Chương 19: 1.18. Auntie Liz

Lisa clipped Demetrius' harness to their borrowed wagon and tightened the strap with the squeak of leather. She scritched the dray's bony snout affectionately and then turned to Tiago, arms wide.

"Come here, my boy." Tiago loaded the Executioner's sword onto the wagon.

"Not while your lipstick's wet. I know you too well."

"Just a hug. Come on. Hug your mama." Lisa pouted.

"I swear I won't give you a forehead kiss in front of Seth il Gutierre. C'mon." Tiago tutted and stepped into his mother's embrace. She snapped her arms down on him like a bear trap and planted a kiss on his forehead with an exaggerated mwah. He jerked away and rubbed the plum-colored mark she'd left there as she laughed.

"You're an oathbreaker," he said.

"Good luck, il Gutierre."

"Have fun in Laramme. Be nice to your sister." Lisa blew him a followup kiss.

"See you in Santura. I love you, Sunshine." Tiago put his hands in the pockets of his slate carpenter pants and wandered away from the ranch house.

"You too."" Hey." Lisa held up a warning finger.

"Say the whole thing."

"Love you too, mom," he called over his shoulder. Lisa smiled and hefted her steamer trunk one-handed.

"There was no I there, but we take those." Seth looked askance as Lisa climbed into the wagon after her luggage. The wagon bed creaked under her powerful frame.

"Were you always this strong," he asked, "or was it a Winter War-slash-Verdugo development?"

"I didn't exactly train in earnest until they gave me a sword to swing. But I was always rather robust." She made a show of dusting her hands off.

"You know what they say about Orwinese girls."

"What's that?"

"Oooh. You don't know." Lisa grinned.

"Then I won't spoil any surprises." She climbed the wagon's divider and perched on the box seat.

"Hop up, Mr. i'Lynnok."

"I'Lynnok?"

"Seth i'Lynnok." She held out her hand.

"That's your pseudonym while we're traveling incognito." Seth took it. Her bicep stood out and slid gracefully under her skin as she helped him into the wagon.

"That's an Orwinese word, right?" he asked, to give himself something to think about besides the Verdugo's arms.

"Mmhmm. It means fox. Fitting, no?" She scooted over to give him more room, though her generous hips still left him a bit cramped.

"Unless you'd like to change Seth too."

"Seth's fine. One of the few things about myself I've never thought about ditching. Although I have gone by Boris a few times."

"Boris? You?" She quirked her head.

"You wouldn't be a Boris. Too slim."

"I was a fat baby," he said.

"What about you?"

"I was fatter."

"Your pseudonym, I mean."

"Moi?" She laid a hand on her chest.

"I am Elizabeth i'Lynnok."

"Are we pretending to be married?" The white marshfires in her eyes glowed as they widened with her surprised laugh.

"I'd planned on being your aunt, Seth."

"Oh." His cheeks tingled.

"Of course."

"But married could be fun." She flicked the reins and Demetrius grumbled into motion.

"The dashing younger husband and the vamp who stole him away. That could be very fun." Annalise's warning about her sorceress head lurked in the back of Seth's mind.

"Aunt works. Let's do aunt." An amused hum from between her wine-dark lips.

"Let's." He cast a skeptical look at his employer's paperwhite skin.

"Though I'm not sure how anyone could see us as related."

"You let Auntie Liz handle that part," she said.

"Wink."

"All your heads do that wink thing, huh?" Lisa stuck her onyx tongue out.

"Annalise got that from Lisa, thank you very much." Down the cobbled Laramme thoroughfare, a few people cast curious looks at the Verdugo's oddly lengthened hair, though her sunglasses and her hat covered much of the transformation. Seth looked to the scaffold as they passed. A geezer in overalls was on his knees atop it, industriously scrubbing the arterial blood from its boards. The woman who'd spilled it hummed melodiously to herself at Seth's shoulder.

