The Queen's Champion

Chapter 7

Joan whistles a song as she steers the skiff across the river. She doesn’t try to make conversation. David smokes down her cigar and sits with his head resting against his seat, watching the sky lighten and turn pink as the sun rises on a day he should have never seen.

He supposes the fatigue will hit him later. He’s been awake since yesterday morning, was running around and being active for, f**k, he doesn’t know. Eight hours? Ten? But David is used to going a day or two without sleep. He’s had trouble sleeping for as long as he can remember, and he could never afford to let tiredness affect his mind. Especially not when Billie’s safety depended on it.

No one comes down to the docks to greet them. Everyone’s probably still asleep. David and Joan trudge up to the mall entrance by themselves, and the intercom buzzes to life.

“What’s the password?”

David leans forward and speaks into the intercom before Joan can open her mouth. “Whalebone.”

Joan gives him a dirty look as he pulls back. David stares back, nonplussed.

Reed throws the door open with a wide grin. “You’re back! Granny said you’d make it back!”

“Yeah, yeah. Pipe down, squirt.” But Joan says it with a smile, ruffing Reed’s hair as she steps past him.

“Did you do it? Did you kill the Duke’s son?” Reed says as he bounces from foot to foot. When David nods, he pumps his fist and jumps into the air. “I knew you could! Zhukov got back a few hours ago, I’ll go let everyone know you’re here!”

Reed scurries off then, his shoes slapping against the tiled floor. David watches him go and wonders how his tophat doesn’t fall off.

David turns back and spies Rose sitting on the steps. Her hair is free from the beehive and knotted dreadlocks spill over her shoulders, the snarled tips reaching her waist. She stands up as David approaches, her hands clasped in front of her chest and her eyes absolutely pleading with him. Fearful. Hopeful.

“He’s safe.” And that’s all David needs to say.

Rose’s face breaks into relief, and she bounds off the steps. She throws her arms around David’s shoulder before he can stop it.

“ Thank you.”

David nods and tries his best to gently extract her. “He’s staying in the Distillery District for now. He says he can make his own way.”

“Oh, he can.” Rose grins. “Joshua’s the smartest of us three. If anyone can make it on their own, it’s him.”

In the background, Joan coughs. “I was gonna bring him back with us, but knife-man here said he didn’t want to come.”

“That’s good. That’s...that’s what we agreed on.” Rose’s smile disappears, and she looks thoughtful for a moment before she starts digging into her pocket. “I know you did this for the right reasons, but-”

“Don’t reward me.” David holds up a hand. “Keep it. Whatever it is, you need it more than I do.”

Rose is quick to shake her head. “No, please. I want to help you. I can always make more.”

David pauses for a moment to mull that over, the fact that she made something to give to him, and Rose takes the opportunity to press the charm into his hand. It’s bigger than the ones he’s been using. Three-pronged, pure white and held together with black wire where the bones meet in the middle.

“You made this?” David runs a gloved thumb over the etchings, and Rose nods.

“I put some of my favorite enchantments in it,” she says, and starts pointing to the different prongs. “This one will make you more agile, and this one makes you a bit faster when you’re sneaking. And this one-” she presses her finger to the carving. “-I’m not entirely sure about all it does, but it makes water taste really good.”

“That’s one of your favorites?” Joan puts her hand on her hip.

“It tastes really good.”

“You made this?” David repeats, taking his glove off and touching the inscriptions. One prong is cracked ever so slightly, and David worries it with his pointer finger. “You know how to make bone charms?”

Rose’s eyes are at the floor, her boot toeing the line in the linoleum. She doesn’t meet his gaze.

‘She’s powerful,’ Sabrina says, impressed. ‘She can be either a powerful ally, or a disastrous enemy. Fortunately for you, she’s only interested in protecting those she loves.’

Rose opens her mouth, but as she does so a door at the end of the mall bangs open.

“Lizzy! David!” Edgar Wakefield stretches his arms up to the ceiling before jogging forward. “You did it again!”

David turns back, but Rose already has her head ducked and is scurrying off.

“Luca Abele died a f*****g coward,” Joan says, grinning. She meets Edgar and they smash their fists together. “The Regent must be shitting herself by now.”

Edgar laughs, picking her up by the waist and spinning her around. “It’s really happening! We’re taking down the Regent, we’re really doing it! We’re putting an Emperor on the throne!”

“That part’s going to be trickier,” David coughs. Edgar frowns, puts Joan back down. David motions for them to follow him. “Come on. I’ll tell everyone.”

“It’s not that bad,” Joan tells Edgar, whose face has gone white. “Kid’s still alive. We’ve just hit a bit of a snarl.”

Still pale, Edgar nods and begins following along. “Everyone should be gathering in the main hall. I woke Thalia up a bit ago, told her we weren’t waiting on her ass to put make-up on.”

David finds himself nodding along as he walks, though he’s tuning Edgar out. A snarl. That’s all it was. A code they’d be able to crack.

They would be able to crack it, wouldn’t they?

His mind is turning. Nobody would know how to decipher the code. Anthony  would remain lost, somewhere in the city, alone and wondering when David was going to come for him. Until Delilah rooted them out, killed everyone who would come to his aid. Then she would let Anthony  out. Sit him on a throne and slip a ring on his finger, and spend the rest of her life whispering in his ear and controlling his Empire.

He clenches his fists. No. He was going to find Anthony . And once he was safe, once he was out of Delilah’s reach, then he would kill her.

The table is filled by the time they arrive at the mill. Thalia sits at the far left end of the table this time, and Zhukov sits in the seat she occupied the day before, at the right head. Paul has switched seats as well, taking the seat next to his mistress. The Dressmaker sits at his old place, to Zhukov’s right, and looks profoundly uncomfortable about it.

Galia is sitting to Zhukov’s other side, staring blearily at the cup of coffee in front of her. David slides into the seat next to her, shaking his head when the Dressmaker offers him tea from the pot in the middle of the table. Joan takes her place to David’s left, next to Jerome, who is busy fiddling with a black box with orange wires sticking out of it. Edgar takes his seat in between Paul and Lydia’s unoccupied seat.

