Quaint Escapes for Traitorous Bastards: Chapter Two, Part Two

 Notes: All right, friends, let's clean a house! And by clean, I mean lean on an unfair advantage...but is it magic if you don't do it yourself?

Title: Quaint Escapes for Traitorous Bastards: Chapter Two, Part Two

***

Chapter Two, Part Two

 Photo by Robert Clark

A Whirlwind Job

 

“You can’t be serious.”

 “It’s cleaning a house,” Hiram said, turning in a full circle as he looked around the sitting room. “How hard can it be?”

“You haven’t scrubbed a floor in your entire life,” Phlox replied, their voice full of disdain. “And we can’t even see this floor to scrub it underneath so much grime. Scavengers, indeed. It looks like they tracked half a forest through this place.”

“It’s a little worse for wear,” Hiram acknowledged, “but I think it’ll shape up very nicely. We just have to get through the initial bumpy phase, and then living here will be as sweet and simple a life as we could ever have asked for.”

“I never asked for a sweet or simple life,” Phlox pointed out huffily. “You never asked for a sweet and simple life either, I’d like to note. You’re only doing this because—”

Hiram snapped his fingers twice. “Don’t go there. I don’t want to hear it.”

“You never do,” Phlox grumbled.

Hiram wasn’t listening anymore. He headed back over to the front door where he’d left several of the bags and boxes he’d unpacked from the wagon. One piece of luggage was a nondescript burlap satchel, the sort of thing you might expect to see full of dried beans at a farmer’s market. Hiram opened the drawstring on the top of it and plunged his hand inside.

“You’re going to lose a finger one day if you keep reaching into that bag like that,” Phlox said.

“I beg to differ,” Hiram replied. “Everything in here is very well trained and—ow!” He pulled his hand back out and sucked on a scrape that had appeared on his index finger. “Cheeky bastard,” he muttered.

“I did tell you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hiram reentered the bag with a bit more caution and moments later found the thing he was looking for. “Aha!” He pulled out a small, round silver box. It had a hinge on one side of its lid and a clasp on the other that was held shut with a slender silver needle. “There we are.”

Phlox’s voice quivered as they asked, “Is that the…?”

“It is,” Hiram replied, his voice full of satisfaction at having found it.

“You don’t mean to…”

“I do.”

“It could blow this whole house over!” Phlox said frantically.

Hiram chuckled. “Don’t be so dramatic. We’re just going to open it...” he eased the silver needle out of the latch. “…a tiny little pinch. Hiram cupped the box between his hands, then cracked open the lid.

Whoosh!

Out came a surge of wind so fierce that it blew him back against the front door, which almost gave under the impact. Every window in the house shattered.

“Close it! Close it!” Phlox shouted.

Hiram, using all his strength, managed to snap the lid down after a few more seconds. The pair of them stared around the sitting room at what his little trick had just wrought. Shards of glass glittered along the edges of the floor, and several of the shutters were broken, but the thick layer of grime that had crunched beneath his soles with every step he took had all been pushed back to the far side of the house. He could see the actual floor now, make out the grain of the wood beneath his feet. It was rather nice once you got a look at it.

“I told you so,” said Phlox.

Hiram laughed a bit breathlessly. “So you did,” he agreed. “So you did. But, you know, the walls are still standing at least, and now I know just how careful I need to be.”

“You’re going to do it again?” Phlox sounded aghast.

“With caution,” Hiram said, ever so gently closing his fingers around the latch once more. “With a great deal of caution.”

Say what you would about Hiram, but even when he’d been one of the most powerful men in the Empire, he had been capable of exercising a great deal of caution. He didn’t always, but he was very capable of it.

Now that his mind and hands had regained their equilibrium with his box of winds, Hiram was very quickly able to direct the flow of air where he wanted it to go. From the upstairs to the downstairs, he gathered all the refuse, all the dust, the grime, the pieces of rotten or stolen furniture, and an enormous number of spiders downstairs into a heap right in front of the gaping back door.

When he finally put the box of wind away, he was tired but satisfied with the work. “There now,” he said to Phlox, “wasn’t that faster than sweeping and mopping for half the day?”

“Considering you still have a home, I suppose I must concede the point,” Phlox said sourly. “But what are you going to do with it now, blow it all out onto the garden? That’ll be filthy.”

“I was actually going to ask you about that.” Hiram felt a bit sheepish. “Perhaps the best way to deal with this, before I set up a good place for a refuse pile, of course, would be a little bit of…targeted incineration.”

“You want me to handle it, in other words.”

