Chương 252: Chapter 274: Tethered

"I need your help," I said to Rabert as I sat down next to him. I did not quite throw myself down to flop into the seat, because I'm a princess dammit, but maybe part of a princess's prerogative can include sitting down rather quickly and somewhat carelessly. As usual I warped the air to give us privacy and started my coin spinning. He smiled at me.

"I understand the exchange rate for help and goodwill," he said, referencing back to a conversation he and I had months ago. At the time, we had discussed the difference between giving aid against favors owed in the future, and how everyone knows not to trust those terms. But I had made solid strides by just asking people to harbor goodwill to me proportional to my assistance. That was different, and settled the anxieties of notoriously favor-averse intrigue-players of Hearstcliff.

Because everyone knows that owing a favor is dangerous, a trap, a contract with no defined terms. But instead, I just bargained for goodwill and good tidings. Which means that I would help folks, and they would later help out when I needed something, or just generally push support for my endeavors and propagate my successes. So, it's a very dry joke with some layers, but I get the gist, that he's happy to help and he is still interested in being something more.

"A favorable exchange rate," I confirmed.

"I need perspective." He looked startled.

"Mine?"

"Truly. I've learned something and I don't trust my own reactions, so I am looking for outside opinions." [Quest Checkpoint: Unprecedented Present, 5XP] I was still startled at this popup while Rabert answered.

"Well, I'd be happy to help, of course. What is your matter?"

"Er, before I get to that- Rabert, I've got an odd question. What comes to your mind when I say 'unprecedented present'?" He looked at me suspiciously.

"Why?"

"It's a visions thing. Humor me."

"Well, I was just now thinking that this is a rare gift you've given me, because I don't think anyone has ever asked for my opinion just to have it, because they thought my perspective was worth hearing. Not as part of a trick, not gathering intel, not a test to make sure I have the right opinions. Where I come from, looking for opinions other than your own just... doesn't happen?"

If I wasn't still working out what to do with the soulless girl in my geography class, this would be the saddest thing I've heard all week. What kind of upbringing do you get when everyone is too assertive and suspicious to engage any empathy at all? I've got a lot of bitterness towards my parents because they held me at a distance whenever they could and never let themselves forget that I'm not their real daughter. That is lollipops compared to a childhood spent in the core of Nhullit etiquette.

A lifetime spent in such an emotionally-desiccated environment that my quest log calls this "unprecedented". What the fuck. Maybe some of my Ruthless questlines need to focus on finding out how emotionally ravaged he is. He might need some work before he's okay.

"Well," I said, "knowing that, I feel it's now important for me to ask you a lot more questions about your opinions and perspective, not just information. But I'll start with the one I started with: so, my brother is one of the designers in Fashion Week now-" His indrawn breath hissed through his teeth. I stopped, and watched him with a raised eyebrow.

"I'm all right, keep going," he said.

"I want to hear all of it before I speak." I shrugged.

"May as well speak then, not much more for me to say about it. You already know the significance of those words. Apparently this has been official for a while, he's had plenty of time to borrow drafting tools and actually produce designs and products. I spoke with him recently about Gharie specifically by name, and told him that if he wants my trust he needs to volunteer information before I stumble across it on my own. And last night, my roommate brings me this information." Rabert shrugged.

"He wanted the information kept secret as long as possible. He possibly could have even kept this confidential right up until the first show. He doesn't care whether this impacts your trust of him. Either because your trust of him does not impact his actions, or because he believes your trust does not impact your re actions. He is confident enough that it could be the first, but clever enough that it could be the second.

Or a third option: that withholding secrets, getting caught and violating your trust is intentional, not incidental." The Gyre was still spinning. It assured me that my brother was not plotting against me at all. Elica's information told me that he had been working at this for a while. I had a magical artifact that is known to be completely infallible, and on the other hand a teen-aged girl who is honestly less reliable than most. But in the circumstances, I'd rather trust Elica.

"What would that mean?" I asked him.