“Well, it’s nice to have everyone all together finally,” Thalia says, with a pointed look across the table. Zhukov gives no indication he notices, however.

“And now we’re here.” he says, never turning his head. David’s eyes linger on Lydia’s empty seat. She was not present, nor was Ricardo or the Coppers. Gerald was in the kitchen preparing breakfast, but he was the only one of the servants privy to the meeting.

Zhukov gazes over everyone and no one in particular, his red goggles betraying nothing. “I think this is an appropriate time to congratulate David, both for coming to my rescue last night, and for removing Luca Abele from play.”

There’s a smatter of applause, and David stares straight ahead.

“What are we clapping about?” Lydia is walking through the entryway, quickly followed by Rose, who darts over to the kitchen. Gerald immediately begins scolding her, though everyone pretends not to hear. Lydia walks around the table as Edgar fills her in.

“David killed Abele. We’re one step closer to the crown!” he grins.

Lydia’s eyes light up, and she looks at David excitedly. “It it true? You killed him?”

David nods, looking past her. “Yep. I cut his throat and let him drown in his blood.”

There’s a clatter at the end of the table. “Let’s not be so vulgar, please,” Thalia sighs, picking up her stirring spoon.

“You’re sending us to kill people, you don’t get to be prissy about the details,” Joan snarks. David smacks her arm and gets to his feet.

“We’re not as close to the crown as we’d hoped,” he says, pulling the satchel from his coat and tossing it on the table. “That’s all the information we have regarding Anthony .”

Galia eagerly grabs for the satchel and busts the fastener open, snatching the first paper from the stack. The entire table watches as her face falls. “It’s in code.”

“Excuse me?”

“f**k, you’re shitting me.”

“That’s...not good.”

Lydia stands up to grab another sheet from the stack, holding it up to the light. “Is this Old Gristolian?” she asks, running her finger over the lettering.

“I don’t think so.” The Dressmaker is looking over her shoulder. “That right there,” he points to something on the page. “That looks like part of their alphabet, but this over here is something else. And those are modern numbers.”

“Let me see.” Jerome stands up and reaches across the table. In doing so, he jostles his piece of machinery, which hits Thalia’s saucer and teacup and sends it crashing to the floor.

“Outsider’s hairy…” Thalia jumps up. “Jerome!”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” he cries, grabbing a cloth napkin from the table and dropping to his knees.

Thalia puts her hands on her hips and continues berating him as if she doesn’t hear his apologies. “I told you not to bring that thing to the breakfast table!”

“Well, I’m sorry, do you want to be able to listen to announcements or not?”

“I want to be able to drink my tea in peace!”

“Okay, okay, it’s already done.” The Dressmaker is up, wrapping an arm around Thalia’s shoulders. “It was an accident. He apologized. Let it go.”

“Don’t tell me what to do!” Thalia huffs, but she takes the vacated seat the Dressmaker offers to her.

Joan rolls her eyes and bangs her fists on the table. “If you’re done with the theatrics, we have real problems we need to solve.”

“Lizzy’s right.” Galia frowns over the paper she’s holding, rubbing her eye. “We need a code-breaker.”

Rose walks around the corner with a broom and dustpan. Jerome goes to take it from her, but she shoos him off, tells him it’s fine. He walks around the table himself to grab a paper as Paul noisily slurps his own tea. “Maybe it’s written in Serkonan? Would make sense, considering where the Duke’s from.”

“Base Serkonan dialect isn’t this different,” Jerome mumbles. “They have some different grammar and spell things oddly, but this-” he motions to the paper. “-is a completely new alphabet. This is a cipher.”

“Are you any good with that?” Edgar asks.

Jerome shakes his head. “I’m a work-with-your-hands kind of guy. I’ve never been booksmart. Lydia, aren’t you something of a wordsmith?”

“I write poetry. Unless the secret lies in iambic pentameter, I won’t be much help.”

“Well, somebody needs to have a clue how to decode this!” Thalia yells, rubbing her temples with her fingers.

Silence falls over the table. Everyone slowly turns their gaze to Zhukov, who has stayed silent throughout this all, for their saving grace. The response, however, came from the opposite end of the table.

“Give it to Reed.”

Everyone turns. Rose is calmly sweeping up shards of ceramic, not even looking at them. It’s as if she hadn’t spoken.

“What?” It comes from David’s mouth first.

Rose leans the broom against the table, raising her head to meet their eyes. “Give it to Reed. He’s good with that sort of thing.”

Thalia’s bitter laugh breaks the silence. “And why,” she says in between breaths. “Would we trust a child with this? Half the people here have had the best education money can buy, why would he be more capable than us? You’re both illiterate.”

She’s overestimating the average education of their group, David thinks. Her and Lydia would be highly educated, sure, as daughters of nobles. Maybe Zhukov went to a good school, back in Tyvia. Galia didn’t, and Edgar and Joan were Navy-educated, which was a nice way of saying they were taught how to keep a logbook. The closest David’s been to formal education was whatever he gleaned from Sabrina and Anthony ’s tutoring over the years. Paul, Jerome, and the Dressmaker could have theoretically received some quality schooling, but David doubts it. Maybe it was a reflection of his own substandard education, but David has a hard time seeing two or even three out of ten as half.

Rose, however, puts her hand on her hip and grabs the broom with her other hand. “We know how to read just fine, thank you very much. We taught ourselves.”

“So you’re barely literate, alright.”

“My brother started reading when he was two,” Rose huffs. “And he loves puzzles. We used to make up codes like this to write each other secret messages. He always made the hardest ones to crack, and was the first to solve ours. He’s smarter than you think.”

“Regardless of how smart you think he is,” Thalia very obviously rolls her eyes. “This is a serious matter. This is not a game little mudlarks play with their siblings to ward off boredom.”

Rose bends over to grab her dustpan. “Well, I thought I’d offer. If you can deign to ask us for help, you know where we are.”

