Under One Banner, page 33
part #4 of Commonweal Series
“Coercer and a shapeshifter, someone who should have been a creature of subtle dread and couldn’t. No room for any mind-twisting dread in the Commonweal, and Grue always knew it. Could talk to me, and mother, and that was the list of anyone truly safe.”
Eugenia’s astonished.
“Not that strong,” Captain Blossom says. “That smart, that subtle, and that stubborn.”
There’s another pause.
“Last chance,” Captain Blossom says.
“We’re the only two independents with warrants of commission.” Eugenia finds themself believing there’s a real sense in which they’re an independent as they say this. “If personal dread matters socially, it’s not the Commonweal. I’ll listen.”
“Thanks.” The rueful version of Captain Blossom’s resolute grin catches Eugenia under the heart.
“Grue and I met when we were seven. Grue was seven and five décades when Halt became their foster-mother. I was twelve. Not out of any lack of love by those who bore us, but capability. Sorcerous families, lots of researchers, aunts and great-aunts way into their hundreds, that sort of thing.”
Eugenia nods, carefully. This knowledge greatly restricts who Blossom’s family of origin could have been.
“Metabolic-me had a strong case of do-what-the-sorcerer-says, and there wasn’t a stronger sorcerer around than I was. I’d get fixated on things.”
Eugenia’s eyebrows rise. Blossom’s talent forced a dismissal of long-established pre-Commonweal time-out-of-mind theory concerning the limits of sorcerous talent. Modest talents can casually command the moderately susceptible to work and have them die of exhaustion still struggling at the task. Fixated must be extreme understatement.
“Grue could get through. Nothing improper, but … an equivalent of shouting. Regular shouting didn’t work at all. Halt — ” and Captain Blossom shrugs their heroic shoulders.
Eugenia nods, and says That which is woven, that which is bound, under their breath.
“It was a reclusive little family, it had to be, but it worked. It was still there when Grue’s and my class didn’t work out whatsoever. Even worked when we all went off outside the Commonweal for half a year, something of the Empress’ waking out of its bounds and Parliament permitting Halt to go put it back.”
“That sounds much too exciting.” Only Halt would have been an independent then.
“First time I ever killed anybody,” Blossom says. “First through several thousand.”
Eugenia turns their head to look at Captain Blossom. Whose tone had gone impish.
“A Bad Old Days preeminent has a lot of uses for someone like Grue. There was a sincere capture attempt.”
Eugenia decides it wouldn’t be polite to ask what their guardian was doing at the time.
Nor likely a thing comforting to know.
“Grue would have liked to have had any number of lovers, some kind of wider society, something. They couldn’t because they didn’t trust their control. They never really thought they were part of society, I think they passed the Shape on sheer intellectual conviction. Never managed to believe that some preeminent wasn’t going to enslave them someday, either.”
Eugenia has no idea what to say.
“She admitted it didn’t make sense, not as probability or logic. Never stopped being a fear, the kind of fear that’s a creeping certainty … .”
There’s a pause, because Eugenia understands that sort of fearing failure and Captain Blossom has a finite capacity for grief.
“Made these two,” and Captain Blossom makes an independent’s chin-point at the horse-things. “Really wanted to run as fast as a unicorn, and did a good job out of wits and stubbornness. They don’t senesce whatsoever.”
“That’s challenging.” Eugenia feels they could do better than a resort to customary phrases, but their understanding is trailing behind the conversation.
“Had a big fight over paperwork, Grue had started them but they weren’t out of the vat before our own-work projects were evaluated.”
Bees, Eugenia thinks. They don’t know anything specific. They do know that there’s several townships worth of ground just east of Edge Creek where something full-mighty happened. There are map advisories bidding no one go there before Year of the Peace Established Six Hundred and Fifty, not for any cause of need.
“Officers don’t usually ride, most animals want nothing to do with a battle.” Captain Blossom’s leaned back down, has one hand just behind their horse thing’s ears. It lips at their other hand and whistles two gentle notes. “Romp’s not much for battles. Stomp — ”Captain Blossom’s hand moves again, scritching behind ears — “seems to like them.
