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 Posted: Sat Jan 05, 2013 2:10 pm
   Quote: For a long moment neither of them said anything. There was nothing to be said. He had failed, Nicholas realized, not only as a Grimm, but as a person; for he had been thinking of his Plague only in Plague terms, despite his constant insistence to the contrary. Claune did not like death—he was terrified of it. This seemed so fundamentally contrary to the nature of a Caedos Nicholas had never considered it as an option. Yet the evidence before him was clear. PLOT SUMMARY
Nicholas and Claune depart from the village in haste, fleeing the agitated mob of people who blame the doctor and his Plague for the long-delayed arrival of the disease. They arrive in Gadu, Imisus, where Nicholas finally meets Dr. Amory Kempe, becomes involved in Council of Sciences, establishes his own laboratory in the catacombs, and begins tutoring students in anatomy to support his research. Meanwhile Claune explores the Council headquarters and Trisica, familiarizing himself with other Grimms and Plagues; his experience had previously been limited to a single Putesco and Lady Hayat. He encounters Dr. Jannisari, whose stance on Plagues as inhuman monsters rekindles his deepest insecurities. Nicholas ultimately discovers that Claune's apparent interest in his dissections doesn't stem from a fascination with death, but rather a profound horror of it—and the idea of one day, as an Infitialis, being equipped to cause it…
[PRP] ere the falcon flies WINTER 1412-13
[SOLO] mementos WINTER 1412-13
[PRP] the fool and the fiddle WINTER 1412-13
[PRP] secret paths WINTER 1412-13
[PRP] a shipment of parsley SUMMER 1413
[SOLO] heart in hand, part i AUTUMN 1413
[SOLO] heart in hand, part ii AUTUMN 1413  
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Posted: Tue Mar 05, 2013 3:12 pm
ERE THE FALCON FLIES
Wherein Nicholas & Claune are rescued by Lady Hayat on their way to Gadu
WINTER 1412-13
- incomplete -
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Posted: Tue Mar 05, 2013 3:29 pm
 MEMENTOSWherein Nicholas and Claune are delayed on their way to Gadu
The evening was perfectly still; no wind stirred the bare branches or combed through the desiccated, snow-crusted grass, but the ragged clouds moved swiftly overhead, enveloping the retreating sky like the reaching fingers of a grasping hand. They had split open in one place on the horizon, revealing a long red wound that bathed everything in the sunset's molten light. The trees looked queerly bright against the inky clouds.
Nicholas, perched on an overturned crate, was beginning to have trouble reading. He turned the page and realized with a sinking heart that he had reached the article on arterial ligation. It was the same thing he had been reading so long ago—a year ago or more—when Isobel had brought Simon to him for stitches.
He folded the pages closed and replaced the medical journal among the remainders of his specimens. When he looked up, little had changed. The mules still grazed idly nearby, their harnesses clinking when they shifted, and the people gathered around the disabled wagon were a study in stark red light and shadow. Nicholas reflexively put his hand to his damaged shoulder and massaged it. He, of course, could offer nothing in the way of help.
Claune looked at him. Or rather, Claune's attention shifted to him, while his eyes remained largely fixed on the movements of the sky above. Nicholas wasn't sure how he knew—he supposed he was developing an instinct for the Plague's subtler behavior, of which there was very much indeed.
Their previous wagon had ejected them after its passengers had discovered Claune onboard. Fortunately, this one proved different. When the owner's wife had uncovered Claune by accident beneath a bit of sacking, her shriek of surprise had convinced Nicholas that they were, once again, doomed to find another means of transportation—but she had instead clasped the struggling Claune to her bosom and exclaimed, "Oh, you poor little dear!" Later, she regaled them with stories of the sugar stunted who lived at home with them ("Looks after our garden, the darling") and Claune no longer had to hide, though Nicholas privately suspected he would have preferred it to periodically being crushed against a housewife's voluminous breasts. Now he lay stretched out in the grass next to the crate, perhaps recuperating.
Nicholas considered him in the fading light. It had been a chore to convince him to remain unseen back in the village, but Claune had grown startlingly circumspect since their departure. Nicholas felt a quick, precise stab of unhappiness when he dwelled on the possible reasons why. The villagers had blamed Claune for the arrival of the plague, and by extension the deaths of his friends Isobel and Simon. Nicholas was not certain whether Claune had actually witnessed the children being immolated by the same angry mob that had roused to chase them out, but he thought it likely.
Just how much had he seen? How did one broach such a subject? And—Nicholas found this thought most troubling of all—did Claune blame himself for what had occurred?
Unexpectedly, the Plague's high, strange voice broke the silence.
"The doctor was far too morose
But, thank Panyma, his Plague was verbose—
As he sat still to brood
His Plague's words accrued
And assembled a balancing dose."
"Oh dear. I'm not brooding, am I?" Nicholas asked, and turned, with a small smile, to find Claune watching him.
"You are," Claune replied, regretfully. "I don't doubt I would find an egg under there, if I looked."
Nicholas opened his mouth to protest that sitting and reading a medical journal did not count as brooding, but upon further reflection realized that perhaps it did, if one were an ex-doctor and had been spending the past several minutes not reading but instead holding the stump (such as it was) of one's missing right arm. He let go and rested his hand in his lap. "Ah," he said. "Yes, point taken."
Claune stood on his head and regarded Nicholas upside down. His gaze slid to the open case containing the notes, journals, and the scant remainder of Nicholas's specimens, and then back to Nicholas. "How peculiar," he remarked to himself airily. "Surely there are moths or grubs or beetles crawling about nearby—and yet they go unmolested."
"Winter is a poor time to collect specimens, I'm afraid," Nicholas said. "That is," he added, feeling a nagging sense of guilt at the half-truth, "only certain types of moths cocoon overwinter, and most eggs hatch out in the spring."
"I look forward to discovering what's in yours, then," Claune replied.
Nicholas sighed, removed his glasses, and folded them one-handed with a deft, practiced twist of his fingers before stowing them in a breast pocket. Claune performed a desultory cartwheel. When he was finished he sat up and watched Nicholas in silence. The red evening light seemed to gentle the luminous foxfire-blue of his eyes, as if canceling out their glow behind fogged glass.
