Chương 39: 1.29. No Refunds

"What do they taste like?" Seth asked as he and Ofelia departed the perimeter.

"The lies."

"Bull shit," she said.

"Appropriately enough."

"How do you know what a bull's shit tastes like?"

"One can extrapolate, I think, from the smell." Seth stepped around a street corner and indicated the Tower Wick, Sondam's most reputable taphouse (as far as that went in a tinpot two-horse capillary town like Sondam). He'd negotiated for his hexentatua here, at one of its wax-dribbled tables.

"It sounds like you might need a drink, then, Miss al Ydris."

"I don't imagine anyone will be—" Ofelia paused as Seth slid his diamond pick from his sleeve.

"Ah."

"Guess we could find some proprietor or another in the crowd." Seth sent the pins clicking, one after another.

"But I try not to make a nuisance of myself." He swung the door in.

"After you, madame." Ofelia strolled past him to park her black-clad butt on a barstool.

"This would strike me as your idea of flirting, if I didn't know you fancied my mother." Seth hopped the candle-crowded bar and rummaged in its splintery underside cabinet. More candles down here. The place really stuck to its gimmick.

"I'm that obvious?"

"She is."

"Okay." Seth came up with two pewter-plated tankards.

"Well, yes. I do. I hope that's not an issue. What are you drinking?"

"A kiln ale, if they have one. Why would it be an issue?"

"It seems like a recipe for awkwardness." Seth found the Redhead Select tap handle, a carved maiden with a blobby wink on her poorly painted face.

"Hanging around a fellow who wants to sleep with your mother." Ofelia's face turned distraught.

"Sleep with her?" She put a hand to her chest.

"As in you want to have sex? With my mom?" Seth's grip faltered on the tap handle.

"Uh, I—yes?" The distress dropped from her. She returned to her inexpressive baseline, with a touch of added bemusement.

"I'm kidding. I don't care." He decompressed and wiped the foamy rim of the tankard he'd overfilled.

"This goddamn family."

"I don't think either of us would enjoy any sort of stepfather-esque arrangement," Ofelia said.

"But I'd be happy to consider you some kind of Fun Uncle." Seth slid the ale across the bar's wax-flecked surface.

"We're nearly the same age."

"That's what would make you fun." Ofelia craned her neck and took a sip from the sloshing mug.

"Though you'd go unlit, you know." He nodded.

"What's it like to be unlit? Does it feel… different, somehow? Like your senses?" Ofelia smacked her lips.

"You're weighing it, aren't you?"

"Well, you went unlit because you love your mother, right?" Ofelia leaned her elbows on the bar.

"Life was difficult for us, with a dead father and a mother on the front. Then she came back turned and told us she had to leave, that she was to be a Verdugo and we couldn't stay with her, and we refused. We'd only just gotten her back."

"What did she say to that?"

"She said that it was a horrible curse and if we did it, we'd regret it forever. She said she wasn't worth losing our souls over."

"And have you regretted it?"

"Never once. Even if the moment it happened was rather existentially unpleasant." Seth frowned as he filled his own tankard.

"Help me understand it. The disparity. Like, why does she consider it so thoroughly horrible and you don't?"

"I see the biggest difference in how it happened," Ofelia said.

"When Tiago and I went unlit, it was by our choice, to stay with the last family we had, and she held us as our souls lifted away, and whispered that she loved us." Seth imagined what it would sound like— I love you, in Annalise's cocoa-warm brogue.

"When Mother went unlit," Ofelia continued, "it was in the jaws of a shrieking abomination as it dragged her into an ambush cave. She killed it with her bare hands, and then lay bleeding to death for an hour in pitch darkness before they got her out. She nearly lost a leg. It was the worst and most terrifying moment of her life, and she's still healing. Up here." She tapped her temple.

"She'll never heal all the way, I don't think. But you've been good for her, so far." Seth hid his heart-flittering reaction to this behind a swig of Redhead Select, to maintain his Fun Uncle bona fides.

"Also, she's quite gregarious. Loves meeting new people." Ofelia shook her head.

"Me, I was never an outgoing person. I had few friends in our town, and when what happened happened with our father, I had none. Now, I appreciate how much I am left alone. I have a general dislike for the uneducated, and the uneducated have a general dislike for the unlit. We have a compatible incompatibility." Seth chuckled.

"I'm pretty uneducated, you know. Wouldn't know how to read if I hadn't taught myself."

"But you taught yourself," Ofelia said.

"And you certainly don't seem to mind the unlit."

"The ones I've met so far have made an okay impression."

"What else…" Ofelia drummed her fingers on the side of her tankard.