She passes behind the table, and David is impressed by her restraint in not dumping the dusty shards into Thalia’s lap.

Thalia huffs to herself, and blinks when she finds all eyes on her. “What?”

There’s silence for a long moment, then Zhukov chooses this to be his moment to speak. “It was an interesting proposal. The boy might prove useful.”

“You can’t be serious.” Thalia rolls her eyes, turning back to the group. “You can’t all be serious! This is about finding the Emperor of the Isles!”

“That’s a common goal we all share, Lady Timsh,” The Dressmaker soothes, rubbing her shoulder. “We all want Lord Anthony  back, safe and sound. We’re just trying to make it happen as fast as possible.”

“And we’re supposed to trust some street urchin to figure out where he is?”

“Do you have a better plan, Miss Timsh?” Joan shoots back.

They glare for a long second. Lydia looks around, uncomfortable, and Paul takes a big bite of his breakfast roll. Edgar nervously stares at Lizzy. David wishes for a cigarette.

Finally, Thalia breaks the stare-off. She sits back in her chair, crossing her arms and refusing to look at anyone. “Fine. Fine. Someone get Reed.”

Reed sits in Thalia’s vacated chair, his eyebrows wrinkling as he examines the paper.

“Can you decode it? How long will it take?” Thalia asks crossing her arms.

“Hard to say.” Reed doesn’t tear his eyes away. His purple tophat sits at an angle, threatening to slide down his forehead, and his shoes don’t touch the ground. But the expression on his face makes him look three times his age.

David ruffles the stack of papers in front of him. He’s tried looking through them, identify some sort of pattern, but the symbols just wave in front of his face.

Across the table, Thalia scoffs. “If you can’t do it, then-”

“Then what?” Rose glares daggers at her, gripping the back of her brother’s chair. “Are you going to waltz up to Dunwall Tower and ask politely for the key?”

Thalia mumbles something, but she turns away.

Ricardo, who seems to have been drawn in by literally everyone else crowding around the table, pulls on Rose’s arm and whispers something into her ear. She sighs, then turns to her brother. “So do you think you’ll be able to figure it out?”

“I don’t know. I mean, probably.” Reed bites his lip. “If it’s just a substitution cipher, it shouldn’t be too hard. There might be a transposition layer, which would get tricky, especially if it changes.” He picks up another sheet. “If they used a running key, we’re screwed.”

“You say those words like any of us know what they mean.” Joan says.

Rose sits on the armrest of the chair. “A running key cipher means it refers to another text. Usually a book.” She points to the one Lydia has set out in front of her. “So if Lydia and I agreed ahead of time to use her book here, I could write down ‘thirteen dash six nine’ and I’d be referring to the sixty-ninth word on the thirteenth page. We could use the book to decode it, but it would be useless to anyone who didn’t know what book we used.”

“There are hardly any numbers on here, though.” Edgar says, squinting at a page and frowning.

“That’s a really simple running key. They could mix that in with a substitution code.”

“Oh, that one’s easy.” The Dressmaker says, smiling. “My niece and I used to write notes to each other using a code ring. You just switch out the letters."

Rose nods. “That’s the jist of it, basically.” She shifts on her perch. “A transposition code means they messed with the order. I could write ‘Lizzy’ backwards so it wouldn’t be immediately recognizable as your name; that’s a transposition code.”

“But that’s not a code,” Joan argues. “That’s just writing s**t backwards. Anyone with half a brain would figure that out in a second.”

“Yes, and they can be more complicated than that,” Rose groans.

Reed puts the paper down. “I think it’s just a substitution code,” he says. “But if it is, it’s the most complicated one I’ve ever seen. There are more symbols here than there are letters of the alphabet.”

“What does that mean?” Lydia leans over the table, her curious eyes scanning over the papers.

“Either they have multiple symbols for every letter, or they’re assigning symbols to sounds or groups of letters. Or both.” He picks up another sheet, already looking a strange mixture of exhausted and intrigued at the prospect. “Can I have some paper? And a pen? This is going to take a while.”

While Rose runs off to find him some supplies, Thalia flops down in her chair dramatically. “I can’t believe this. We’re trusting what, a nine-year-old to decode state dossiers?”

“I’m eleven, so shut the f**k up.” Reed raises his big brown eyes and looks directly at her, and it’s probably the first time David’s ever seen the kid make eye contact with anyone. Then  he’s swiftly interrupted by a swat at the head, courtesy of Ricardo, who leans over and whispers something about language very harshly in his strong Serkonan accent.

Joan gets to her feet, her chair scraping against the floor. “Well, David and I should be hitting the hay. It’s been a long night.”

David doesn’t want to go to sleep. He’s not tired yet, and he’s not eager to revisit the nightmares that plagued him in Coldridge. He has no reason to believe they’d abate now, here.

Plus he wants to stay here, watch as the letters are decoded. He can’t tear himself away now. Not when they’re so close.

Zhukov seems to read David’s mind. He still hasn’t moved, still sitting in the same chair absolutely motionless. “She’s right. You both have been awake too long to be of any use.”

“Get some rest, David.” Galia turns to him and pats his hand, half-smiling in a way that doesn’t reach her eyes. “We’ll wake you when we need you.”

David returns to his attic bedroom, but he doesn’t sleep. He’s still too wired. He knows he should sleep-he can’t go save Anthony  in this state, even if they figured out where he was being held immediately. He needs to rest before they leave.

But he doesn’t.

He starts with emptying his pockets. They’re full of coin and whalebone and stolen goods, enough to significantly add to the weight of his jacket. David tosses everything on the table, taking his coat off and hanging it up. It’s in remarkably good condition for what it’s been through. The red hides the bloodstains well.

David runs a wet rag from the basin by his bedside over his body and changes into something more suitable for sleeping. He wants to slide his feet back into his boots, because he’s always been weird like that, but he refrains. Feet that haven’t breathed in a while, leather that’s still damp from the river, good way to get fungus. Anthony  would tell him that. Tell him to keep his feet dry. David puts on a fresh pair of socks.

