Chapter Nine: Convenient Excuses

+++++Anise+++++

It would be an understatement to say the last two weeks had been interesting. For starters, she'd reached the 4th elevation in the middle of preparing a very illegal potion. It would be obvious to all of her teachers that she'd elevated - they were all 5th or 6th elevation, after all. They could sense far more nuanced fluctuations in the arcane warp than Anise could, and her change in power and complexity would jump out the moment they saw her do any magic.

When you elevated, it meant you'd reached the peak arcane energy state that your soul could handle and maintained it for some period of time. This usually required intense focus, as well as weeks spent in reflection, seeking out the nuances within the nature of magic and developing deep intuitions to cultivate your energy. Then, at that crucial moment of peak energy, your soul would spontaneously reconfigure to a higher energy level to stabilize the power. Anise had never even heard of somebody doing it in the middle of potion creation…

So she and Franyi came up with a lie… it seemed like Anise was telling an awful lot of those of late. This one seemed harmless. They'd say that Anise had elevated while being tutored by Franyi, who was (everybody agreed) a magical prodigy, after all. It would make Franyi look good and Anise wouldn't have to worry about explaining what had happened.

"I don't understand why we have to lie about it," Franyi said.

"I'm afraid they'll take the potion for examination and Uncle Fenrik won't get it…" Another lie.

Franyi looked up from her book and shrugged. "So we'll make it again. With you at 4th elevation, it'll be easier. The reagents weren't that expensive."

After only a little light bribery, Franyi had agreed - she took Franyi, Eloise, and Virtupi-Grace out to celebrate on the West Shore, and Anise footed the bill. But, as nice as Franyi was, she was also very, very smart, and she knew that Anise wasn't telling her something. She might have even suspected something of what they'd actually created in the laboratory that night, and for whom.

Then, when Ezra stopped by St. Quillia's to pick up 'Uncle Fenrik's potion', Franyi finished putting the pieces together… and she let Ezra ride off with his 3Z potion - his demon liberation potion. She'd even invigorated the potion for him and, despite their now being at the same elevation, Franyi could surely do it more expertly than Anise, because Anise wasn't yet used to wielding that much power, but Franyi was as precise as they came. Franyi told him two hours for the potion's vigor time - that was insanely long!

Afterward, when Anise went to thank her, Franyi was angry and inching past the verge of tears.

"I can't believe you lied to me - I thought we were friends!" she said, and she made to leave the room, to go out and study in a common area, just to get away from Anise.

"We are… I didn't want to get you in trouble. You… Franyi, I didn't want you to know it was to help Ezra. It was to protect you."

"So instead you just let me help you make a very, very illegal potion and keep me in the absolute dark about it? Can't you see how that's way worse?"

And, all at once, the tearworks opened - Franyi's and Anise's both. "I know. You're right, I'm sorry," she cried.

The two of them cried on opposite ends of the room Franyi crying near their bookshelf because that's where she'd been standing and she was too angry to even look at Anise, let alone take a step in her direction. And Anise curled up on her bed, feeling miserable and thinking that she should go and hug Franyi, and then deciding not to do so, partly because she thought it might make Franyi madder. But mostly because Anise knew she deserved to feel miserable.

Eventually, Franyi put her books back on the bookshelf - apparently she'd literally shelved the notion of studying for the evening. She glared at Anise, but softened a bit when she saw how obviously miserable the still-sniffling Anise was. Leave it to the good old pathos gambit to ease things along, part of Anise thought, and that startled her right out of her tears. Where had that come from. It turned out that, when you elevated, all sorts of interesting intuitions and insights started flooding into your expanded mind.

"Don't ever lie to me again," Franyi said.

"I… I won't."

"I'm serious."

"Me, too," Anise said.

+++++Anise+++++

Things remained cool between Anise and Franyi for a few days. Anise would have given her left thumb to bring things back to normal, but it was going to take time. Franyi took to studying by herself outside of their room, and Anise hated it - hated that her best friend no longer felt at home in her own room. She liked to watch Franyi reading, the way her gaze became so intense it was like nothing in the world existed but her and whatever tome she'd decided to master. She liked the way her coal-dark eyebrows creased when she found something difficult and the way they sprang up into little arcs of delight when everything suddenly made sense. Anise sometimes wondered what thoughts went through her head and whether she could ever understand them.