"There's the skin and the eyes, but that's obvious. I'm sterile, but I'm not fond of penises, so no great loss there. I can only ever find sex when we're back in the Necropolis and around our fellow unlit, of course, but that infrequency makes it more special, I find. And it's the only place I can locate people my age who look as young as I look. The options are otherwise off-puttingly ephebophilic in either direction. Not that finding sex would be an issue for you, I suppose."

"I'd actually rather not talk about this whole bit." Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

"Suit yourself," she said.

"You know I can't really remember what her eyes looked like? Before they turned? They were green, I remember. But not the shade." Green. Seth tried to picture that and didn't have much luck. Green eyes in Annalise's face.

"It used to be that in my dreams we were human again, and I'm sure I must have dreamt her eyes the way they were." Ofelia studied her own distorted reflection in the ale's ruddy surface.

"But these days, when I dream of my family, all our eyes are black. I suppose a dream could easily get the color wrong, anyway." She raised the mug; the image boiled away into ripples as she drank. She wiped her lip.

"Would you call this a normal conversation?"

"What makes you ask?"

"I rarely have them. Is this the sort of way people talk in the Plainlands?"

"Not exactly," Seth said.

"I mean, dreams, I suppose, that's normal-ish territory."

"What did you dream about last night?"

"Last night I had a dream I was picking a lock with no pants on and the Sorcerer General kept trying to put a leash on me." It had been Annalise with the leash, actually, but Seth wasn't about to tell her daughter that. He thought to change the subject: "What do you read all day up on that carriage roof?" That brought some animation to her eyes. Ofelia liked when you asked her about her book, he was learning. Annalise and Tiago were rarely curious.

"One can't be picky when one lives nomadically," she said.

"At the moment it's a book of Rinian fables."

"Rinia. That's in Tuthima, isn't it?"

"Mmhmm. Their breadbasket. Or ricebasket, maybe." Her pinky swirled on the sweating side panel of her mug.

"It's quite fascinating—every story ends with its protagonists dying in grisly ways. The Little Boy and the Pebble Man? Pulverized. The Little Girl who Talked to Crocodiles? An entrée. One wonders what their problem is with little individuals."

"I danced with a Tuthimi girl over in Fontana," Seth said.

"She seemed not to mind my height."

"Perhaps she was a crocodile in disguise," Ofelia said.

"A hungry one."

"Perhaps." Seth took the last gulp of his own stein with the cavalier haste of a man who hadn't paid for it.

"So you can get back to the carriage yourself, right?"

"Do you have some other place to be?"

"I have a hexentat scriber to confront." Seth stepped around the bar.

"Didn't see her in the crowd, so I imagine she's at her hideout."

"Oh, fun. Why?"

"She gave me a bullshit hexentat, is why." Seth reached over his shoulder and patted his back.

"The Fox. It's supposed to give me good advice. It got me caught by Rohan il Agante."

"That's how you ended up hired by Annalise, no?" Seth held a warning finger up.

"Don't start with that." Ofelia giggled. It was as disarmingly girlish coming from her as from her mother.

"I'll come along," she said.

"It would be a kick to see you confront someone, I think."

"Annalise said to take you back to the carriage."

"You're trying to get closer to me because if Annalise's children like you, it'll give you more of a chance with her, yes?"

"I'm trying to get to know my coworker," he said. She stuck her tongue out and grimaced like he'd triggered her Darkness.

"And also yes. A little bit. You don't already like me?"

"Taking me to your scriber," she said, "would be a very Fun Uncle thing to do."

"No refunds." Marla snapped another chalky thumb of chew-root from the branchy husk atop her rolling table, and slid her glove back on over her spindly fingers.

"You said this thing would keep me out of trouble if I listened to it," Seth said.

"It's been nothing but goddamn trouble for me ever since."

"I didn't say that." Marla flicked her loupe down over her singular bright blue eye. She resumed her disastrously shrimp-backed posture over the finch tattoo she was dotting onto her cringing customer's rhomboid.

"I said it'd look out for you." Her wiry canvas grimaced over his shoulder.

"Maybe you want to finish this before you get talking, huh?"

"I can do mundanes in my sleep," Marla said.

"Hush."

"It leapt me into danger the first time I used it," Seth said.

"Got me collared by a fucking Syndicate Patre."

"Rohan il Agante." Marla shook her wrist out and scratched around her eyepatch.

"And how'd he fare?"

"Not the point."

"When I gave you that hexentat you looked half-starved and hunted. Now you're coming here, you're in nice new clothes, you've got a cute little undead friend here with you, you're strutting. Did you get that way ignoring the Fox?"