He still won’t sleep, so he starts with sorting out his loot and supplies, setting aside what he’ll take to Jerome to resell. He paws through the coins he’s picked up, sorting them by value to make counting them a bit easier. He turns over one copper piece and nearly startles back at the face on the coin.

Short hair, pointed nose. Lips and eyelashes purposely made fuller to appear on the portrait, to make the profile look feminine. Large words printed over the picture. The wrong words. ‘DUNWALL FOR HER’.

Fucking Delilah.

David balls up his fist and throws the coin against the wall as hard as he can. Really? It’s been six months. What, did she go straight from the Empress’s funeral to the treasury, walked right up with her new coin design in hand? Could she be any more obvious?

Not only that, but the plague had Dunwall in an economic crisis. Sabrina had stopped production of new currency before David had left on his voyage. Delilah shouldn’t be minting any new coins, much less ones with her face plastered to them. There shouldn’t be a need for Regent coins anyway. A new design would be created when Anthony  took the throne. And the old coins would continue to be printed for seven years after the Empress’s death, in line with tradition. More, if Anthony decided so. It was a sign of utmost disrespect to stop production of a coin bearing the previous ruler’s face before the acceptable period was up.

Delilah wanted to be Empress. That much was becoming obvious. She had always been jealous of Billie.

That was stupid of him, he thinks as he sorts through the rest of the coins, to throw it away. It was money, as much as he hated Delilah’s face on it. A lot of these coins were, far too many for a piece of tender that’s been in circulation for a few months. But he doesn’t bother retrieving it.

The majority of the rest of the coins are Sabrina coins, with the correct motto of ‘EMPRESS PROTECT US’ over it. There’s quite a few of the masculine version, with Emperor Lurk’s profile gracing the front. David finds one of the previous Emperor, Billie’s paternal grandfather, which are becoming rare. Older Gristol coins are collectors items by now, worth more than their face value because of their age and scarcity. The last Empress before Billie, her great-grandmother, her coins were still around when David was younger. But they fell out of use sometime since then. The only Empress coins in circulation now had Billie’s face.

There’s a few foreign coins, with the picture of Duke Theodonis Abele or the dual profile of the King and Queen of Morley, and one lone Tyvian coin adorned with the image of a snowy landscape. They didn’t put anyone on their money in Tyvia. Some bullshit about equality.

David wonders, as he takes a golden Empress five-piece from the pile and holds it in his palm, what history would say about his Billie. Her portrait would hang in Dunwall Tower until it fell, and coins minted with her face would line collectors cases and museum displays for centuries. Would she still be called a Child Empress, whose rule would be overshadowed by her early ascent and premature death? Or would they remember her as the peasant girl who very suddenly became the most important person in the world, taking the throne at fourteen and working tirelessly for her people until her violent murder, not ten years later?

At the very least, her name would be remembered. David should be grateful for that.

He goes to put the coin back in the pile, but something keeps it clenched between his fingers. He doesn’t want to let it go. Stupid, yes. There’s thousands of coins like this.

Still. He gets up and crosses to the end table where he’s set up the rune he found in the waters outside the mill. Leans the coin against it.

It wasn’t a portrait, but it would do. For now.

Billie’s been quiet all morning, but just in case she has something to say, David takes her out and gives her the chance.

‘I was forged of three fathers. Their lessons still course in my head, but I am fractured, shards of a woman. Half in the Void. What am I?’

Sometimes Sabrina talks like a seer. Sometimes she sounds like a half-baked riddle.

David is suddenly tired. He drops into bed and prays to the Outsider not to see Him there.

“..told you.” Anthony  says, his smile bright and playful. “We need to bribe him with jello.”

Sabrina laughs, a full belly laugh like her father was known for. David smiles. She’s had so little reason to laugh lately.

“We still have time. I can send Quinn down to have the kitchen prepare some of that sour stuff he likes so much.” Sabrina grins, shooting a mischievous look at David, who rolls his eyes. She knows he doesn’t like green jello. David has such a strong sweet tooth it’s amazing he still has the seventeen teeth left. When had he lost the three…

Anthony  and Sabrina are holding hands, laughing and teasing him together. The sight of the two makes him hurt with longing. Which is ridiculous because they’re right there. They’ve done their reunions; he’s home now. He doesn’t need to miss them.

Something’s wrong. The hairs on the back of David’s neck prick up before Sabrina even notices the guards’ absence.

It’s too late to get them inside, so David will have to fight off the assassins here. He uses his pistol, blasting away the beak-faced intruders into a cloud of smoke and blue feathers. When Sabrina repels her own attacker, David Blinks forward-how is he doing that?-and puts his own sword through the man’s back.

Nobody else appears, but David whips his head around, his pistol drawn and blade at the ready. “Billie.” She snaps her head at the sound of her name. David speaks through gritted teeth. “Run.”

“What?” Sabrina shakes her head. “David, we’re fine. You beat them. Thank you.” She’s smiling, but it brings him no reassurance. She’s in danger, she’s always in danger, why can’t she see it?

“No! Listen to me!” He’s yelling, but the words are getting smaller, harder to get out. “You...run! Go, Billie! Run and hide!”

Why isn’t she listening?! She just tilts her head, staring at his lips in confusion. She can’t hear him. He’s screaming so hard his voice feels the strain, but his words are plucked from his lips and never reach her ears. She doesn’t know.

Then Billie’s eyes widen, and she shrieks. David’s pistol falls to the floor. He loses control of his lips, his feet, his hands. The only thing he’s left with is his mind, and someone else is along for the ride.

He can’t move his head to see what Billie’s screaming at. Anthony  runs up to David, grabbing onto his arm, his eyes wide with fear.

The strings pull at David’s arm, his hand darting out and his fingers wrapping around Anthony ’s skinny wrist. He pulls, and Anthony  stumbles into him, grabbing onto his coat lapel to steady himself. Just like he did when he was a child, overwhelmed and in need of the comfort David would always begrudgingly give.

