seats made outrageously conspicuous by the fact that there is hardly standing room left in the vestibule, sits a man in a black coat to whom no one is speaking at all.
He has one leg crossed over the other at the knee. The metal tipped end of the cane laid over both juts menacingly outward.
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The crowd shuffled again as the harried clerk came back and read the names for another set of individuals, although it hardly seemed to lessen the press of bodies in the antechamber. In effort to stay out of the way at least until her name is called, Pela sidled up against the wall until her path is interrupted by the seated man with the pointed cane, and the ways it's positioned means she can't get past without shoving into the crowd.
He isn't wearing the same sort of nervous, anticipatory energy that the rest of the room's occupants is, nor does he immediately strike her as someone unfamiliar with the proceedings. No, he radiates an extremely I belong here mien.
"If you were hoping for a quiet spot of contemplation here, sorré, I'm afraid you've picked the wrong day for it," she addressed him with rueful and hopefully disarming courtesy. The unfamiliar word was a respectful mode of address native to the southern colonies, and the same accent tinged her speech.
Well, if she can't get past... she'll just sit in the empty seat next to him like it's nothing at all.
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Then she sits. And, like a cracked door closing to erase the slit of a view into the adjacent room, that surprise disappears from off of his face. In it's place, the handle of the cane in the shape of a snarling dog has flicked round. Its muzzle sets between her ribs as a barricade to preserve the inches remaining between her hip and his. Surely she of all people must recognize a ward: Keep your damned distance.
"I hadn't noticed."
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She neither leans closer nor pulls away, like the pointed jab — both the physical and spoken one — isn't something to be rebuffed by just yet. Acknowledging the threat, but not being reactive to it.
"And yet," she says after a moment. "There are other, far less sonorous places here at the Hall you could enjoy the quiet of, if you really wanted to. So: here to observe of your own volition, or been ordered? My condolences, either way."
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