They rolled out of Laramme's village cluster into the golden waves of its fields. It was a perfect afternoon, the sort you'd want to capture in amber and preserve for the coming dark and cold. A fresh crispness in the air intermingling with the baking emerald warmth of the sun. Seth wondered sometimes whether the Deathspell had influenced the weather at all. Did the kindred of old feel the warmth of their strange yellow sun for longer? Were their winters gentler? This text was taken from Royal Road.

Help the author by reading the original version there.

"Now that we're away from all that hoi polloi." Lisa turned in her seat and looped the reins around her bent knee.

"May I see your arm?" He peeled back the sleeve of his tatty jacket; she followed suit, and then pressed her forearm against his. It was easily twice as wide.

"Pardon my skin contact," she said.

"Won't be a moment. You have just such a lovely warm bronze. Must make sure I get it right if we're related." She tapped her opposite hand's fingers against her chest diagrammatically, like she was entering an invisible code, and muttered an airy syllable under her breath. Inch by spreading inch, the colorless, tattooed skin laid next to his adopted his Plainfolk tan. Her hair went from black to a dark coffee.

She was still six feet and change, and still built like a goddess of war, but the human-colored skin, unblemished by hexentatuae, went a long way in camouflaging her. He whistled.

"Nice trick."

"Cheers, nephew." She winked one eye shut.

"Did I get the lids?"

"What about the lids?"

"They're a bit darker than the rest. Like you've got some natural shadow on. Did I get them?" Seth didn't know how to feel about the level of attention the Verdugo had been paying to how his eyes looked.

"I can't exactly see my own eyelids, but it looks right."

"Fabulous." She reopened her eye, now brown-on-white, and slid her sunglasses back on.

"I do hope we run into a mirror soon. I've been so excited to wear your skin." He wondered if that counted as the flirting he'd been charged to shut down.

"Now we have two essential tasks to accomplish in Fontana," Lisa said, as the road trailed into rural degradation under their wheels.

"There's an import-exporter we need to see. Guy by the name of Marston. He's the one who bought my head."

"Do you reckon he's holding onto it?"

"It would be lovely, but no. Marston has no reason to steal a head and he's a career middleman. I imagine he's passed it on to whoever his buyer was at this point. Still, it's a good start. He's attending a contredanse at the Fontana Muster Hall, which provides a perfectly innocuous public place to run into one another and peel a layer or two back."

"I wonder if we should be married after all. I don't know about going to a contredanse with my aunt."

"Too late, bucko. Already cast the spell. You're taking your Aunt Liz to the dance. What will all the Prossimo ladies say behind their big frilly fans?" He chuckled.

"It's a neat trick. Can't let it go to waste, I guess."

"Lisa has all kinds of neat tricks," she said.

"Sorcery, as I'm sure you're aware, is a real son of a bitch to learn. I get all the fun without the hard work."

"I hear it's hard," he said.

"But I'm not entirely sure why. It has something to do with hyperphantasia, right? You smoke something?"" Very good, Seth. Hyperphantasia indeed. You're full of surprises, aren't you?" Her smile made him feel like the smartest student in a class. Stay mad. You're mad, remember?

"The trick to casting a genesis spell is the same thing a hexentatua does." Lisa gestured to her arms, though they were now bare of tattoos thanks to the enchantment.

"A moving image branded on living flesh. It's just that a hexentat does it on your skin and a true spell—a genesis spell, as the sorcerers call them—does it in your brain. You need to perfectly picture the image and its motion. So if someone were to stare at your back until they'd branded it with eidetic flawlessness into their mind, they could invoke the Fox the same as you do, by visualizing that motion. But it has to be perfect. Every detail."

It'd been a while since Seth had seen the Fox, blazoned as it was on his back, but he recalled from rare chances with a mirror how complex the grinning depiction was, the geometries of its pelt like a mandala.

"That'd be a lot of staring."