David raises his sword, and shoves it through Anthony ’s forearm.

He feels it all, the resistance of the flesh and muscle as he pushes his blade through, the tugs Anthony  makes as he tries to get away. The confusion in his eyes.

In the background, Sabrina still screams.

David shoots up in bed, barely swallowing a yell.

He’s in his attic bedroom, in the mill, in Draper’s Ward. People are downstairs. They’ll hear him.

David leans forward and pushes his wet hair back from his forehead. His back is drenched in cold sweat. His blanket, quilt, and pillow are all on the floor.

It was a dream, another goddamn dream. David closes his eyes. They were getting worse. Was it the Outsider’s doing? It didn’t feel like it. Getting pulled into the Void felt profoundly different from dreaming. Why would it change, though? Every time he’s dreamt of that day, it’s always a faithful replay. Always takes him by surprise. Letting him relive the horror anew, keep the pain fresh. Why would he be more aware now? Why would it change ?

At least he hadn’t watched her die this time.

David shoves his feet into his boots and throws on a sweater over his wrinkled, sweaty shirt. It was freezing up in the attic. There was a stove up here, and it had been lit when he returned from the Distillery District, but it had gone dark since then. Probably no one wanted to risk disturbing him to tend to the fire, and he had forgotten about it himself.

He blows on his hands as he descends the stairs. The main floor is still drafty, too big to truly be warmed by the kitchen and the tiny stoves set up around the perimeter. Perhaps it was warmer when the mill was in business, with the combination of body heat from the workers and the giant, industrial looms buzzing away. But it’s still warmer than David’s attic.

The dim light streaming through the windows could mean it’s either late evening or early morning. David would guess evening, considering Reed and Lydia are both still at the table, surrounded by papers, and wearing the same clothes as the last time David had seen them.

“David, you’re up.” Lydia smiles at him, marking her place in her book with a ribbon. “Joan woke up about an hour ago.”

“She’s off being weird with my sister,” Reed adds, not looking up from his paper.

David approaches them and puts his palms down on the table. “Have you figured out the code yet?”

Reed bites his lip. “No, I-”

“Well, what’s taking so long?!”

Lydia places her hand on his forearm. “It’s a complicated cipher,” she says, gently. “We’re doing the best we can.”

David snatches his arm away. “It doesn’t look like you’re doing much of anything.”

Lydia’s eyes narrow at him. “I’ve been testing out the codes he’s come up with. We’re making some progress.”

“I know what they’re using for most of the vowels now,” Reed says, too brightly considering the context. “And I’m pretty sure this right here corresponds to a double S.”

“That’s it?” David leans over and pulls the paper towards him. “How can you even tell?”

Reed snatches the paper back. “Words have a pattern to them. If a symbol is used a lot in the code, it’s a common letter, which are usually vowels.” He takes a moment to rub his eyes. “Then it’s trial and error. It’s a lot of guessing which word is which and applying those symbols to the rest of the code, see if it makes sense.”

Lydia pushes her chair back, getting to her feet. “You went to bed before breakfast, are you hungry?” she asks, putting her hand on his shoulder. “I can find Rose or Gerald, and they can make you something. You need to eat.”

David brushes her off. “I need to know where Anthony  is.”

He doesn’t look back at the two as he marches away from the table.

Back up in the attic, David swears as he tries to get the little stove burning again. His hands aren’t as stiff anymore, but they’re unused to this work. He remembers how to do it, of course, but he never had to tend to his own fire at Dunwall Tower. Servants did that for him. The decade of palace living has rendered his hands clumsy with these menial tasks.

But he does get it going, finally, and David holds his hands over the heat and basks in the warmth.

He grabs another change of clothes from his tiny, pathetic chest of drawers, mentally noting to ask someone for a set of clothes that wasn’t either armor or pajamas, and leaves the room to warm up on its own. Down in the mill’s single shitty-ass bathroom. David scrubs the sweat and blood from his body, then drains the tub before it runs cold. He wants to sit in the bath, let the hot water thaw his bones, but he doesn’t feel like he deserves it. Not while Anthony  could be freezing his ass off somewhere in the city, and Sabrina is cold and dead in her grave.

‘I wonder if you remember me as I was. Sometimes I get glimpses, echoes of our past. You knew me.’

Did she not remember? The thought burns in David’s mind as he towels off, pulling on fresh clothes. Nothing Billie’s said so far has distinguished her as the Empress. She speaks in her voice, says things Sabrina would have said, but she’s never said anything about her past. Everything was cryptic, strange statements that reflected her omniscient view of the world. David would know his Sabrina anywhere, but he never thought Sabrina might not know herself.

He reflects on the things she’s said, things he remembers. The last thing she said to him, before he went to bed this morning, sticks in his mind. She had three fathers.

Well, she was probably counting him among that, the brat. He told her so many times as a kid that he wasn’t a dad, he was just the asshole who was feeding her. He didn’t want her to get too dependant on him, or feel like she owed him. But David had still ended up raising her. And as much as he tried to keep their relationship professional, he got attached.

The Emperor was certainly one of the others, obviously, but he couldn’t imagine who the third one would be. Was she counting the Emperor as two, both the man who created her and who picked her back up after she was grown, when he felt like being a father? That didn’t make much sense, but Sabrina saw things a different way. Maybe it made sense to her.

David tries to remember what little she said about her life before she met David. Perhaps her mother had married at some point, and she was referring to a stepfather. Maybe there was another man, in between. There would have to be a reason why she wasn’t with him anymore by the time David had first spotted her, and as horrible as it sounded, the only ‘good’ explanation would be that the man had died. David thinks of the Actor, and his stomach burns. There were plenty of people like him it Dunwall, plenty of uses they could find for small children, and he’s enraged at the mere thought of Sabrina being in the hands of someone like him. She had never mentioned anything, though, and David never had reason to believe she had been abused like that. Anthony ’s behavior at first had been concerning, but he was non-verbal for the first few months and by the time he did talk to them, he had already stopped flinching whenever he was touched and trying to palm David through his trousers whenever he sat on his lap. David hadn’t brought it up afterwards, in case it jogged bad memories. He had wanted names, yes, wanted to find the people responsible and hurt them-but more than that, he wanted Anthony  to move on with his life if he could forget.

Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe he should have talked about it with them. Then he could have killed anyone who had ever laid a hand on either of them.

David mulls the rest over as he returns to the attic. He’s half-tempted to just pull the Talisman back out, ask Sabrina herself what she remembers. If she knew her name. If she could tell him the things she always kept from him in life. He tells himself he doesn’t do so because she’ll never respond to his questions the way he wants. There’s a nagging voice at the back of his skull telling him it would be easier if he just didn’t know.

The attic is warm by the time David returns, and he goes back to his supplies. His money is neatly stacked according to denomination, and the valuables he acquired are piled off to the side. His runes and bone charms sit in a box on the under the desk.

David sits cross-legged on the floor and pulls the box towards up, dumps the contents out on the ground. He picks through the charms, examining the markings on each, holding them in his Marked hand and feels their magic flow through him. He’s a bit more attuned to it now, and he can get a feel for each charm’s purpose in this way. Makes him swim faster, cushions his falls, lets him hold onto his rage longer.

Some of them are cracked, and David tosses them back into the box. They’re powerful, yes-but the corruption equally so. The corrupted charms could easily screw him over as much as they could save his hide, and David can’t afford to gamble with his life right now. Not before he saves Anthony .

He does set Rose’s charm on the edge of the desk along with the other charms he’s settled on, destined for a hidden compartment inside his coat. It has three different effects and only one prong is cracked, so David thinks it might be an acceptable risk. Plus he can feel the magic inside it, alive in his hands. Sabrina was right. There’s power behind it. Rose may have butchered one of the carvings, but she still has talent.

The runes are all that’s left, and David assembles them like a puzzle. They’re identical in their inscriptions, unlike bonecharms. All bear the Mark of the Outsider on their surface. But there’s tiny, minute differences that set them apart. Chips along the edge, the material keeping parts of the bone connecting to the rest. They don’t fit together perfectly, and David rearranges them over and over again to get them to line up. The pieces weren’t created to come together with each other, and most likely never would. There was no picture they made. No larger pattern that the runes were meant to show. But his hands still move, tirelessly, to fit them together and the protests in his mind fall away.

David stares at the assembly of runes. The markings blur together, his vision wobbling something fierce. His eyes are dry, but his eyelids are stuck. His mind is quiet. He watches.

And then it’s done. David blinks, the images playing across his retinas fading. He feels...like he should be tired. But he’s not. His muscles, paralyzed just seconds before, are renewed with energy. His mind is sharp as ever. What more, there’s a new understanding of his powers. Ways he can use them better. And something new to focus them on.

He sweeps the runes back into the box, pushes it back under his desk. Now that he’s read from them, the runes don’t hold the same attraction anymore. He still likes them, but he doesn’t feel the same need to touch them, to keep them close.

David makes his way back down the stairs. The windows are dark, and David blinks. The Month of Darkness had passed, and with it the winter solstice. It still got dark early, but he had been down here an hour ago and the light was just beginning to fade. Unless, of course, he had actually slept through the next morning and he was actually seeing the end of dawn. Which would be worse. How long had he been staring at the runes?

Lydia is still at her old place, but Reed is gone. Instead, Galia sits at the other end of the table. Zhukov is once again seated at the head, watching as the girls work. Creepily.

“Where’s Reed?” David asks as he approaches. Galia looks up at him, but Zhukov doesn’t even turn his head.

“Sleeping,” is all the answer he gets from Lydia.

David catches his remarks in his throat. Reed was eleven years old. It wasn’t fair to expect him to stay up all night to decode the letters. He wouldn’t have allowed Anthony  to stay up all night at that age for any reason. Anyone would need some rest by now anyway.

David comes up to the table and leans over to observe their work. “How is it coming along?”

“Like a ton of bricks,” Galia groans. “Reed explained it to me, but I still don’t get what we’re doing.”

“Just keep trying with the code I showed you. You’re doing fine.”

Galia grumbles under her breath. “It’s all Pandyssian to me. None of this makes sense.”

“Have patience, dear Galia.” Zhukov doesn’t move, but his voice comes out loud and clear, unmuffled by his layers of furs and scarves. “The answers will come out in time. Everything will work out the way it should.”

Well, David couldn’t wait around for things to shake out the right way. He doesn’t believe in karma, and he can’t rely on the universe to do what’s best. If David wanted things a certain way, he had to make it happen himself.

He walks away from the table without another word, into the kitchen. He’s never been an exceptionally good cook, and he hasn’t cooked for himself in years, but damn him if he’s going to wake someone up to make him dinner.

Though David realizes, once he’s in the kitchen, that he has absolutely no idea where anything’s kept. Everything’s in boxes and crates, probably because this wasn’t built to be a kitchen, and the oil lamps are dimmed on account of the sleeping people in the corner. A plank that made for a makeshift table during the day has been taken off, the cot underneath it occupied by Reed and Ricardo, sleeping back to back with a single thin blanket thrown over them.

He walks up to the side, tilting his head. It’s the first time he’s seen Reed without his tophat on. His brown hair is cut haphazardly, like Overseers do sometimes for public humiliation. He looks way younger this way, face relaxed as he sleeps, his body dwarfed by Ricardo’s long, langy figure. They’re both skinny, far too skinny. Two noblemen wouldn’t be able to fit, even if one was a child.

David is painfully reminded of Anthony . Sabrina wasn’t quite this young when he met her, and she had always acted beyond her years. Even at twelve, she had to think like an adult in order to survive. He had trouble thinking of her as anything younger than a teenager. Anthony , however, had not only been younger, but was allowed to be young. He had David and Sabrina looking out for him at first, and then he had an army of guards assuring his safety and a plethora of servants keeping him fed. He was allowed to run and play and study like children should be doing. And unlike Billie, he was allowed to make friends his own age. There was no worry about attachments or the inequality of their positions because there was never any expectation that Anthony  would rule.