“If you would be so kind.”

“With my magic.”

“If,” Hiram said through gritted teeth, “you would be so kind.”

“Magic coming to your rescue yet again,” Phlox said haughtily. “When are you just going to admit that I’m right?”

“On the fifth day of never,” Hiram replied genially. “Now, if you don’t want to use your magic—and I completely understand why you might not, being as out of practice as you are—I’ll just fetch a broom and—”

“Shut up.” The pile flared brightly, the heat of it washing over Hiram’s chilled hands. It felt like being eased into a warm bath, and a second later there was nothing to be seen on the floor, not even a scorch mark.

“Beautifully done,” he said. Hiram was capable of admitting when other people did good work, even when those people were bloodthirsty fire elementals.

“Naturally,” Phlox replied. “Now that you’ve thoroughly aerated this charming little cottage of yours, what do you plan to do next?”

“Well.” Hiram looked around the room and his eyes caught on his bags once more. “I suppose I should set the place up to be livable, or as livable as it can be before we add to our belongings.” He reached into the burlap sack again and brought out a smaller leather bag.

“Oh, you’re not planning on using the furnishings from the travel tent,” Phlox objected. “Nothing in there matches, you know. You won’t be able to have a soul over because they’ll spend so much time laughing at your abysmal taste, they won’t have the breath to talk.”

“My taste isn’t abysmal,” Hiram protested as he opened up the bag. “It’s eclectic.”

“It’s absurd.”

“It’s interesting.” He pulled a rug that he’d been gifted in the Elasgus Mountains by the chief of a Deyrian tribe and laid it out on the floor. It was made from thick wool, hand-knotted, and was wonderfully comfortable under the feet. That the pattern they’d chosen for it was an up-close portrait of their three-headed skeletal crone goddess depicted in lurid shades of red, green, and yellow was perhaps a bit unfortunate. But who looked that closely at the things they stepped on, huh?

“Absurd,” Phlox repeated.

Hiram ignored them as he went on decorating the sitting room. To the side of the rug, he put an ornate, three-legged table that was topped with an actual toenail from one of the stone giants that had been bedeviling the Deyrians. No one would never know it was a toenail just to look at it, of course. It was beautifully flat, perfectly oblong, and rather a nice mauve color.

Beside it Hiram set out two chairs. The first was a squashy, comfortable red armchair where he’d whiled away many delightful hours reading spellbooks and musing about potions. The constant contact with magic had, in fact, imbued the chair with a bit of a snarky personality over the years, but it hadn’t kicked anyone out of it in months now. It would be fine.

On the other side of the table went a low stool with a  crescent moon-shaped seat and a broad wooden X for legs that, upon reflection, Hiram decided would do better upstairs. Up went the stool, plus the desk he’d brought from his own workshop back at Vordure Palace, all of his potion-making equipment, another rug—this one a delightful shade of blue that only occasionally transfigured into clouds and began to rain—and his bed. There was actually room for the entire bed up in this loft instead of the shrunken-down version he’d been using for weeks now.

Hiram sat on the edge of the bed and bounced a little bit. Softly sprung, it still carried the scent of ambergris at the edges of it. Hiram inhaled deeply, letting the earthy sweetness of the scent fill his senses. It was a smell he would always associate with Andy. Shows of affection between them had been rare by the end, and yet there had been a time when they’d spent so many nights together that his smell had permanently worn into the furnishings.

Hiram laid back on the comforter, closed his eyes, and let his heart hurt for a moment. That moment stretched into two, then three, and before he was fully aware of it, Hiram had almost fallen asleep.

“You didn’t do the cellar,” Phlox reminded him.

“‘Mm,’” he mumbled, not bothering to open his eyes.

“The cellar, Hiram.”

“Mmm.” Hiram crawled further up into the bed. “I’ll get it tomorrow.” For now, he would take what comfort he could in sleep.

 

Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Twenty-One: Part One

 Notes: All right, back to plot! We're closing in on a finale here, darlins :) Exciting!

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Twenty-One, Part One

***

Chapter Twenty-One, Part One

 

Picture by Frank Tunder 

Kieron ended up spending the next four days well out of the way.

He wasn’t deliberately setting out to isolate himself. He wasn’t getting lost in a sea of his own thoughts or a maelstrom of emotions that he didn’t want to face and could barely look at anyway. No, overall, he was happy. His family was coming together; there was hope that they were going to escape from Hadrian’s Colony without having to wait for the storm season to pass; and the people he loved most in the universe were safe.