What was he thinking? Just as Nicholas could gaze out at the glinting, wrinkled skin of the ocean and remain wholly ignorant of the currents twisting beneath it, the millions of lives struggling to inhabit it, so too could he look at Claune and determine nothing of what lay under the surface; Claune's eyes were not windows to the soul but mirrors, reflecting all, revealing nothing. For all he knew Claune could be amusing himself by inventing more limericks. He wondered, sadly, if this lack of connection was his failing as a Grimm.
"Claune," he began carefully, "are you all right?"
"No," Claune replied, startling Nicholas immensely; he hadn't expected an answer. But the Plague continued, "I am only half right. The other half is, of course, my left."
***
Some hours later, when the mended wagon once again rocked into motion, Nicholas looked over at Claune on his shoulder and noticed something by the weak moonlight he had not noticed before: a pair of long, dark hairs wound about the Plague's wrist, peeking out from under the tattered edge of his sleeve.
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Posted: Thu Mar 07, 2013 1:42 pm
THE FOOL AND THE FIDDLE
Wherein Nicholas & Claune meet Dr. Amory Kempe & Rene, a stunted
WINTER 1412-13
- incomplete -
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Posted: Thu Mar 07, 2013 3:06 pm
AMPHIPYRA PALLENS
An excerpt from Nicholas's notes June 15, 1412 First generation
A. pallens typica - 8
A. pallens carbonaria - 23
38 larvae gathered between Clearbarrow and Windcoast
5 specimens perished as larvae, 2 additional specimens failed to complete metamorphosis
White (typica) and sooty (carbonaria) sub-types isolated immediately post-metamorphosis
Carbonaria/typica crosses have previously shown to produce viable offspring in earlier experiments
Both groups fed identical mixed diet of common nettle, blueweed, and common dandelion
September 26, 1412 Second generation
A. pallens typica group:
A. pallens typica - 31
A. pallens carbonaria - 0
A. pallens carbonaria group:
A. pallens typica - 3
A. pallens carbonaria - 69
Conclusions:
A. pallens typica group consisting of 8 specimens produced a total of 31 offspring, 30 typica and 0 carbonaria
A. pallens carbonaria group consisting of 23 specimens produced a total of 72 offspring, 3 typica and 69 carbonaria
Carbonaria/carbonaria crosses are capable of producing typica offspring; opposite unproven; more data required
January 4, 2013 Data lost
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Posted: Mon Dec 02, 2013 8:02 pm
SECRET PATHS
Wherein Claune, exploring Trisica, encounters the formidable Dr. Jannisari
WINTER 1412-13
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Posted: Fri Dec 06, 2013 9:32 am
A SHIPMENT OF PARSLEY
Wherein Jin Ho delivers a shipment of parsley, and Claune and Blaithe become acquainted
SUMMER 1413
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Posted: Tue Dec 17, 2013 12:03 pm
HEART IN HAND, PART IWherein Nicholas tutors a student in anatomy, and the unexpected occurs
"Do you have a grip on its legs?" Nicholas asked. "Then on the count of three: one, two, three," and together he and Bernard Babcock heaved the dead sheep onto the dissection table.
Nicholas had been occupying this laboratory since spring; it was small, but unlike most of the underground rooms in the Council's catacombs had a narrow window set into the top of the wall against the ceiling, which afforded a view of the feet of students passing by on their way to Trisica. Every once in a while a particularly curious undergraduate crouched down to peer inside, especially when Claune sat on the sill and sang. The high, sweet, strange sound of his voice proved irresistible to passers-by—Nicholas suspected his Plague was responsible for more than a few missed classes, and furthermore suspected that that was Claune's aim all along.
He hadn't put a stop to the habit as it was one of the few ways Claune managed to entertain himself during Nicholas's long hours. He remained utterly disinterested in anatomy, medicine, and natural biology, and though he had never complained outright Nicholas received the impression he loathed the subterranean closeness of the laboratory. Moreover the students were responsible for their own affairs, and if they were tardy it was no one's fault but their own.
Even so Nicholas could not shake the occasional pang of guilt, for there was music, and then there was Claune. He had traveled the world and never heard anything more heartbreakingly beautiful than the sound of his Caedos' voice; there was nothing like it in any church, in any corner of Profugus, in any of the exquisite designs of man or nature. Nicholas had once seen a student so overcome by the sound that he had burst into tears on the spot. If not for the fact that Claune delighted in concluding his soaring performances with somersaults, dirty limericks, and detailed imitations of flatulence, his audiences might be fooled into thinking he sang with the voice of Panyma Herself.
"Very good," Nicholas said, once Bernard had finished tying down the sheep's ankles to the nails at the corners of the table. "Now take the scalpel, the large one there, and cut in a straight line all the way down the belly. Yes, there—no, a bit harder—through the muscle beneath the skin."
"Like this?" Bernard asked.
"Here," Nicholas said, placed his hand atop Bernard's, and pushed down. The severing of the tissue made a sound not unlike slicing into a hollow and slightly rotten pumpkin, and Bernard's complexion went a touch green.
"What if I…"
"The sheep is quite dead, Babcock; it isn't going to notice if you nick something. And the carcass was drained this morning, so there won't be much blood to contend with."
"Right," Bernard said. His prominent Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed. He was a tall, spindly, nervous youth, with pale blonde hair thinning prematurely at the temples, a protuberant nose, a weak chin, and a tendency toward rosacea; all of these combined gave him the look, Claune had once observed, of a recently plucked chicken. Nicholas privately thought his efforts were wasted, as the boy was proving to possess neither the skills nor the stomach for science and would be a great deal less miserable as a student of logic where, based on their conversations, Nicholas believed his true potential lay untapped.
But his very wealthy and influential father was determined that his youngest son receive an education in Plagueology ("And become a Grimm himself one day," as if this were a thing a man could achieve through study and connections alone), and thus Nicholas was tasked with rescuing Bernard's grades in anatomy—and being paid a handsome enough tutoring fee to impose a halting silence on his moral objections.
How, Nicholas wondered, had he gone from a man of principle to the kind of person who felt no qualms forcing an unwilling nineteen-year-old to hack apart a dead sheep for money? A year and a half ago he would have written Lord Babcock a stern letter and washed his hands of the matter. But then a year and a half ago he hadn't had Claune, or the Council, or anything at all to lose.