Reed had more pressure on him than a boy of his age really should, yes. No eleven-year-old should have to worry about where he’ll sleep or how he was going to be fed, or if Overseers or City Watch would storm in and kill him just for having the wrong allies. But in a way, Reed is more free now than most sons of nobility. Definitely more than Sabrina was, after moving to Dunwall Tower.

Lydia wanders into the kitchen, and David turns and busies himself rooting through the icebox. That probably didn’t look too wholesome. The Dressmaker was plenty a creep for all of them, they didn’t need to add David to the number.

If Lydia noticed him staring at Reed, she doesn’t comment. Instead she just leans forward, bracing her forearms on the countertop. David pulls out some unidentifiable meat and drops it in a pan. He’s never been picky.

He silently wishes for Lydia to leave, but she just continues to stand there, her eyelids drooping as she watches. David realizes she probably doesn’t know how to cook. That this is probably fascinating to her.

Stupid f*****g nobles, teaching their kids dumb s**t and leaving them unable to fend for themselves. If David had ever had children of his own, even if he had all the money in the world, he’d have still taught them to cook. Nothing fancy. Enough to survive on their own, if they needed to. He had taught Anthony  a few basic things, and Sabrina had already known a bit when they met. He had taught her how to skin an animal, though. She only knew how to clean fish before that. She had eaten a lot of seafood while living with her mother, apparently. Not that you could do much hunting in inner-city Dunwall, but they caught squirrels and raccoons to supplement their shitty diet of garbage scraps and whatever stale food they could buy on David’s unreliable income. Sabrina had been so proud the first time one of her traps caught a raccoon, and she had both killed and skinned the animal herself before bringing it to David to fry up. Her grin had been wider than the Wrenhaven during flooding season.

“Do you need something?” David spits out. Then he sees the crestfallen look on Lydia’s face and knows he should feel bad about it. He just wants to be left alone with his thoughts.

“No?” Lydia blinks. “I just needed to give my eyes a break. Everything’s starting to look the same.”

“Never good,” David mumbles. He adds in some salt. That was usually his cue to drag Sabrina away from her paperwork. Her eyes would wander and she would blink excessively, then David would grab her pen from her hand and tell her to go to bed. “Are you making any progress?”

Lydia nods to herself, not meeting his eye. “Some. Like Reed said, it’s mostly touch and go. It’s guesswork, and if we guess wrong, then we’re back to square one.”

“Mmm.” David can’t find a spatula, so he flips his meat over with a butter knife, careful to avoid getting hot grease on his hands. They stare at the sizzling meat in silence for a moment. “Thank you.”

That makes Lydia perk up a bit. “For what?” she asks, her light blue eyes meeting his.

“For what you’re doing here. Agreeing to teach Anthony , and now your help with the code…” David attacks the meat in the pan, cutting into it to check the inside. “It’s very selfless of you.” Not what you’d expect from someone of her station, but David doesn’t say that.

Lydia taps her fingernails on the counter. “Oh, I don’t mind.” She leans forward, still watching David’s dinner cook. “I...like it here. I feel useful.”

“Can’t imagine it’s what you’re used to. Cold, crowded, shitty food…”

“Yes, but I’m doing something.” Lydia pushes herself up. “Ever since my niece was born, I’ve just had this sense of...like I’m wasting my life.” She shakes her head. “To be a Boyle is to always look beautiful for everyone to admire, make small talk with people you don’t even like, and then drink to forget how unhappy you are with it all. Oh, you worked for the Empress. You know what I’m talking about.”

He really doesn’t. He and Sabrina certainly kept busy enough, and by the time parties did come around he usually convinced her she’d earned a night off and she’d get happy drunk. She was far from unfulfilled. And as long as he was by her side, he felt the same.

But he nods anyway.

Lydia continues on. “I didn’t...I don’t want Maria to grow up thinking that’s all there is to life. That the only thing she has to look forward to is finding a tolerable husband and making other women jealous.”

“You want her to make something of herself,” David says quietly. Lydia nods.

“Her mother is...she’s brilliant, really. Esma could have ended up at the Academy, if our father hadn’t limited her studies.” She sighs. “It’s all just so...frivolous. Father would have a conniption if he could see me now, but if he had it his way, I would have never amounted to anything. Just another pretty face for men to stare at.”

These were the times David was glad Sabrina had become Empress so young. There had been no pressure to get the princess primed for marriage, for finding a husband suited to help her rule. She would have always been the partner with the power, of course, but David knew that the Emperor would have arranged a marriage for her based on her spouse’s political prowess. And in that way, Sabrina would have been rendered down to just that. A pretty face and a ticket to the throne.

Becoming the Empress so young had given her advantages in weird ways. The sons of Dunwall’s nobility might have pursued her for the perks involved, but she had the power to tell them to get bent if she so chose to. Or have David beat them off with a stick. He was rather fond of that option. By the time Sabrina was old enough for men to start objectifying her, she was too strong of a figure to be seen as one. Being a Child Empress empowered her in that way.

“But you didn’t come down here to listen to me.” Lydia waves her hand. “I don’t think we disturbed the boys at least.”

David glances over to the cot. Ricardo and Reed are both indeed still zonked out. He takes the pan off the heat and slides his dinner onto a plate. “Where’s Rose? Does she sleep in here too?”

“I don’t know? She usually does, but I have no idea where she is tonight.” Lydia shrugs.

A young woman sharing a space with two males, one of whom was an adult she wasn’t related to. How improper. Or it would be, but Rose was a serf, so nobody cared about her honor.

“She sometimes goes to visit with Granny, so maybe she’s there.” Lydia continues. She gets to her feet. “I should probably get to bed soon. And you,” she eyes David’s hunk of meat, raising an eyebrow. “You should probably cook that a little more. You’re going to get sick.”

“I like it rare.” He tears a chunk off with his front teeth and chews on it as he stares her down, until Lydia steps out of the kitchen and bids him goodnight.