"What's going on between you two?" Virtupi-Grace asked.

"Yeah," Eloise said. "You two are usually so close."

"Well…" Anise said, and she realized she was about to lie again. She was about to lie to her second- and third-best friends (in no particular order) like it was nothing, just to cover for the fallout from the lie… lies, plural… that she'd told Franyi. "I made a stupid mistake," she said eventually. "I don't want to talk about it, but Franyi can tell you if she likes."

And Franyi must have told them something because they didn't ask after it again… and, knowing Eloise, she would not have let the subject drop for long if she didn't think she had some version of the truth. Whatever it was, it didn't get Anise in trouble… not for another two days, at least. That was when a school matron pulled Anise and Franyi out of their Intermediate Calculus class and ushered them off to the head magistress's office, autumn leaves flitting past them as they made their way to the stately white marble of the administrative building.

Their magistress was Sorceress Binar, the only 7th elevation sorceress at St. Quillia's, and one of only two in the city (the other being Sorceress Jue, who'd somehow secured an appointment at St. Arbalest's). While she was the nominal head of the school, Binar was mostly engrossed in her studies and various sorceress-y hobbies (for instance, she had a garden of the world's most poisonous flowers) and she only gave the most urgent of matters her direct attention. And, to Anise's mounting horror, the magistress wasn't the only one there - a functionary from parliament and a captain from the constabulary were both very eager to speak with the girls, too. It was, indeed, a most urgent matter. Franyi shot Anise a panicked look, but she was already spending far too many of her efforts dealing with her sweaty palms and thudding heart to do much best friend consolation.

The constable captain had a glass sample jar with a glass phial in it. And not just any generic, boring, exactly-like-every-other-glass-phial variety of cylindrical phial, but one of the small, rectangular, glittery ones that Anise liked that had a little imprint of a leaping fox on the broad side and the initials ALD monogrammed beneath it. Anise Lyrica Derrigin. Those had been a present from her cousin when Anise made it to Adept a few years back. She'd given Ezra his very illegal potion in a monogrammed potion phial. Wonderful.

"Do you recognize this potion jar, Miss Derrigin?" the captain asked. He was a kao-alta, dark blue, silver-ruffed, and completely unreadable behind his sunglasses.

"Um…" Anise couldn't see the point in lying to them - a two minute search of her room would turn up another dozen of the things. "It appears to be mine."

"A very serious assault was committed against your uncle…"

"Is he…" Anise was about to say dead. She felt terrible for hoping he might be.

"Yes, he's safe. He's the one who contacted us. Now… we know that you girls…" The captain lifted his sunglasses and took a moment to stare into Anise's soul before repeating the look with Franyi… "you girls spent a good long time working on some extracurricular potions last week…"

"So the etudium records indicate," the magistress said.

"Tell them about the borrenkin," the functionary added. He was a scriben dressed in a neat gray suit - scriben didn't really need to wear clothes, per se, but most of them did… especially the bureaucrats, who were every bit as conformist as every other bureaucrat. And, if the kao-alta captain was unreadable, there wasn't even a book to read for the scriben… well, if you didn't include the small, ancient book that appeared to be woven into his neck. "The girl, the kao-alta…"

The captain shot the scriben an annoyed look but checked his notes. "Your friend, Virtupi-Grace. She told us everything." His smile was very smug, indeed.

"E… everything?" Franyi shuddered.

He nodded. "Everything."

"I-" she started, but Anise squeezed her hand and cut her off.

"It's true…" her lip quivered and she allowed herself to shed the tears that her roiling emotions desperately wanted to unleash. "I sold some potions to Mr. Gladion! Franyi didn't know anything about it! I told her it was for a boy I like!" She wept into her hands.

"I knew it!" the scriben functionary said.

The magistress let the two of them go not long after that, though she promised that there would be repercussions, especially for Anise. For her part, Franyi stumbled along behind her, in complete shock after almost confessing to giving a dangerous potion to an infernic. Instead, she'd been implicated in… something different, but presumably much less serious. Some sort of disagreement between her uncle and Mr. Gladion.

The thing about being 4th elevation was that, suddenly, Anise was much more intuitive. It was odd, as if extra information just trickled into her brain all on its own. When the functionary mentioned borrenkin, her brain just put two and two together and figured where the connection must lie.