Kieron understood that at heart he was a simple creature. He had never been a man of wild hopes or big dreams. Those were for bigger, wilder people whose wants couldn’t be contained in small spaces. Undoubtedly his therapist or, more likely Elanus, would have a lot to say about that if he actually said it out loud, but there was no point. Kieron was content with the way things were. He liked his life. He liked the people in it. And he had learned definitively at this point that chasing answers from the past only led to pain. All Kieron wanted to do at this point was live in the present.

He didn’t quite trust himself to look forward to what would happen after they got off Hadrian’s Colony yet. It was probably going to involve a lot of the talking that he didn’t want to do. But if Elanus asked, he would do it with a glad heart because nothing was more important to him than being healthy, safe, and sane so that he could take care of the ones that he loved.

Part of staying healthy, safe, and sane was knowing when listening in on certain conversations was only going to drive him up the wall and exiting them.

It wasn’t that Kieron wasn’t smart, but he was not smart enough to follow the math that Elanus and their two daughters were bantering around. Most of the time, there wasn’t even any conversation involved at all, just discussion between Elanus and his implant and the girls in their hard drives. It was a way of being together and solving problems collaboratively on a level that Kieron had never experienced before and, quite frankly, didn’t really care to.

He wasn’t able to talk with Pol and Xilinn much, and even Ryu gave over the com so that Lizzie could focus all of her energies on helping establish trajectories, weight limits, and weather reports. That meant Kieran ended up spending a lot of time with Bobby. He didn’t mind. He liked it, actually, being around someone who made him remember that he wasn’t the most inexperienced person here.

“Those are some good-looking legs,” he told Bobby on the second day out from help’s impending arrival. It was raining outside. Naturally, it was raining outside, but the worst of the lightning storms had passed, and the forecast was as good as it was going to get for the time being. Kieron, as much as he loved Catie, had grown absolutely sick of being locked in her interior, and he could tell Bobby was stir-crazy as well. So they’d taken themselves for a walk, a walk that necessitated Bobby, well, work on his walking.

[Are you sure?] Bobby tapped out. [They feel weird.]

You haven’t done a lot of bipedal stuff yet,” Kieron told him. “I think it’ll probably feel weird for a while, but they look great. You want to give them a try?”

[I guess so,] Bobby said. He took a few tentative steps, stumbled, then darted back to lean against Kieron’s legs. [I don’t think I can do it.]

Kieron smiled and pet the little robot on top of the head. “I know you can,” he told him. “You’re so clever. You’re so…” What was the word Elanus had used to describe him? “Protean,” he said after a moment. “Adaptable. Just work on it a little more, and soon walking around on two legs will be like nothing to you.”

[You make it look easy,] Bobby said, with a bit of a desultory echo to his taps.

“It’s really hard for human babies,” Kieron replied. “It takes them months and months to learn how to stand, much less walk. You’re doing a great job.”

[Thank you,] Bobby replied.

“You ready to try again?”

[Yeah, okay,] and he did. This time he made it five steps before tripping. The next time he took twenty. After that, he skipped right ahead to running, and it turned out being able to leap over the barriers in front of him was a lot more intuitive for Bobby than having to stumble over or go around them.

[This is easy!] he tapped out as he ran in literal circles around Kieron. [I love hydraulics.]

“Just wait until you try out some springs,” Kieron replied with a grin, which meant of course Bobby had to try springs instead of hydraulics, which led to some rather hilarious pratfalls as he adjusted the tensile strength. Eventually, though, he was able to leap almost fifteen feet through the air, land on a single limb, and turn flips all in the space of a couple of hours.

“So cool,” Kieron applauded at the end of it, then frowned as he realized his hands had practically gone numb from the chill. “We better head back in, though, before Elanus wonders where we’ve gone off to.”

[Okay,] Bobby said. They returned to the ship, where sure enough, Elanus had lightened his trance state so that he’d know the moment they came in.

“You’re soaked through, this is stupid,” he said the moment Kieron stepped over Catie’s threshold. “This is not the place to get soaked. What are we going to do if you get pneumonia? Are you insane?”

“That’s not how you get pneumonia,” Kieron pointed out as he shucked off the poncho that Catie had thoughtfully made for him.

“Oh, so now you’re the expert on how people get pneumonia on Hadrian’s Colony, huh? For all you know, it is carried in the water. Maybe it’s a seasonal variety of illness that can only be dredged up by the force of winds stirring waters from miles below sea level. You don’t know.”

“Neither do you,” Kieron said, but he let Elanus fuss over him while Bobby soaked the attention up like a sponge. It was nice. It was homey. It was exactly what he wanted.