"Excellent work," he said, perhaps more charitably than Bernard's crooked incision deserved. "Now two more lateral cuts, here and here, and the same again on the left. When you're finished we'll lay the flaps aside—you recall we had to use pins with the frog, but in this case, and in the case of human cadavers, the weight of the tissue will hold them down nicely on their own."
Nicholas heard a faint tinkle from behind him. He glanced over his shoulder to see Claune stealing through the labyrinth of papers on his desk for a better view. The Plague had watched all of his dissections so far with a silent, fixed absorption that Nicholas had at first found cheering—being possibly indicative of a newfound interest in his work—and then gradually disturbing as Claune offered no explanation for the practice, and the possibility had dawned on him that the Plague might simply be interested in the spectacle of death and gore.
Up until this point Nicholas had only had Bernard and the other students dissect smaller organisms like insects, frogs, and rats; Claune's morbid fascination, if that was indeed what it was, would be satisfied today in spades.
"Next we'll open up the ribcage," he said, turning away, "and remove the most important organs for preservation. Unless you have any preference I think it would be best to start with the heart and lungs tomorrow."
"Can't we just get them over with now?" Bernard asked, staring at the saw Nicholas had handed him in dismay.
"I'm afraid taking apart the specimen will require the rest of our time," he replied, deciding against mentioning that when they were finished with this part they would move on to extracting the brain. He'd deal with that when they came to it. "And of course we need to get everything tidied up today; all of this will be in a sorry state by tomorrow."
"Of course," Bernard said weakly, and leaned over the carcass with the saw held as far away from his own body as possible.
Nicholas sighed. "I'll take one end, and we can do it together. Again, on three—"
Bernard's face was very green indeed by the time they had unevenly scraped their way through the sternum, which at the end parted beneath the saw-blade with a meaty crack. Nicholas spared another glance toward Claune, only to catch the Plague partway through enacting a dramatic swoon against an inkwell.
"If you would be so kind as to go to the other side and steady the abdomen for me," Nicholas said, retrieved the scalpel, and once Bernard had complied inserted his hand into the slimy cavity to sever the ribcage's connective tissue. When he was finished he took hold of the nearest half of the ribcage and pulled it down; there came a loud wet crunch of cartilage as the ribs detached.
It was followed by a chime—a pause—and a tiny thud.
To be continued
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Posted: Tue Dec 31, 2013 12:26 pm
HEART IN HAND, PART IIWherein Nicholas learns he has been wrong about his Plague all along
Bernard looked beyond Nicholas in astonishment. "Um," he said.
For a moment Nicholas did not move. He stared at Claune lying facedown on the floor with his cold, sticky hand poised in the air above the sheep, waiting for the excito to spring back upright and bow at them, perform a cartwheel or a handstand—
Nothing happened. Claune really had fainted, and subsequently fallen off the desk a distance eight or nine times his own height.
He hurried to the equipment table, dumped his hand in the basin of water there, and fumbled it dry with a cloth on his way over. "Claune," he said urgently, and after tossing the cloth aside picked up the Plague and turned him over; one of his arms slipped limply between Nicholas's fingers. His head lolled. If not for the faint blue glow emanating from his mouth—little more than a sliver now—and the crescents of his eyes, one might easily mistake him for a lifeless doll.
He finally stirred. "Ah," he said, his voice feeble, thin, and high, and lifted one hand. He turned his slender fingers before his face as if to evaluate his vision. "There are two of you," he declared.
"Are you hurt?"
"Am I what? Am I pert? Yes, thank you; I am."
The tension went out of Nicholas's shoulders. He could not recall ever having experienced such a unique combination of relief and exasperation before in his life.
"No, that wasn't it," Claune went on. "Did you ask me if I'm curt? Overt? Dessert? Or—an invert?"
Nicholas cleared his throat.
"Do I ever squirt?" he continued blithely.
"You seem to be in working order," Nicholas said.
Claune narrowed his eyes. "No, there aren't two of you after all. I was utterly mistaken. What is that?" He made an effort to stand up, then collapsed. He shrank back against Nicholas's hand in an exaggerated facsimile of horror and disgust. "What is that creature looming above you?" His voice broke theatrically.
Nicholas looked up to see poor Bernard hovering over his shoulder. "I'm very sorry," he said, weary. "Would you mind making up the rest of our time tomorrow? I'll finish this up after you've gone."
"Absolutely, sir," Bernard said, with more enthusiasm at being dismissed than Nicholas typically liked to see from a pupil, and fled.
Nicholas carried Claune over to the desk and sat down. "I have no idea how I'm going to fulfill that promise," he confessed. "I think I can manage most of the rest on my own, given enough time, but sawing open a skull requires two steady hands."
"What a pity," the Plague replied. "If only you were five inches tall—then you could do anything you wanted."
Nicholas smiled. "I'm sorry. I don't have any right to complain, do I?"
Claune was silent for a moment. He looked away. "You smell of sheep intestines," he said eventually, and climbed from Nicholas's hand onto the desk.
Nicholas watched him closely. He could not, he knew, ask after Claune's health a second time—as usual the Plague had dismissed his efforts, and trying again would offend him—but there didn't seem to be anything amiss to his movements, any hint of stiffness or hesitation, that would indicate pain. Amory was right; Plagues were resilient creatures. However, there was still the matter of what had brought on the spell to begin with.
"It isn't unusual," Nicholas began, "for people to pass out in these types of situations. Even students who go on to become accomplished surgeons."
"I'm not a human," Claune said tartly.
"But you are a person."
Claune sat down on a stack of papers and pulled his knees against his chest like a child. He put one of his hands inside the opposite sleeve and stroked his wrist. Nicholas couldn't see it now, but he'd caught glimpses of the material the Plague had fashioned into a bracelet, and he knew of only one person Claune had encountered before Gadu with hair so long and so dark. Those strands had belonged to Isobel. Had she given them to him—or had he yanked them out in a fit of pique, only to later transform them into his most treasured possession?
He could not guess at what his Plague was thinking. Claune was remarkably expressive, but the luminous blue pits of his eyes held little affect when he wasn't purposefully contorting them in the pursuit of his theatrics. Even so it was clear Nicholas had upset him somehow: by suggesting he was like a human? Claune had reacted strangely to similar conversations before in the past. Nicholas knew the Plague experienced emotions just as fiercely as a human might, perhaps to an even greater extreme, but it was possible he did not like being compared to them all the same—that he was developing a disdain for humanity, as Nicholas had heard was the case with some Plagues.