"About my trust." He shrugged.

"Isn't that part of his whole deal? Hiding his true goals as being a side-effect of some other ploy? Like if he was only getting into this fashion business specifically so you would feel like you're feeling right now?" He paused.

"Hypothetically, though, and just for the sake of being thorough. Honestly, positioning himself inside the fashion show is such a power move that I can't think it's incidental. But it's possible that what he's really after is to get under your skin."

"To what end?" I asked. Not because I expect him to know. He's even less of a mind-reader than I am. But because, well, I am here for his perspective.

"Well, pretty much anything," Rabert said, shrugging.

"It's just basic intrigue. If you control someone's motivation, you control what direction they move in. For example, provoking some of your well-documented predilections." Meaning, my famous ability to hold a grudge and chase revenge.

"So, once you control what direction someone is acting, you can start restricting the routes to get there until they only have one way to go. Then you can steer them into any trap you want, again hypothetically," he said.

"So, if he wanted to get you to make a big scene and alienate a lot of allies at Spring Fashion, he could goad you with trust, then betray that trust, motivating you to seek justice. Then he makes sure that the only avenue you have to strike at him is through his fashion work during the show. By having you wreck the biggest event of the season, documenting it and spreading it, he could ruin you. Hypothetically. I just pulled an example, that does not necessarily reflect his goals at all."

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. But, even as he said that, I had to admit that I found his suppositions very compelling. This really did feel like a Nathan kind of reasoning. Being an expert spy and being a child of House Nhullit seemed to shape very similar thought processes.

"Honestly," Rabert said, "I think his most likely course here is that he's going to insinuate himself into the show, start influencing behind the scenes there, and shaping scenarios so he has a guiding influence on the social calendar for the next six months. Which is, I remind you, some very significant six months." Referring here to the armed revolution that we've got planned out like a very methodical business takeover.

"I mean, if he's not using this opportunity for that, he really should be," Rabert added.

"It's basically perfect. It's a degree of control that outstrips any other. No, just for the sheer potential of the position, I'm pretty sure that his goal here is to adjust a guest list here, a venue choice there, to see you pressed into unfavorable positions. Having to choose between honoring two influential allies, embarrassing yourself in front of potential enemies, promoting your competition, things like that. From that position, he could keep his thumb on the scale of the entire season."

"Well, shit," I grumbled.

"It might possibly behoove you," he said carefully, "to just go ahead and act well within character, all things considered." Meaning, trashing the Fashion Week event would have less negative consequences than letting Nathan have his way with the show. Maybe my tendency to strong grudges and rash action is exactly what we need this time. The foreign object was in Belisa's leg, the back of her knee. Since I had been enveloping her from the hand inward, I would not have found it on my own for quite a while.

When I swept my soul's plumes there, the sudden yank of pressure threatened to disconnect me from Natalie entirely. I dug in, and pushed back, billowing until the pressure finally eased. Once I occupied both her mind and her leg and all the nerves in between, I was able to decode more her memories. The first was pain: the jagged golden thorn in her leg was a constant low-grade pain, a sharp ache. Its wound was lodged not only in her still-warm flesh, but in her still-aware mind as well.

The memories I found showed the wound of its entry had healed very slowly, over the course of weeks. This was perhaps an effect of the potion, or the barb itself, or some other factor altogether. And because it was inside her body, I had never noticed it using my sorcerous senses. Clever. This was the key: the potion that she had been forced to drink had displaced her soul without harming her body or her senses, but the barb was what anchored that potion's effects in her still-breathing body and still-aware mind.

There was not a soul to keep her shell alive. But she did not need a soul to keep mind and body clinging together. She had something worse. She had a tether. And fortunately I've figured out how to keep Septimus Ebonder from destroying the school so he can search the rubble for this necromancer. And it comes back to that tether, that thorn. I pulled all of me back where I belonged, reeling in against the dragging draw of Belisa's cyclonic hollowness.