"I—""No, you didn't." Marla blew a puff of air into the frizzy curl that dropped out of her corded hair tie.

"And even if you did. What's our refund policy, Agger?"

"No," grunted Agger the neckless meat mountain from his perch on the cellar steps. Ofelia wandered across the flagstones into the pool of humming corpselight that hung above Marla's underground workstation.

"Would you perhaps be willing to give another hexentatua for a reduced rate, ma'am?" Marla didn't look up.

"Agger."

"No," the muscle repeated.

"I am loath to bring this up, ma'am," Ofelia said.

"But if you won't offer incentives for a dissatisfied client, then perhaps you will do so because I am Ofelia al Ydris, daughter of the Verdugo Annalise al Ydris, and you are running an unlicensed hexentatua business for criminals." That finally got Marla's attention off her work. She shoved her chair away from her client and glared up at the monochrome interloper.

"Do you know where you are, girl?"

"I do," Ofelia said. Behind her, at the basement's only exit, all three hundred pounds of Agger stood, and wrapped his meaty fist around the hilt of his cavalry dusack.

"Do you understand the danger you're in," Marla said, "talking like that in here?"

"Thank you for your concern. I'll be fine." Ofelia unbuttoned the front of her tunic. On her bellybutton, radiating upward like a compass rose with her ribcage due north, were three stuffed-full hexentat rings. A lethal grimoire scribed into her shockingly muscled abdomen. More hexentatuae on one person than any of the people in this room had ever seen.

"Uh," Marla said. Agger had been pacing closer. He froze. The guy on Marla's table looked about ready to bolt from the basement half-finched.

"Now I'm looking for a second-ringer to finish out this row, and I'm looking for another weapon hex." Ofelia pointed to an open spot near her liver.

"My mother gets some splendid mileage out of the Weeping Razor, but I worry about its passive effect. I tend to wear my nails short."

"Well, uh." Marla took the shop talk like a rope and climbed as far as she could out from the abyss she'd been dangled over.

"I reckon the Salamander works just as well as a hidden weapon, if you're smart about invoking it. That's fire out your mouth on the active and a higher body temperature on the passive. Helps ward off the cold."

"That might be lovely. How's it taste, the fire?"

"Dunno," Marla murmured.

"I've got enough magic that puts odd tastes in my mouth," Ofelia said. She folded her tunic back over her stomach.

"But thank you for the suggestion, ma'am. Would a two-for-one sort of arrangement agree with you?"

"Uh. Yeah."

"Splendid." Ofelia smiled her strange smile.

"If you have a broadsheet we can consult of your expertises, Seth and I will happily review it and return to you tomorrow morning for payment and an appointment."

"No broadsheet," Marla said.

"I've got a book."

"Even better. We'll borrow it."

"I… All right." Marla rediscovered the plug of chew-root in her cheek, and a modicum of courage with it.

"You'll bring it back." Ofelia bowed from the waist.

"I swear on my mother's sword."

"And this doesn't count as a refund," Marla added, as Ofelia plucked the book from her cart and brushed past Agger. Seth shadowed her up the narrow stairs, and they opened the cellar door into the alpine-colored evening.

"That went well," Ofelia said.

"Well as it could have, I suppose." Seth raised an ear to the chilly air, trying to hear whether the business at the scaffold had concluded.

"Do you have room for two more hexentats?"

"The other is for you, of course," Ofelia said.

"It's time we started filling your rings up."

"Your mom doesn't pay me enough for that. Not yet, anyway."

"Happily, Mr. il Gutierre, we've obtained a two-for-one." Ofelia ambled away from the shuttered florist whose basement played host to Marla's operation.

"I'll pay for us both." Seth found himself as tongue-tied as the street toughs Ofelia had halfway threatened in the cellar. Even a basic hexentat was eye-wateringly pricy. The magnitude of the trust and acceptance of the al Ydrises sank into his gut. A tickle in his skull. The Fox was laughing at him. He shushed it and followed Ofelia down abandoned streets toward the center of town and the gory scaffold where her mother plied her trade.

They'd made it a couple of intersections when, from an alley near the Tower Wick, a man with drawn shoulders and cheeks almost as pale as Ofelia's stepped into the road.

"Many apologies," he mumbled, a few quavering notches above a whisper.

"You're with the Verdugo, yes?" Ofelia turned her scabbard-side away from him, hand drifting toward the hilt of her dirk.

"Yes, sir."

"I have a crime. I—that is, there is a crime I must report." The man sniffed sharply through his shark fin nose.

"The property I tend. The man who hired me, he… he's harboring unlit."