“Held a memorial. No convincing Grackle otherwise.”
“Grackle?”
“Fire’s mother. Fire and I decided we were sisters on the March, about when the last demon got its heart cut out. Fire’s born-sister and mother agreed, which surprised me more than passing the Shape did. I’ve got neeves, I’ve got a regular sort of family. It makes me remember how to be social. I couldn’t have done it when I was younger, but it’s a help now.” Captain Blossom smiles in the expectation of loss. “Being Captain Blossom, being this specifically embodied, is a social sensorium.”
Eugenia, a sorcery student since they were fifteen, thinks carefully. “Grue didn’t feel as attached?”
“She couldn’t believe it was real, despite our consonance lasting into adulthood and independents, it wasn’t just having to get along as kids and the mad hopes of youth and a desperate need for touch. Welcome in the working link, but terrified of external sorcery in quantity. Could do it, but couldn’t trust it after the rest of our class cooked themselves.”
“There’s me and there’s Spark made it,” Eugenia says. “There were five more. I’ll remember them as long as I last. It doesn’t help with having complex feelings about Order.”
“Grue never came to a state of peace about Rose.” Captain Blossom looks up at the sky, and talks up, and quietly. “Rose remade their own talent; Rose found a way to believe they’d be safe enough. Rose does things Grue just couldn’t make wit and determination equal. It wasn’t rivalry, Grue loved Rose as her own child. But couldn’t ever manage to set aside feeling surpassed.”
“No one is always brave,” Eugenia says. It’s not one of Order’s sayings, but rather Eugenia’s own opinion. “If regular life asks an exercise of courage, it becomes difficult.”
Eugenia needs to get their back straighter to say this, to believe they are someone who should be saying this, and they lean up a bit. The horse-thing — This one is Romp and — And was Grue’s — pass by separated paths through Eugenia’s thoughts as they straighten and the great head shifts without complaint. Eugenia pats the rail beside them and gets, rather than a rotated horse-thing, a close nose and slow breath on their leg.
It will do.
“Independents commonly die.” Eugenia has been to some mental trouble to avoid shifting their immediate expectation of death from being examined to an immediate expectation of death from trying to exist. “If their courage must requite Grue’s regular existence, that should burdensome become of years. Such burden makes it not you loved them not enough.”
Captain Blossom nods once, and reaches behind the post to put a brief and gentle hand on Eugenia’s near shoulder. “Diction?”
“Very traditional upbringing.” Eugenia says it as neutrally as they can.
Captain Blossom grins. “Know the prayers, as well as Archaic Spider?”
“Two of my great-aunts won’t speak anything but Archaic Conversational Spider.” A Creek would not know what that means, but the entity called Blossom will. Eugenia hitches along the rail a little. Romp moves to keep their nose just as close as it was. “They’ll have conniptions if I get a chance to tell them about this year.”
They weren’t pleased about Eugenia’s choice to go for an independent. Sorcery is a respectable trade, but not that much sorcery.
“Every culture has prophecies of destruction.” Captain Blossom’s voice has the right sort of emphasis for mentioning the weather, and it might be some amusement.
“If they last long enough to worry about the inevitable end,” Eugenia says. If the personification of one of those prophecies, the goddess daughter of the Great Queen, Vastest of Spiders, Hunter of All, She Who Has Yet To Devour, can be amused, so can Eugenia. “The rise of the Commonweal didn’t fit any of them.”
“Laurel’s repute wasn’t conventional even before,” Captain Blossom says.
Laurel, who you have surpassed, flits through Eugenia’s thoughts, because it is true. Not in Power — Blossom surpasses everyone in Power — but in skill as an enchanter, and if Ongen can be called Laurel’s student without entirely making a lie of student, Blossom’s students come in teams.
“I don’t know the rituals.”
“Those great-aunts,” Captain Blossom says, and Eugenia nods.