When Lizzie and all her passengers finally came into close orbit around Hadrian’s Colony two days afterward, Kieron was tentatively ready to accept that this was going to be a good thing. That something wonderful, in fact, was happening to them. Their rescue was here. Their family had come for him, for all of them.

“Can you see us?” Lizzie asked.

“You shine briiight,” Catie told her. “So briiiight!” The refit had done a lot to boost her signal. Lizzie didn’t just appear like some random object in the night sky on Catie’s sensors; she blazed like a close contact star.

“Approximately five hours and you’ll be able to drop the parts,” Elanus said, rubbing his hands together eagerly. “Another fifteen hours of refits—”

“More like eighteen, Daddeee,” Catie said.

“To hell with it, rounded up to twenty. Twenty hours of refits, and we could be off by tomorrow afternoon.”

They looked at each other and grinned, and then—

“We fucking see you people now” came over Catie’s wide-open radio transmitter.

 

Quaint Escapes for Traitorous Bastards: Chapter Two, Part One

 Notes: Sooo...some seriously rotten political stuff is going on chez moi, and to help tamp down on my sense of outrage, I'm going to share some more cozy fantasy. Because FUCK those assholes, that's why.

Title: Quaint Escapes for Traitorous Bastards: Chapter Two, Part One

*** 

 

Chapter Two, Part One

 

Photo by Annie Spratt 

An Almost-Expected Adventure

 

Hiram had lost his ability to be surprised as Mistress Tate led him and his ambling wagon back the way they had come, down the rutted path until stopping at the very first or, in this case, last house along the lane. It was the same one he had passed on the way in, mentally noting the dilapidated back door, the hutch without a roof, and the general state of disarray of the garden.

It was fate, he figured at this point, the same thing that had led him to choose a town he had never seen before on the suggestion of a person he barely knew. When things happened to Hiram, they happened quickly, rarely allowing for even a moment of contemplation to let him come to grips with things. And so, despite the faint look of apprehension on Mistress Tate’s face as they stopped in front of the house, Hiram simply smiled at her.

He had no interest in throwing some kind of fit in front of the lady. He was not, after all, a great and powerful wizard. He was an herbalist, and herbalists didn’t care about whether their pillowcases were made of Cithinian silk, or the furniture in their home was aged white oak polished with wax made by blue bees. He would manage just fine.

That said, after walking up the three steps to the front porch—the second was rather wobbly—and forcing open a door that had swollen during the winter rains and stuck in place as it dried, Hiram had to confess that he had at least been hoping for some furnishings.

“Oh, dear,” Mistress Tate said, not sounding all that surprised or sorry. “It looks like the scavengers got in.”

“Scavengers?” Hiram asked, a bit surprised. “You get that kind of thing this far south?”

“Not the way you’re thinking,” Mistress Tate said, her hands still folded gracefully in front of her. “Not in a desperate, lawbreaking kind of way, more in a—well.” She shrugged. “We are a proud town, but a rather poor one, compared to others in Oribel, Master Emblic. Farming and raising rabbits is a good life, but it doesn’t leave much room for luxuries like a second chair or a spare bed. I daresay you’re rather lucky that they left the stove.”

She gestured toward the enormous iron monstrosity taking up one wall. Hiram had never seen a stove like it, not even in the imperial kitchens of Vordure Palace. It was black as pitch, for starters, rather than the polished bronze that he was used to, and the metal seemed pitted, almost spiky in places. The handles were loose, and several of the drawers seemed to be falling off their hinges, but there was a sense of comforting solidity to it that he could appreciate.

“I do count myself lucky,” he said, with as genial a smile as he could put on. His earring heated up briefly, and Hiram resisted the urge to flick his own ear in front of Mistress Tate. “So, this is the greatroom,” he said, turning around to look at the space.

“Sitting room, we call it,” she corrected, indicating the largest of the open spaces that they had just walked into. “The kitchen area is often separated by a half-wall, but Raileene enjoyed being able to see her guests as she cooked.” Her smile was soft and a bit sad as she went on, “The preparation and cold storage area is over there. They left the icebox—that was friendly—and the trap door for the cellar is right there.

“I suggest waiting until you’re properly armed and have a torch to go and check that out,” she added. “There are very few dangerous creatures in this area, but it’s not impossible that there could be a crawl-bear or coiling snake of some kind down there.”

Crawl-bears and coiling snakes. “Good to know,” Hiram said. He knew his smile was faltering a bit, but he couldn’t stop it at this point. Mistress Tate, at least, was kind enough not to mention it.