I had a lot more to work with now: the pull of Belisa that kept trying to wrench my soul was her tether, the golden spur stuck in her leg. It was the power that pulled at me. Like I'd noticed before, nothingness, vacuum, only has a maximum stable amount of pull. But the magical tether embedded in her acted like grappling hooks, like grasping hands, like a fishing line. And unlike a simple emptiness, there's not a hard limit to how hard a tether can pull.

I cleared the space between our palms, and I re-sealed myself into my own self. Belisa sagged, as if I had just added disappointment to her list of problems.

"Well," I said, "time to look like a crazy person in the middle of class." We were in the middle of class. Well, back of class, we were in the back row side-by-side. Not the only people back there, though, and there were a lot of students that could see me in the peripheral vision, not to mention the teacher who was actually facing directly at us. This was one of the smaller classrooms on Academy property, a room sized for thirty people that held thirty people.

All the walls covered in maps, appropriately to a geography class, but what is less often seen is the gigantic mural painted on the ceiling, the big mostly-square shape of Hearstwhile, blown up as big and detailed as possible. The desks were straight-backed, scratched wood, with one armrest bloated into a paddle-like desk that did not ever have quite enough space for what you're doing. The desks reminded me history books, Gilded Age, kids-in-the-coal-mines kind of time period. A homey room, a familiar room.

But it was not burdened with an excess of privacy. But I would need to get to the bottom of this. I got up from my desk, squatted next to Belisa's, and started emptying her schoolbag. I have searched her for printed ink sigils and found nothing, that was the easy part. I can scan for sigils at quite a distance. I think Meadwhite knows that, he's had enough chances to study my fighting style, watching me move in on defended positions, whatever.

He saw exactly how far away from his shop I stopped before I made contact. He's not dumb, and he's got those clues. And the fact that I don't find any special inks on her person leads me to believe he's learned from our encounters. Now he's striking at me much more indirectly: making me an accomplice in his inhuman experiments. But a sigil does not always need those inks. There are exceptions. Some can be carved, and those are harder for my senses to detect.

I opened her books, and flipped the pages to make sure none of them were cut, ripped or rent in sigil-patterns. No marks gouged into the book covers. My classmates stare at me as I empty out the catatonic girl's book-bag and search everything. I hold the books at an angle and fan the pages, just to see- nothing. I check the bag itself, something scratched into the leather. Maybe something stitched into the leather? I turned it inside out and shook it. I checked for concealed pockets and hidden flaps.

I know she's got sigilry on her. I know it because I can't follow her back to her room. For a long time I rationalized that I didn't want to know more about this, but, in retrospect, that does not sound like me at all. Nux's condition is somewhat similar to hers, and I followed him back to his cell, got to know his caretakers, made deals with his keepers, and I visit him in his cell. But Belisa for some reason, I've never even followed out of the building. Nobody has.

I do not suffer from a lack of curiosity, generally. And yet, in this one thing, I've never made a move. Well, now I've tried. And failed. It's always something. Confusion, a distraction, forgetting, or just taking a wrong turn and losing track of her while she moves very slowly in the middle of the corridors. I've been through this building, there's nothing here that keeps me from going where I like. But there's something about Belisa that keeps me from following her, or looking for her, or keeping track of her.

But only when she's in motion. It has to be a magic item or a scribed spell. I check her for jewelry, accessories, weapons, anything that might be mana-infused. Nothing. And there's nothing in her bag. That was my big hope: she doesn't always wear the same clothes, but she always has the same bag and books. So that's logically where the sigil should go. I don't look around but I can feel the silence and the judgment, everyone staring at me as I ransack a helpless girl's things. Maybe her shoes?...

I'm getting desperate. But not desperate enough to start strip-searching this girl in the middle of class. That can't be me. And this is the only place to find her, because of that damned spell. I tune out the mutters as I re-stuff her bag and set it back, and go back to my own desk. There's one more thing to try before I turn Septimus and his army of lich-hunters loose on this place.