“Those great-aunts know the rituals.” Without modifiers, Blossom understands this as Eugenia intended; the great-aunts know the entirety of the rituals associated with the worship of the Mother of Spiders. Blossom might surmise that Eugenia knows how to read the ritual instructions, which would be correct. Those seem simple, absent specific knowledge. It’s nothing to admit socially.
There’s enough of a pause Eugenia starts to feel sitting on a fence rail as something best not undertaken for indefinite periods of time, especially not in winter.
Captain Blossom quirks an enquiring eyebrow and hops down from the fence when Eugenia nods. Eugenia climbs, with Romp’s nose carefully just too far away to constitute snuffling the whole time.
It’s a shelter, not a stable, and the way out is through it. There’s a round of ear-scritching and grumpy whistling and a few more copper nails. It’s not just like feeding horses bits of carrot — the horse things want a vertically held nail, rash in the extreme with horses — though it comes with the same pleasant feeling of small kindnesses.
Treats for horses don’t involve repeated metal-shearing sounds.
“If they don’t senesce — ”
Eugenia says, and Captain Blossom says, “The teeth are complicated. You’d have to ask Rose for a complete explanation.”
Eugenia nods and says thank you.
The refectory — thorpes have refectories — is new and large and set up so the washing rooms are on the way in. Eugenia’s far from the only person in a visitor’s rope slippers in the refectory itself. The floor is warm.
Everything’s too high. Everything is always too high. Someone shows up with, not a kid-seat, but a tall stool and a cushion. Eugenia says thank you, and doesn’t stare at the bird on the kind person’s shoulder or the other one following in flight to land on the person’s other shoulder.
The whirring of glass wings is the strangest thing Eugenia thinks they ever have heard.
“Does Crow know about those?” Dinner is good. It’s not bland, and not knowing what it is, beyond an expectation that the orange colour is some kind of squash, doesn’t diminish how pleasant it is.
“I don’t think so,” Captain Blossom says.
“Doing all right?” Captain Blossom doesn’t ask this entirely rhetorically, and Eugenia realizes dinner is gone and they’ve stayed thinking.
“Someone has to have made those birds, and I got to thinking about how I don’t find Crow especially unsettling unless I think about the Marchioness.”
The Marchioness of the Narrow Corner summoned a great mass of crows out of the bodies of an opposing army, next year’s enhanced breeding success come early for birds willing to scavenge corpses.
It would have been simply clever if the army hadn’t been entirely alive when the summoning started. Some few of them had been some value of alive afterwards.
Much thinner and not necessarily functionally complete, but alive.
“If I tell you all the old ones are unsettling, you’ll say something about dead armies.” Captain Blossom means it kindly, and so Eugenia takes it.
“I think there’s a difference between dead and artistically dead.” Eugenia sets their coffee cup down, to be sure they don’t wave it. “Maybe not enough difference, but a difference.”
“It’s a practical difference,” Captain Blossom says. “Artistic costs more.”
Fear is a threat, and to threaten is to threaten conquest. The Commonweal chose not to do that, in its beginnings. Artistic only repays its effort in fear. Eugenia knows they don’t understand this well enough, not yet. If they continue as a Part-Captain they will have to understand it better.
The expense of artistry doesn’t keep Halt from arguing for subtlety, a thing which Eugenia doesn’t know and which no form of Blossom’s presence is much inclined to tell them.
“Do you know how much a metaphysical prosthetic costs?”
“Twenty-three days of the Shot Team’s time, spread over four months.” Captain Blossom sets their fork down, to look directly at Eugenia. The refectory is much larger than the people presently in it require, and they have an eight-person table off to one side to themselves.
Captain Blossom’s head tips, just a little. “Creek social custom values bravery. Telling Rose to do as they thought best is regarded as impressively brave, and after that you were effective.”
“So not stupidly brave.”
Captain Blossom smiles, just slightly. “Perhaps more brave than sensible.