“And of course up there is the second level,” she said, pointing at the staircase that traveled up the wall on the left side of the sitting room, which leads to the sleeping areas. “Really, it’s just one large room, but when Raileene was raising her family here, it was easy enough to put in screens to divide it up. You might consider a study of some sort.”

“Perhaps,” he agreed, then looked around the great—no, the sitting room—again. Three of the walls had two-foot-by-two-foot windows that let in a decent amount of light, and given that there was no back door right now, he got a decent amount from there, too.

It still felt close in a way he wasn’t accustomed to. Back in his chambers at the palace, Hiram could have fit this entire house in just his laboratory. His suite had spanned thousands of feet, each nook and cranny filled with something from his adventures in service to the Emperor. It had been a monument to his life, a life of power, of magic, of excitement and adventure. It had been a life he was proud to lead, one that he would thought he always would. And now…

Now this place is where you’ll build your new life, he thought to himself, trying to polish the grim edge off his words and not quite succeeding. Two unfurnished floors, a cellar which may or may not be inhabited by crawl-bears, and whatever the state of things is outside.

 Speaking of… “Mistress, would you care to come out and inspect the rest of the premises with me?”

“I would love to,” Mistress Tate replied primly, a secretive little smile on her face as she stepped past him and moved through the open door. Hiram watched her go and wondered for a moment just what she knew, or thought she knew. Well, whatever it was, he would deal with it. At the very least, she seemed like a woman capable of discretion.

He followed her into the garden, then took two steps past her and stopped, closing his eyes and letting the sounds of the place rise around him. It didn’t take magic to feel the life out here, just a certain sort of presence. The soil was rich with insects, worms digging their tunnels, larvae lying in wait to crawl to the surface and begin a new life in one of many different forms. Bees buzzed—not rare blue bees, but fat, yellow-bodied bumblebees, stopping occasionally on slightly battered-looking flowers to gather their nectar and pack their already heavy bodies with more pollen. Birds chirped in the trees, and a bit beyond them Hiram heard the thud-thud-thud of a rabbit tamping down on the ground.

The air itself was practically green with light and life, and the sweet scent of honeysuckle and lavender caught in his nose when the wind kicked up just right. Hiram smiled broadly and turned to look at Mistress Tate.

“Ah, there it is,” she said with a smile. “That’s the look of a man who knows good earth when he feels it.”

“It’s been a long time,” he said. His voice was unexpectedly hoarse, and he coughed to clear it. “A long time since I had the chance to be this close to the earth.” Hiram had made fire his everything for so long that he’d almost forgotten his childhood, hours spent working rich, dark soil, seeding and smoothing, plucking pods and gathering flowers. Those times came back to him stronger than ever now, and he found himself almost shivering with anticipation of more.

“So you will make this work, then?” she asked more briskly.

“I suppose I’ll have to,” he said. “But,” he added, before she could remonstrate him, “I believe I will be happy to. My needs are few, and with some work,” a great deal of work, his mind clarified, “I think this will be a very comfortable place to live for the foreseeable future.”

“I’m very pleased to hear it,” and she seemed genuine. “Let me show you to the barn.”

The barn was little more than a lean-to, actually, but it at least had a roof and timber sturdy enough that Hiram would be able to stable Mule there without worrying too much about him. There were some run-down chicken coops behind it that he hadn’t seen the first time as well. All the wiring on those would need to be replaced if he were to keep hens, which he might, and as for the rabbit hutch—

’Oh, I don’t think I need to look at that,” Hiram said when she brought it up. “I’m not a rabbit-raising kind of person.”

Mistress Tate just laughed at him. “You live in Lollop now, sir,” she said archly, “I think you’ll soon find that everyone here is a rabbit-raising kind of person. But sometimes the rabbit must discover the man. I’ll leave you to find that out.

“Come to the market tomorrow,” she continued, drawing her shawl a bit more closely about her shoulders. “I have a stall there, and I’ll be able to introduce you to the carpenter and the blacksmith and the like. They’re good people to know for projects such as this.”

“I’ll see you in the morning then, Mistress,” Hiram said with a nod as he escorted her out. “Unless you’d like me to accompany you back to town?”

“I’ve been walking this village alone for much of my life,” she replied. “They’re safe as can be. I’ll see you tomorrow morning, Master Emblic.” They exchanged nods, then Mistress Tate took off at a brisk pace along the road.

Hiram went back through the front door, looked around at the empty space just waiting to be filled, and clapped his hands. “All right,” he said. “Let’s do this.”