"You're too good at that," Franyi said quietly.

"At what?"

"Lying," she said.

"Oh," Anise said. "But I'll never lie to you. Never again."

Franyi allowed herself the ghost of a smile. "I know."

+++++Anise+++++

By the time the magistress let them go, Intermediate Calculus was over and they had ten minutes before Sigilics and Runology, which they also shared. There was really no good reason for either of them to miss class, but Anise felt absolutely gutted, like somebody had just gone in, scooped out all of her innards, and replaced them all with burnt coffee grounds. Her hands shook and she felt on the verge of tears despite having just been pinned for a much less serious infraction than the one she'd actually committed.

"I… I thought I was doing the right thing…" Anise clutched her textbook against her chest and stared at the plaster of the wall, trying very hard not to see anything at all.

Suddenly, Franyi was by her side on the bed, pulling Anise tight and stroking smooth, cool fingers through her hair. Franyi, with her caramel skin so soft and her amber eyes looking far deeper into Anise's soul than the constable captain ever could. She was so much better than Anise, and she'd very nearly lost this wonderful girl as a friend, but now she was there by her side, warm against her side, her fingers threading her hair like a weaver at the loom.

"It's okay… I'm sorry you're upset," Franyi said. With a gentle insistence, she turned Anise's head to bring them face to face, their noses nearly touching. "You told the captain that you told me it was for a boy… was there… did you have somebody in mind?"

"What?"

"A boy? Was it Tua'hik from the men's school? He seems sweet on you… or… could it be Ezra?"

Anise furrowed her brow and Franyi relaxed the slightest amount. She sat up on her bed, staring into the rumpled pile of her checker patterned bedsheets. "No, there's no boy, I…"

Intuition trickled in, information heretofore inaccessible. Oh. Her brain said. Ohhh… Oh no. Oh nonono. And, just as Anise's world came crashing down upon her, just as she apprehended a soul-shattering, life-altering revelation about herself, they heard a commotion down the hallway followed by angry-sounding tromping toward their room. The door creaked open.

"Sir! Sir! You cannot be here," the dormitory matron called after the intruder.

Uncle Fenrik stuck his head in the room and spotted Anise, teary and huddled with Franyi on her bed. He sneered. He pursed his lips.

"It's high time you and I had a talk, girl," he said.

+++++Ezra+++++

After his initial crash into Gladion's carriage and subsequent tear down the avenue - which, thank god, none of the constabulary saw - Ezra slowed to a respectable speed and headed north. North was Old Town which, he realized, was where Gladion's base of operations was along with much of the rest of St. Arbalest's professional and aspiring gangsters.

Fenrik's carriage was nice, worth a stack of brownbacks or more. Unfortunately, he couldn't just take the carriage, nor could he sell it, since it had an ID plate permanently welded to the back and side of the carriage. Even if he'd stolen Fenrik's finest clothes and dressed to the nines, it would have been immediately apparent that the carriage wasn't his, and even the greediest criminal wasn't stupid enough to try to sell a sorcerer's stolen carriage.

As he drove along the avenue, the smooth, slate-gray streets of the East Shore became the rumbling cobblestones of Old Town… and, regardless of whatever magical niceties they had in St. Arbalest, they had a lot to learn about suspension systems. The whole carriage rumbled beneath the cobblestones and Ezra weaved around the slower traffic - big carts stopping to unload cargo, horse-drawn carriages from the countryside trotting along, and, yes, a few johns picking up comely "hitchhikers" to drive to discreet destinations further into the district. The road was wet from recent rain - rain that had tamped down the river's stink while upping the ante on smell in the streets and alleyways - Ezra was uncertain whether it was an improvement, but it was certainly different.

He reached back and adjusted the sheet around the unconscious girl. He'd wrapped her in an off-white sheet of some sort of thick, wax-treated fabric. And, with a start, he realized that it was a bodybag. Ezra didn't know how many bodies Fenrik went through, but the number, apparently, was more than zero. The rumbling cobblestones kept shifting the covering, exposing more and more flesh… supple shoulders… lithe arms… the upper edifice of pert breasts… he shifted the covering back up. It would have been better if she was awake, though he wasn't sure he wanted her to awaken right there in the carriage as he drove them up toward Chartham.