"You've seen an Infitialis," Claune said finally, staring straight ahead, with a strange tightness in his voice and posture. "Have you not?"
Nicholas had told the Plague little of the Council meeting the winter before last, and he chose his words carefully. "Yes, but only from a distance. They were—"
"Ghastly? Monstrous? I hear they have claws and pointed teeth."
He looked at Claune in surprise. When he disparaged something directly, he rarely meant it. He preferred to couch his real opinions in riddles and rhymes instead, so Nicholas was forced to focus his undivided attention on the matter to puzzle it out. But this was different. What, then, was he up to? What was he trying to lead Nicholas into saying, and why? The Grimm knew from past experience that any answer at a time like this could be disastrous. Once Claune had elaborately coaxed him into admitting the Plague's clothes were a bit shabby-looking, yes, and Claune hadn't spoken to him for a week.
Nicholas gazed across the room. He felt very tired. "Some of them," he replied, deciding simply to be honest. "Every anhelo is different. Infitialis do, in general, tend to have a fiercer aspect."
"Ah, so I thought: the outer reflects the inner. How do you imagine I'm going to infect people with the plague when I am grown?" Claune inquired, with all the lighthearted carelessness Nicholas had privately feared from Claune's first moment as an excito, when he had seen that his charge possessed glowing eyes in an ink-dark face.
The matter had to be addressed, no matter how reluctant Nicholas was to discuss it. He was raising a being that would one day be able to kill in the most terrible of ways with a touch, a word, a thought. But how did one impress the seriousness of killing upon a being such as a Plague, itself made from death, and despite all its cleverness still less than a year of age?
Nicholas took a breath, steeling himself. "Claune," he said sternly. He looked down.
And saw that the Plague was looking back up at him, his eyes blank with abject misery, and his hand wrapped around his wrist so tightly it was shaking.
For a long moment neither of them said anything. There was nothing to be said. He had failed, Nicholas realized, not only as a Grimm, but as a person; for he had been thinking of his Plague only in Plague terms, despite his constant insistence to the contrary. Claune did not like death—he was terrified of it. This seemed so fundamentally contrary to the nature of a Caedos Nicholas had never considered it as an option. Yet the evidence before him was clear.
Claune had seen Isobel brought down by the plague. He was made of the very thing that killed her, and he wore her hairs around his wrist.
Nicholas fought the urge to close his eyes in despair.
In the silence he moved his hand closer. He had come to learn that Claune would refuse comfort if it were offered directly, but was often receptive to small, sideways kindnesses, ones that he might either reject or accept with his dignity and privacy intact. The Plague hesitated only a moment before crawling into the space within Nicholas's curled fingers, beneath his palm, and curling up inside.
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Posted: Tue Dec 31, 2013 12:33 pm
 Quote: With four peas and a piece of carrot, Claune had stopped being dangerous. Good, he thought, for it was better to be a fool than a monster. PLOT SUMMARY
Nicholas receives the unexpected news that his father, whom he hasn't spoken to in seventeen years, is dying—along with a heartfelt plea to return to his childhood home in Mildell. An awkward reunion ensues, and Claune makes a useful discovery. Full summary coming soon!
[SOLO] root of orris WINTER 1413-14
[SOLO] the journey home WINTER 1413-14
[SOLO] the silver spoon WINTER 1413-14
[SOLO] an abandoned violin WINTER 1413-14
[SOLO] better a fool WINTER 1413-14
[SOLO] old man isambard WINTER 1413-14
[SOLO] in a name WINTER 1413-14
[SOLO] goodbye, farewell WINTER 1413-14
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Posted: Tue Dec 31, 2013 12:43 pm
ROOT OF ORRISWherein Nicholas receives a letter containing unfortunate news
A rap came on the door. Nicholas, lost in his notes, almost didn't hear it. One more sentence—and then he would get up to see who it was.
"You do know," Claune said from his shoulder some unidentifiable amount of time later, "that whoever knocked has surely left by now."
"Of course," Nicholas replied vaguely, and then, "What?" and left a splatter of ink across his paper as he hastily extricated himself from the tiny writing desk and crossed the room in three long steps. The hallway outside was empty. He was about to turn away again when he caught sight of the crate sitting on the floor.
"Oh, good," Nicholas said cheerfully, reaching down to lift it by its twine. "Pupae!"
"Of all the Grimms I could have had," Claune sighed.
"You never know; you could have ended up with Dr. Jannisari," Nicholas replied. Claune had told him a little of his encounter with the professor—omitting, Nicholas was certain, a generous number of compromising details—and even then his tone was slightly wistful. By all accounts Jannisari was a brilliant woman, and he'd never had the chance to meet her. Furthermore, after witnessing time and time again the affect Claune had on people, especially those less than enthused by the prospect of sitting through a half-hour marathon of increasingly rude limericks, he was privately convinced that the misadventure had been largely of his own making.
The Plague gave a tiny, chiming shudder.
Nicholas advanced on the desk before realizing it was covered in an avalanche of notes, some of which still gleamed with wet ink, and turned toward his bed instead.
"No! No. No specimens on the bed," Claune said, his voice going high with only partially feigned distress.
"Claune—"
"You may be married to your work, but must I be forced to sleep with it?"
Nicholas could spend all afternoon trying to convince Claune that he wasn't going to get any moths in the blankets (and probably fail), or he could just put the crate somewhere else. He chose the more expedient option. His old, splintering, flat-topped trunk, which had traveled with him across the oceans of Profugus and nearly from one end of Panymium to the other, often ended up functioning as a makeshift table in times of need. Seconds later he had braced one side of the crate against his knee and made swift work of prying open its lid.
As he had expected it was packed with straw and tiny cloth bundles, each one wrapped by Eliza's careful hand. She wasn't an expert at identifying Ampiphyra pallens cocoons, but the species was common near Mildell and the results of her labor more often than not proved fruitful. And, as was often the case, a letter lay neatly across the top of the straw.
Nicholas picked it up and unfolded it, and when he did a faint smell wafted out—a smell of violets—which stripped away the weight of the present like an old coat and left him a boy again, standing in a sunlit parlor at once achingly familiar and terribly strange, its details blurred by the passage of time and the distortion of memory. He hadn't smelled this perfume since the day he graduated from Trisica. It belonged to his mother.