“The prosthetic proves the generalized personal latch mechanism for sorcerers works. Laurel put that in the original standards, specific to them and solely to them. We might not need it, but it’s something the standard-captains wanted to know about. As effort to produce an apprentice proof-piece it’s more than usual but not excessively so, considering.”
Apprentice, Eugenia thinks. Not student.
Apprenticed to the Goddess of Destruction. Eugenia carefully didn’t look at the record of events inserted into the battery banner to learn how the devourer of Reems died.
The boiling cloud and the red light and the shocked desert and the sound the driven sand did not make sliding around itself Eugenia will remember perfectly all their days. Sound did not pass through the obdurate outer layer of the battery ward bubble. How it took steady, flexible attention to have the banner’s ward-bubble block the spectral screams coming down the still air and the Power from Blossom’s fight is entirely as memorable.
Well apprenticed. The Shot-team made those five-red shot. The Shot-team figured out how they could make five-red shot, so they have a workshop placed to be lost.
“What’s the social difference between Shot Team and Tiggy’s bunch?”
“Shot Team’s official. Tiggy’s bunch is how another wreaking team or a collaborating independent would refer to them. ‘The shot shop’ is increasingly historical.” Captain Blossom makes a wry face. “‘Tiggy’s team’ is social, how you’d invite them to a party.”
Eugenia has a brief flash of trying to imagine the necessary circumstances before they themself would be inviting the whole Shot-team to a party.
“You’re sort of in the same-gean social category. ‘Those shot-makers in the edifice’, sort of thing.” Captain Blossom thinks this is good. Captain Blossom also thinks it amusing.
“Did you have the social isolation talk with them?”
“Before we started making shot for the Experimental Battery, back before the March. Several times since.” Captain Blossom starts stacking dishes. Eugenia looks around, and starts doing so as well.
“The most useful thing,” Captain Blossom says, as they walk toward the Galdor-gesith’s hostel, “about being Captain Blossom is I don’t have to worry about people doing what I say because I said it. The means won’t generalize but the idea does benefit the general possibility of independent social interaction.” There’s a soft grin, surprising Eugenia. “It helps my neeves remember I’m a grownup, too, or most of them.”
“Most?” Not believing the Independent Blossom is an adult seems impossible to Eugenia.
“Hawthorne’s kids are a bit over median talent for Creeks. Good kids, industrious, but nothing like enough sensorium to spot amounts of Talent. It’s not emotionally obvious to them even a tall Regular is a grownup instead of a big kid. Rose’s sister’s oldest kid — ” and Captain Blossom does something Eugenia thinks isn’t precisely a shrug.
There’s a sitting area. It has reading tables. It has five sizes of furniture. It has something that Eugenia has to extend metaphysical perceptions to convince themself isn’t an open wood fire.
“That isn’t an illusion.” It’s no kind of material combustion. It’s giving off heat, not the perception of heat.
“Abstracted fire.” There’s an almost displeased look. “I can’t tell you how it works.”
Eugenia isn’t, quite, able to contain their astonishment.
“Don’t ask me about life-magery, either.” Captain Blossom is smiling.
Eugenia nods, a little bit abashed.
“I’m going to have to ask the Shot-team how they’d like me to refer to them.”
Captain Blossom nods, smiling.
Eugenia settles on a broad something. It’s leather, it’s a neutral grey, it’s almost too firm. That will certainly do. They take the glass of brandy Captain Blossom hands them.
It’s the traditional size, and almost the traditional shape, but the execution is flawless.
Up behind Captain Blossom’s shoulder there’s a cabinet full.
Eugenia says the short form of the words with Captain Blossom, because that’s what the mourners do before they toast the dead.
“Those whom life has eaten.”
Chapter 48
545-Nivôse-07
Esteemed Colleague,
I shall trust the post office to find you, since I am not so much your colleague as to be able to send this by a construction of wings and intent. (And enough not your colleague that my alternative would be to wake the Line and set it seeking for you, a choice I should not care to explain to a standard-captain!)