Ezra decided to see how far they could get. He'd drive them out into the countryside, wait for her to come to, and then maybe see about getting work on one of the farms out there. They didn't have thrall-plugs, so they could pass as human. They'd work the earth, learn about farming, and life would be hard… they'd be of humble means, but it would be rewarding in its way. He and the girl would fall for one another over slow, candlelit nights, the air smelling of fresh soil, cicadas calling in the trees…

"Oh… for fuck's sake…" he sighed.

The carriage stalled right over the old stone bridge into the Chartham Canals. The carriage slowed to a cruise as it made its way the rest of the way down the gentle slope of the bridge, and Ezra barely managed to pull out of traffic and off to a little side street. He pulled the parking lever and cursed. The car's crystal had run out - a crystal attuned to Fenrik of Westval. Without a whole new crystalline enclosure, the carriage was worthless to anybody but Fenrik, unless they wanted to sell it for parts. If Ezra left the carriage here, that's probably exactly what would happen.

He took his bearings. Ezra had never actually been into the Chartham Canals - people tended to avoid it when possible, and even criminals of means like Gladion avoided the place. It was a place of questionable infrastructure, rampant theft, and (most pertinent) small profits. It was also, Ezra realized, a great place to hide if you didn't want to be found.

In front of half a dozen curious onlookers, he tromped around to the back of the carriage, opened the coachman's boot, and emptied the little cloth bag of odds and ends that somebody had put back there - a tire repair kit, a little bottle of axle grease, a squeegee for the window, plus a crumpled-up brownback and some change - and stuffed the money, his crystals, and the gore-caked thrall-plugs into it. Then he lifted the unconscious young woman from the coach, her head lolling out from the body bag, her almost-crimson hair tumbling like a cascade of lava, and carried her across the street.

Ezra wasn't the strongest man in the world, but he'd put on some muscle in the past weeks and could barely manage the lithe girl, at least enough to carry her over to the ramshackle boarding house that was, suspiciously conveniently, located directly across the road from there the carriage had given up the ghost. Mama Pathula's, the sign said.

"Um… you can't bring a body in here," the woman in the kitchen said. She was a kao-etema woman hovering over a wood stove and stirring at something that bubbled and smelled a lot better than most of Chartham. She squinted at him with her little kao-etema eyes - they didn't have the best vision.

"She's alive," he said. He laid her across the shabby, deteriorating divan in the main room. "She's just having a… a spell…"

Medicine was reasonably advanced in St. Arbalest, at least close to mid-20th Century standards, but common knowledge of medicine was almost nonexistent. In the common parlance, almost anything that incapacitated you without obvious injury or illness was a 'spell'. Seizure? Migraine headache? Hypoglycemia? Meningitis? That was a spell. By the broad definition of the term, the young woman was having a spell.

Mama Pathula was unmoved. "It's a brownback per week… one brown, ten par if it's two to a room."

Ezra fished through his pockets and came up with a crumpled-up brownback and six or seven brushpins. He carefully flattened the bill and placed it with the coins upon the table. "I haven't got the ten par, but I can get it by this evening…"

The landlady frowned, her little drawn-on eyebrows doing interesting things, and pointed vaguely upward. "Third door upstairs. There's no locks on the rooms, so watch your things. Breakfast at seven, supper at seven, anything else is on you."

"Thank you… thank you," Ezra said. He glanced back to the girl on the couch. "Can you, uh, help me get her up the stairs?"

"No."

Ezra wished he had Anise's magical lifting ability but, alas, he was a mere Earth human, utterly ungifted in the ways of magic… though, he was starting to have some doubts about that. Regardless, he was currently ungifted. He had to drag the poor girl up the stairs, his shoulders straining, legs burning, her limbs thumping against the rickety wooden steps. Eventually, he got her up to the room, dragged her in, and shut the door. He looked around the place - it was a lateral move from his chamber beneath the steps at Fenrik's, barely larger and certainly dirtier. But at least he wasn't at Fenrik's, and at least he wasn't a slave. Not for however long he could keep from getting apprehended. He carefully lay the girl on the room's small, water-stained (he hoped) mattress and then lay himself next to her on the dusty carpet. He'd slept worse places before. The various and sundry sounds of Mama Pathula's faded as he drifted into slumber.