He finished opening the letter as if in a dream.
Dearest Nicholas, it read, in Cassandra's flowery handwriting and old-fashioned style,
I write to you with the greatest trepidation, not knowing whether you will be in the mood to receive this letter, or indeed whether you will receive it at all. Eliza was kind enough to see it included in her shipment to your address in Gadu, but indicated the residence might be temporary—
Here Nicholas, even in his preoccupation, spared a guilty thought for the shabby room he and his Plague were still staying in; the same room he had rented out on his first night in the city, giving Claune distracted assurances that they would soon find better lodgings as he prepared to dash back outside, late to his meeting with Amory.
I have heard such dreadful things from her: that you lost your right arm at sea, and have now been burdened with a Plague of the least desirable variety; but your return to Imisus gives me hope that you are happy and in good health, as every Mother wishes for her Son. Unfortunately I write to you now because your Father is not. He has lately been forced to discontinue his practice in Pwlanarfyll, and rest and gentle care have done nothing to improve his weakening constitution. I beg you to return to Mildell at the earliest occasion…
Nicholas let the top fold of the letter flop down over his fingers.
"So?" Claune asked impatiently, climbing out of the crate with another bundle of specimens. He was setting them in neat white rows on the trunk like the bodies of soldiers slain in battle.
When had he started doing that? The last time a shipment of specimens had arrived, or the time before? It was kind of him, and Nicholas had never bothered to notice or remark upon the new habit. He usually had so many other things on his mind.
"Nicholas?" the Plague prompted, a trifle warily. He had stopped now to look.
"It appears my father is dying," Nicholas replied. His voice was calm. "How do you feel about returning to Mishkan?"
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Posted: Tue Dec 31, 2013 12:45 pm
THE JOURNEY HOMEWherein Nicholas and Claune arrive in Mildell
Claune sometimes dreamed of shipwrecks at the bottom of the sea. Their naked masts were festooned with strings of algae, and their railings had calcified into pale wintry shapes beneath layers of encrusting sediment. The first time he'd seen snow come down in Imisus thick enough to coat the trees the sight had filled him with scrabbling terror. But traveling by carriage out of Gadu a week and a half ago, the spectacle of the laden branches had only inspired a faint twinge of unease deep in his stomach; or whatever he possessed in place of one, if he possessed anything there at all.
Almost a year to the day had passed since their original flight out of Mishkan, and the weather was the same. Claune remembered the quilted gray lambswool of the clouds, the way the sterile winter sunsets bathed the bare trees in reddish light. Every once in a while a southeasterly wind blew from Auvinus, rich with the scent of turned earth after sweeping over miles of open farmland. The last time Claune had smelled it it had been tainted by the sweet, enticing aroma of death.
"Just because you will have the potential to do harm one day," Nicholas had said after the incident with the sheep, "doesn't mean your purpose is to inflict it upon others. Any person can pick up a sword and hurt someone with it. It's the choice that matters."
Claune had remained silent within the warmth of his Grimm's fingers, unable or unwilling to explain that on a certain level the choice was already made for him. People weren't born holding swords. Even if he never meant to use it, he would always have it in his hand.
You, Plague, are inhuman.
The carriage bumped over a rut in the dirt road, and the book Nicholas was reading flew out of his lap. He sighed, went to retrieve it, and then did a double-take and looked back out the window.
"That's Mildell in the distance," he said, in a way which not only suggested he wasn't speaking to Claune, but that for a moment he had forgotten about the Plague's presence entirely.
Claune knew a little bit about the history between Nicholas and his parents. His Grimm rarely discussed his youth, but Claune had taken the pieces he had heard and filled in the rest. Nicholas was estranged from his mother and father; they had wanted him to marry and join his father's practice; he had run off to sea; and afterwards his father had excised him from the inheritance like a stubborn boil. It must be strange for him to return now, so many years later, and see the shape of his childhood home on the horizon.
Did his parents miss him? Did they still love him?
No one can love Nicholas more than I, thought Claune, and leapt nimbly from the windowsill to climb onto Nicholas's shoulder.
An hour or two later the carriage pulled up a narrow cobbled lane on the outskirts of the city. There before them was a white half-timbered house with an overgrown garden spilling out behind it, a marmalade cat lurking within the hedge. Claune could easily imagine Nicholas there hunting for insects. But try as he might he could not imagine Nicholas as a boy.
For a moment his thoughts seemed to drift outside his body. He was holding onto Nicholas's ear for balance as the carriage jounced over the cobblestones, but he stopped feeling it in his hand.
Nicholas had been a child once. He had had a whole life before Claune, and here was the proof of it. There were other people who cared about him, who had far older and greater claims on him than Claune: his mother, his father, Eliza... what was Claune's year and two months in the full reckoning of Nicholas's thirty-nine?
A blink—a sigh—a trifle.
And if he decided he had liked the other thirty-eight better—what then?
A woman stood in front of the house. She was pale, perhaps sixty years of age and less beautiful than she had once been, with long gray hair and a strange air of distracted, wistful fragility, as if an invisible door to her youth yawned just beside her and she was doing her best to ignore it. She stared fixedly at the approaching carriage with her hands folded against her stomach. Claune knew that from the outside the sunlight would make it difficult for someone to see through the carriage's windows, but he felt as if she were staring straight in at him all the same, through glass and wood, taking in his measure.
The carriage turned and rattled to a stop. The driver jumped down with a thud to see to Nicholas's bags.
Nicholas rose more stiffly than even their days of travel could account for and ducked through the door into the light. Cassandra—for the woman could only be his mother—stood watching him like a statue. Claune could see the wet glitter of the sun on her eyes shift slightly (brown, very unlike his Grimm's) as they moved to take Nicholas in: his arm, the Plague. He must look terribly changed from the son she had once had, and she different to him in turn. If Claune's estimate was correct she had been close to the age Nicholas was now the last time he had seen her.
He couldn't help but wonder if it would be like this when he grew—the uncomfortable staring silence, the unexpected feeling of having become a stranger to the person who knew him best. And when Nicholas truly realized that Claune was an Infitialis, not a harmless Caedos, not a human, not a person—
For a heartbeat Cassandra looked as if she might turn around and leave.
