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.