"Well, Karmen—that's the woman whose head this is—used books, not boys' backs."

"More fool her." Lisa laughed brightly.

"Agreed. But that's why they're always smoking that chortweed stuff. The something you mentioned. And why even with it, few sorcerers can fit more than three or four spells in their heads, including the siege spell. Karmen knew a half-dozen." Seth balked.

"A half-dozen? Like six?"

"I know. Even outside of a rather galling chort habit, she was a prodigy." Lisa tapped her temple.

"That's why she let me have this after I took it off her. She was loath to just let all of that work go to waste. Although one of them does require human sacrifice, which was the whole reason for the lopping. So let's call it five. The irony isn't lost on me, by the way."

"It is on me," he says.

"What irony?"

"I executed Karmen for harvesting hexis from humans. And I took her hexis for the big bad mother of all human sacrificial spells." She pointed at the sky, at the distant necromantic green.

"Only she needed two people, and Charles il Nekropoli needs thousands every year."

"Like Alfonse," he said.

"And those charming gentlemen who came after you in the hex engine," she said. And me, he thought. It might have been me. If I hadn't told you, or if you'd come some other day and I'd stolen some other thing, my hexis might be glimmering in that big black sword of yours. Hounds, foxes, and hens. And here sat Seth i'Lynnok, next to a big friendly hound.

"What was the other thing?" he asked.

"Hmm?"

"You said we had two essential tasks. What's the other essential task?"

"Ohh. Right." She smacked her forehead.

"Thanks for the reminder. I'm taking you to dinner." His brows knitted together.

"Dinner?"

"Mmhmm. You've earned yourself a very fancy meal, and if you wouldn't begrudge me coming along with you, it would be my distinct pleasure." And this was definitely what Annalise had been talking about when she warned him about Lisa, but there went that disobedient little flicker in him and he said, "Sure. Why not?" She beamed.

"Where are we going?" he asked, like it'd mean anything to a man whose only taste of luxury was the occasional bottle stolen off a windowsill.

"A place called the Butterfly Pavilion," she said.

"I hear lovely things, despite the tacky name." The name didn't seem so tacky to him, but that must be his tin ear. Maybe he'd save up for a fancy silver one.

"And then…" She kicked her ankles against the wagon's front board below their seat.

"Is there anything else you'd like to do, while we're in Fontana?"

"I'm not sure," he said, carefully.

"Haven't been. There's the contredanse, right?"

"Mmhmm."

"And then what?" She smiled.

"Whatever we like, I suppose." Had her leg always been pressed so close to his? There was barely any space between them as it was.

"No wrong answers," she said.

"Fontana is a big city. Big enough to get lost in. Whatever you'd like, I'm sure I can find for you."

"I, uh…." He caught a crack in his voice and forced it down in time.

"I guess if there's any other magic you wanted to show me? While you're Lisa?"

"You know, Seth." She leaned in closer still. Close enough he could feel the warmth of her breath.

"Magic isn't the only thing that Lisa knows how to do better than Annalise ever could."

"Like what?" Her voice was bedroom soft.

"Want to see?" Seth felt the fluttery thump of his heart attempting a cartwheel and face-planting. Shut her down. Shut her down.

"Uh," he said.

"Okay." You're supposed to shut her down, il Gutierre.

"Right." She straightened with sudden chipper casualness and held the reins out.

"Hold these and keep us steady, kiddo."

"Kiddo?"

"I'm old enough to be your mother. Or your aunt as the case may be. Hold the reins." She passed the leather to him. He took over and watched, nonplussed and a little disappointed, as she clambered over the divider into the wagon. She flicked the latches on her steamer trunk and rummaged inside.

"Where did I put that damn thing? If Tiago went and hid it again, I'll—Here we are." She pulled a leather hardcase from the trunk and cracked it open. The afternoon light gleamed off its contents. Seth looked over his shoulder. His eyes widened.

"No fucking way," he said.