Then she unfroze with a movement like a flowerhead dipping in the wind and rushed to Nicholas, and wrapped him up in a whispering embrace; or at least that was how it sounded to Claune, who was trapped beneath a cascading pile of her hair.
"Oh, Nicholas," she said. "My little boy. My little boy."
It was a funny thing to say to a man nearing four decades of age, but the way she said it made it not funny at all. Claune had never heard a person speak like that before. It sounded as if her voice had taken a mortal wound, or as if she had just learned that Nicholas had died, even though he was standing right here. No one can… the Plague wanted her to stop.
He reached up and tugged on a lock of her hair like a bell pull.
"Oh!" she said again, but in a very different tone, and pulled away. She made a hurried attempt to dab away her tears with the backs of her sleeves. When she was finished she looked at Claune. It was clear she didn't know what to say.
Claune, for once, didn't know what to say either.
"Mother," Nicholas intervened, "this is Claune, my charge. Claune—Cassandra."
Cassandra looked between Nicholas and the Plague, summoned a wan smile (very like his Grimm's) and said "It's wonderful to meet you?" in a slow and questioning tone, apparently under the impression that Claune might not be able to understand it otherwise.
"Well, I don't know," Claune replied, as if it had been a question after all. "I suppose you'll have to find out. Do you have any particular aversion to limericks?"
Cassandra's smile took on a bemused quality. "I don't think so. I've never had the occasion to hear many of them."
Claune clasped his hands to his breast and stared at her with an expression of fatuous wonder.
Nicholas cleared his throat uneasily. "I advise you not to encourage him," he said, as they began to make halting progress toward the house in the awkward way of two people, newly acquainted, torn between the equal demands of movement and conversation. Cassandra kept trying to look at Nicholas's right shoulder without Nicholas noticing. Nicholas noticed, but politely pretended otherwise.
"Isambard will want to know you've arrived," Cassandra said vaguely, and paused before the door. It appeared she was quickly becoming overwhelmed by their presence. She had a translucent quality now, as if she might fade away and vanish through the wall like a ghost. She must not, Claune thought, interact with new people very often.
"Nicholas, I wanted to tell you—" she went on "—in person, not in writing—that I forgave you long ago. It all seems so foolish now, that business with Eliza…"
"It's quite all right, Mother," Nicholas said gently.
"No, it's not all right. If I had known how long—" Her hand tightened on the doorknob. "And with you and Eliza writing to one another the whole time! How absurd!"
The corners of Nicholas's mouth thinned ruefully. "I would have written to you as well, if it weren't for the suspicion Isambard was waiting at the door to intercept the letters and burn them."
An odd look crossed Cassandra's face. Then, to Claune's surprise, she let out a sudden peal of brittle laughter. "Oh," she said, "yes, he sat in a chair next to the window every morning for months, looking down the lane. He tried so hard to convince himself he'd done the right thing. And just look where it's gotten us."
As she spoke she opened the door, and out of it came a great exhalation of death.
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Posted: Tue Dec 31, 2013 12:48 pm
THE SILVER SPOONWherein Claune tells Nicholas a lie
Claune had known in theory that houses like this existed, but he had never been inside one. He was accustomed to the vastness of the Council headquarters and Trisica, the cramped, cluttered space of the room Nicholas rented in Gadu and the shack they had lived in before then, but nothing in between. The Glasses, as far as he knew, were only moderately wealthy, endowed with the inheritance Cassandra had received from her merchant father in place of her mother and brother, who had both passed away when she was young, and her scant handful of distant relatives. But to Claune they seemed very wealthy indeed.
He stared down from Nicholas's shoulder at an array of silver spoons and knives lain out on a cabinet, as if someone had forgotten about them in the middle of polishing. He could see his own glowing blue eyes reflected back at him in the dozens, like fairy lights, through the thin patina of dust.
Nicholas caught him looking and an expression of flagging unhappiness settled over his features. He was probably comparing the silver spoons to the cracked wooden ones he used at home. Perhaps he was remembering, again, that he still hadn't moved them out of the tiny room in the boarding house as he had promised long ago. "What do you think?" he asked Claune.
The urge to say something hurtful to Nicholas rose like bile in his throat. The two of them might live in a home like this if his Grimm weren't so forgetful, so absorbed in his work above all else; he was realizing now that he had raised Claune like a pauper, unnecessarily so, in places dismal enough that the Plague had become neurotic about his work finally running out of space, crossing the very last embattled front, and invading the bedclothes. It would only take a few words to make Nicholas miserable—and this time he nearly deserved it.
Claune just wished he didn't have that look on his face.
"It's horrid," the Plague lied, his voice going a bit shrill with the effort. "Altogether too large, and why do your parents have so many spoons? What do they do with them? Are they hoping enough dust will accumulate to allow them to take root and sprout?"
Nicholas shook his head and smiled at the same moment his mother reemerged from the darkened bedchamber down the hall. The smile fell from his face. Cassandra waited until she reached them to speak.
"He's still asleep; he often is this time of day. I'm certain he'll be well enough to join us for dinner. Sarah has prepared your old room, and Richard's brought up your things, if you…"
Cassandra continued talking, but Claune had stopped listening. The smell of sickness creeping down the hallway was more potent now that the door had been opened. It wasn't as attractive to him as the odor of the plague, but it was pleasant all the same. What was it? One of the wasting diseases his Grimm often mentioned?
"Richard?" he heard Nicholas say as if from a distance.
"Oh, our new gardener—he began working for us a few years ago."
"Did Franklin manage to get a job in the city? Good for him; I know he didn't like spending so much time away from his family."
Claune was still paying minimal attention to their forced small talk, but when a second passed without Cassandra delivering her reply, and then another, and a third, the Plague shook off the smell's soporific effect to find her staring at him. She looked away again quickly.
"Well," she said, "you know, things have changed since you left. Franklin and his family, they…"
"Died of the plague?" Claune interrupted, tiring of her reluctance to get to the point.
Cassandra hesitated, then nodded. Claune couldn't tell whether the alarm in her eyes was for him, a creature that might—as far as she knew—revel in such deaths, or for the possibility that she had committed a social blunder by bringing up the disease in his presence. He suspected a combination of both.
"Alas, how terrible," he said gravely. He pressed one of his hands to his heart, as if he were overwhelmed by the shock of the news. "My condolences." Nicholas shot him a warning glance, but Cassandra didn't appear to notice the theatricalism and took his words at face value. She smiled faintly, relieved.
"I'm glad you think so," she said nearly in a whisper, in the way of someone confiding a secret, and reached forward to tuck one of the belled ears of Claune's hat behind his shoulder. Claune stood still. Why had she done that? He didn't like for people other than Nicholas to touch him, but it had been an oddly tender gesture; it was something Nicholas had never done before, and would never think of doing. Was Cassandra being patronizing? No, he decided, looking up at her face. She was smiling. Her eyes looked kind.
Then why?
They retreated back down the hall. "I hear such dreadful rumors about Plagues," she went on, alighting her thin papery fingers against the wall often, as if she needed the contact for balance or reassurance. They had felt like moth's wings against his cheek. "I've never met one before, you see, living out here in the middle of nowhere. Nicholas has probably told you we live in Mildell, but as you've doubtless noticed that's not really the case…" Claune thought 'the middle of nowhere' was an astonishing example of hyperbole, but chose not to belabor the point. "But even so I've always found it improbable—you know, what some people say—that all Plagues are wicked creatures."
Nicholas laughed, a dry sound. "Having encountered all sorts of Plagues over the past two years, I can assure you their personalities are at least as variable as those of humans."
"You poor dears," Cassandra said to Claune. "Us humans didn't choose to be made from mud, either. I suppose it's Panyma's way of keeping us humble."
"It doesn't seem to work on most of you," Claune observed.
"Oh," she said, and then laughed. "No, it doesn't, does it? Well, I should see how Sarah's getting along. Nicholas, will you be all right, with…?"
"Mother, if I had not learned how to change my clothes with one arm yet I would be in a very sorry state indeed," he replied patiently, looking faintly embarrassed.
"Yes, of course. It's just—I've been trying not to mention it, but—" Cassandra looked close to tears again.
"I shall fasten his buttons if he needs it," Claune said, because she seemed to require an assurance that her son would be taken care of, however unnecessarily, before she would go away.
"Good," she breathed. "All right. Well!" She injected some wispy, false-sounding cheer into her voice. "I'll be downstairs if anyone needs me!" She reached a hand toward Nicholas, an abortive gesture, and then left.
Claune watched her go. He placed his hand to his own cheek. Why?
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Posted: Tue Dec 31, 2013 12:55 pm
AN ABANDONED VIOLINWherein a relic of the past is abandoned by both parties
Nicholas's room was about the size of their room in Gadu and looked as if it hadn't been altered—aside from being tidied, Claune was certain—since his Grimm's departure. If it were someone else's room Claune would have assumed that it had been cleaned out of most of its personal effects, but he knew Nicholas wasn't one to accumulate excess belongings, and so the bareness of the walls, the dresser, the bedside table came as little surprise to him. The shelves next to the window contained a few objects of interest: a stack of sheet music, a violin case, books (most of them with titles suggesting anatomy and medicine), a jar of potpourri that looked as if it had never been opened (no doubt Cassandra's touch), and some rather whimsical drawings of insects. The packs Nicholas had brought with him were arranged neatly on the bed.
While his Grimm changed out of his traveling clothes Claune went to the shelf and climbed up. The violin case's leather was dull, cracked, and covered in dust. He waited until he was sure Nicholas wasn't looking and pried open the latches to peer within. A smell of rosin and polish came out at him; the violin's wood shone in the dimness. Someone had been taking care of it all these years. Now that he knew what to look for he could see the ghosts of old fingerprints around the latches where a person had opened it again and again at intervals, disturbing the layers of dust. He closed it silently.
When Nicholas turned around again Claune was on the bed, examining the holes in Nicholas's luggage with a critical air. Noticing his Grimm's attention, he stuck an arm straight through a particularly egregious one and waggled his fingers. "What a sad state of affairs," he said. "I think your mother is right to worry."
"That wasn't there when we left, was it?" Nicholas leaned forward and fished his glasses out of his breast pocket for a better look.
"Yes, it was," Claune replied. "And that one, and that one too. I'll sew them up before we leave if Cassandra has any needles and spare thread."
Nicholas looked at him over the rims of his glasses. "You can sew?" he asked doubtfully.
Claune gave Nicholas a tart [removed](not feigned) and lifted up his arm by way of demonstration. Some months ago he had mended the tears on his sleeve's hem, and kept redoing them every few days when the threads began pulling out; there seemed to be some property to his clothing which resisted permanent change. Naturally Nicholas had never noticed, even after Claune had hinted at it persistently, which had just made him eventually say "yes, your clothes are a bit shabby, aren't they?" as an afterthought in between recording how many times his moths had pooped that hour, or whatever it was he was working on. Claune had refused to speak to him for the rest of the week.
"Hmm," Nicholas hedged, and then, with a note of surprise, "Oh, the hems do look better."
"Yes, they do," said Claune.
"Where did you learn how?"
Claune folded his arms. "I taught myself to sew, if you must know; I expect it comes as a blow, to discover that your witless ward can learn—"
Against his expectations Nicholas gave a single laugh of astonishment. "I'm terribly lucky to have ended up with such a clever Plague," he said. "I'll go ask Cassandra about supplies."
"Or you could just buy new luggage, and save me the trouble," Claune said testily, climbing into one of the bags; but when Nicholas realized the Plague had done so to seek out the locations of more holes, he smiled and left him to it.
Claune listened carefully to his Grimm's footsteps across the room. He imagined him going to the shelves, picking up his old violin, and looking at it. He knew Nicholas would have waited until he was certain his Plague wasn't watching to do this. A moment later, sure enough: the soft, muffled click of the case's latches opening. The soft, muffled click of them being closed again. More footsteps, and a quiet scraping noise from the floor. Claune jigged about, bells chiming, to give the impression he wasn't paying attention.
"I'll be gone just a moment," Nicholas said.
Claune waited until Nicholas's steps had receded to emerge from the bag. The violin was gone. He slid down one of the bed's legs and peered underneath it, where years of dust had formed clotted shapes that clung here and there to invisible drifts of cobweb. There was a patched and worn old rug, and beneath that something peeking out—a corner of the violin case. Nicholas had hidden it from sight.
He hadn't been able to bear looking at it.
Claune couldn't stay under the bed for long. Nicholas will come back soon, he thought, but still did not move. The violin looked lonely there by itself beneath the rug. He crept over to it and gently stroked the case. A flake of leather came off in his hand. He smoothed it back into place, and then on impulse kissed it, as if it were a child with a scrape. Claune had only been kissed once in his life—on the top of his hat by Simon, who had sometimes labored under the delusion that he was some kind of doll or pet. The experience had been wet and not particularly pleasant. Cassandra must have kissed Nicholas often when he was a boy, Claune thought. She was a demonstrative person, unlike his Grimm.
In the distance, he heard Nicholas's steps coming back up the stairs.
Claune's hand slid from the case. "Better you than I," he whispered to the abandoned violin, and fled.
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Posted: Fri Jan 03, 2014 1:48 pm
BETTER A FOOLWherein Claune learns a new trick
Isambard came to dinner.
There had been so much buildup to his introduction that Claune wasn't sure what he had been expecting, but it wasn't this: a withered old weed of a man being helped along by the gloomy-looking Richard, his steps shuffling, flesh waxen, clothes and skin hanging from his whittled-down frame. He had obviously lost a great deal of weight very quickly. Based on Nicholas's reaction—shock and dismay, quickly stifled—Claune knew the specter before them wasn't the Isambard of old. But it was clear by the sharpness in his rheumy blue eyes that his illness was restricted to his body alone.
The first thing he said to his son upon being seated was, "How did you lose it?"
Nicholas took a measured breath. "An infected shrapnel wound from cannon-fire," he replied in a calm and steady voice.
"Isambard," Cassandra murmured, "can we not discuss this at the dinner table?"
"I've waited seventeen years to speak to my son," Isambard barked.
An awkward silence fell. "I love smoked herring, don't you, darling?" Cassandra said, as Sarah began setting down their plates.
"It happened at sea, did it?" Isambard persisted.
"I assure you, if I had ever been anywhere else under the circumstances required to produce a cannon-shot injury, you would have heard about it." Nicholas was beginning to sound slightly angry. This was such a rare occurrence that Claune turned and watched him with open fascination.
"Don't pretend you don't know what I'm asking you," Isambard said.
"Yes," Nicholas said, "it was entirely avoidable. I would still have two good arms if I had married Eliza and joined your practice in Pwlanarfyll."
Isambard sagged back into his chair, satisfied. "And what about that thing? Did you get it at sea as well?"
Nicholas had just picked up his spoon. He set it back down again, slowly. "That thing?" he asked. "I'm sorry?"
"That damn thing on your shoulder, Nicholas—you know very well what I'm referring to!"
"You will have to be more specific," Nicholas said rather coldly. He lifted the spoon again and maneuvered a piece of herring onto it. Isambard watched him the whole time; Claune caught the briefest spark of grief in expression as Nicholas chased the bit of fish to the raised edge of the plate and pushed it onto his spoon. The look quickly darkened into outrage.
"That blasted Plague! That little monster!"
Nicholas had warned Claune in advance that Isambard was likely to be unfriendly toward Plagues at best, hostile at worst. In all probability he had seen dozens if not hundreds of patients die from the plague over the years since Nicholas had left, and therefore staunchly inclined against the disease in all its forms. (An unfortunate choice of wording on Nicholas's part—the disease in all its forms—Claune had jabbed the needle through the cloth more forcefully than necessary and was then forced to pluck the thread back out and redo it.)
"Don't take anything he says to heart," Nicholas had gone on. He was sitting on the edge of the bed with a neutral expression, preparing himself to go to dinner like a diver about to plunge into icy water. "The last time I saw him he was—well, suffice it to say that his only joy in life was making other people miserable, and I expect he's only worsened since."
An unusual evaluation from Nicholas, who was ordinarily level-headed and generous in his interpretations of character. Either his Grimm was blinded by his long, fraught history with Isambard, or the man truly was a remarkably wretched individual.
Right now, Claune was inclined to believe the latter. As much as he tried to ignore the words he couldn't prevent them from settling down inside him; the worst insults, after all, were the ones that might be true. He stood up on Nicholas's shoulder.
"Ah, the little monster shall introduce itself," he said merrily. "Its name is Claune and it's a vile, repellant creature; it loves nothing more than tormenting those around it, and looks forward to growing up and doing the good work of spreading the plague."
"Claune," said Nicholas, but without much hope of stopping him.
Isambard opened his mouth, closed it, and instead of speaking leaned forward and stared, as if he thought Claune might be some sort of strange, offensive hallucination.
Claune minced down Nicholas's arm, bells a-jingle, did a series of somersaults over to Isambard's plate, and then seized four of his peas and began juggling them.
"You stop that," Isambard said, a bit uncertainly.
Claune added a piece of carrot.
"Nicholas," Isambard appealed.
An odd noise was coming from down the table. The Plague stole a glance over his shoulder. Nicholas had sat back in his chair and put his hand over his mouth. His face looked serious, but Claune could tell he was smiling. He wasn't the source of the noise; Cassandra was, doubled over with stifled laughter. She'd put one of her sleeves in the herring and hadn't noticed.
Claune turned back around. He carelessly threw the four peas and piece of carrot over his shoulder without looking. One of the peas found its intended target and dropped into Cassandra's glass with a satisfying plop, while the remaining vegetables skittered down the table, between the place settings, and onto the floor. He folded one arm against his waist and dropped Isambard an abrupt, professional bow.
"Bravo!" Cassandra said, clapping.
Claune pivoted about on his heel and performed another bow in her direction.
The hatred in Isambard's eyes—and the buried fear, not for what Claune was now, but what he might become—had faded into subdued disgust. "This Plague of yours is useless and a fool," he said gruffly, and shooed Claune away with his butter knife. "What do you plan on doing with it? I've heard you collect moths now in Gadu; surely you can't expect to have a court jester for an assistant…"
The conversation moved on to the topic of Nicholas's work. Despite Isambard's insistence on referring to his specimens as his "butterfly collection," the remainder of the dinner proceeded, Claune could tell, far more smoothly than both Cassandra and Nicholas had been expecting. And, most curiously of all, Isambard no longer looked at Claune in the same way as he had before; whenever his gaze happened to pass across Nicholas's shoulder it was with the dismissiveness of a man trying to do his best to ignore an imbecile—an irritant, but not a threat.
With four peas and a piece of carrot, Claune had stopped being dangerous.
Good, he thought, for it was better to be a fool than a monster.
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