David eats standing up, the dry meat catching in his throat. He remembers, as he’s chewing the last of it, that he used to fry meat with whiskey to keep it tender.

David manages to nap for a little bit, just until dawn. Now that his physical fatigue is fading, David seems to need less sleep than he used to. Sleeping is more to pass the time until morning, when normal f*****g people are up. After he watches the sun rise, David grabs his box of trinkets and other various bits and pieces he picked up in the Distillery District and marches on down to the mall.

Jerome squints at an emerald ring, holding it up to the light. “It’s definitely real, that’s for sure.”

“Is it worth anything?” David asks.

Jerome shrugs his shoulders and places the ring back on the table. “Should be. Emeralds are pricy bastards.” He taps his finger on the surface. “Finding a buyer might be tricky. Though it could go either way. Nobles will always want their luxuries no matter how bad things get, and with half the laborers in the city dead there’s not many left to make them.”

“So you’ll be able to turn a pretty profit over these, then.”

Jerome smiles, nervously. “Yeah. Definitely.”

He goes on examining the jewelry, and David is left twiddling his thumbs. He wants to go check on the code’s progress again, but last time Galia threatened to push him into the canal if he asked again before noon. She’s probably gone to bed by now, but David would rather not risk it.

The front door squeaks, and David raises his hand to greet the Dressmaker. “Hey. Welcome to work.”

“You startled me.” The Dressmaker puts a hand on his heart. “I wasn’t expecting you to be here, David.”

David just blinks, and Jerome pipes up. “Hey, brother, do you know anything about gemstones?”

“About...what?”

“Gems. Jewelry, you know?” He puts the necklace he’s examining down. “You used to make clothes. Did you work with the bling too?”

“Oh. No.” The Dressmaker shakes his head. “I once made a dress encrusted with rubies, though. Does that count?”

“Didn’t you make that for Billie?” David turns around in his seat, raising an eyebrow.

The Dressmaker seems to brighten slightly. “I did! And she looked ravishing in it.”

She did look beautiful in that dress, but David still hadn’t liked it. It had looked far too much like a wedding dress for his comfort.

“That’s cool and all, but no. That doesn’t count.” Jerome rolls his eyes, going back to his work. “Something wrong? You usually don’t come in ‘till later.”

The Dressmaker rocks back on his heels, his long, spiny fingers dancing over each other. “I just couldn’t sleep very well. Just...worried.”

“About Alex again?” Jerome looks solemn.

The Dressmaker nods. Then, to David, “My niece. Her name is Alex.”

“The one in the Academy?” David asks. “I’d think that would be the safest place in Dunwall right now.”

“Normally I’d agree with you, but with Sokolov disappearing so mysteriously and the Regent putting all the Academy students to work on a cure…” He sighs. “She’ll be in constant contact with the afflicted. We’ve already lost her parents and both her brothers to the plague. It’s just the two of us now. If something happens to Alex, I just...I don’t…” The Dressmaker covers his face with his hand.

David stares at the grains in the wood, willing Jerome to say something. The only things that pop into his mind are nasty thoughts, things that harp on the Dressmaker’s creepy nature, things that will undoubtedly make him a huge asshole if he says them right now. Sabrina stirs in his hand.

‘He’s a man of simple desires. He admires the honesty of children, and seeks to protect their innocence. Don’t judge him too harshly. This is a man who longs for the simplicity of childhood.’

Well, David certainly felt like a d**k now.

“Hey, man, worrying about it isn’t going to help her.” Jerome reaches across the table, puts his hand on the Dressmaker’s arm. “I’ll get the speaker up soon, then we should be able to hear some announcements. Might be something about the cure progress. They’re not going to let one of their best alchemists drop dead of the plague before it can be cured.”

The Dressmaker removes his hand. He doesn’t say anything, but he nods, his eyes and nose red and puffy.

“That what you were doing yesterday?” David asks, motioning to the heap of metal and wiring spread out on a nearby table.

Jerome nods without looking away from the jewels. “Our speaker went on the fritz about a week ago. Thalia’s been badgering me to fix it, but she also wanted me present at the meeting. I don’t know what she wants from me, sometimes.”

“She’s used to having more servants,” The Dressmaker supplies. “She doesn’t realize that there’s labor involved in everything we do, that we can’t split ourselves into two to get things done.”

That would be a nice power, David thinks.

“We’re not her f*****g servants…” Jerome grumbles. He puts the piece down and looks back up to David. “Well, this s**t, the stuff you said you found in the Duke’s room? That’s all worth a pretty turn. But this-” he motions to the pile of jewelry David pilfered from the Golden Cat. “-is all costume jewelry. I could sell them for their raw materials if you’d like, but it won’t be worth much.”

His eyes are worried, like he thinks David is going to stab him for appraising them wrong. David just shakes his head. “Nah, don’t bother. I’ll give them to the girls. They’ll have some fun with it.”

Jerome nods, looking relieved. “Great. I’ll pack the rest of it up, let you know when I get it sold off. There anything you want me to buy for you? Ammo? Weapons?”

“Sleep darts,” David says, shoving the worthless jewelry back into Joshua’s box of stolen treasures. The jewelry box itself was worth something, but it was useful enough that David held onto it. Jerome goes to take the actually valuable jewelry, and David hold up his hand. “Wait.”

He gives David a curious look, but David pays it no mind as he picks through. He already took out the Kaldwin signet ring, both because he knew it couldn’t be resold easily and because he didn’t really want people asking how he got ahold of it. It was also kind of smugly satisfying to have it, knowing she had taken his. He selects two other pieces from the pile and shoves them in his pocket. His fingers linger over a ruby bracelet as he thinks of Billie, how the square-cut red gems and golden cuff would look against her dark skintone. She always looked nice in red. But then his memory turns to her blood, spilling onto the pavillion floor, staining her skin. David pushes it all away. “Okay.”

He pretends not to see Jerome raise his eyebrow at him.

The Dressmaker perks up, calling to Jerome as he puts his goods away. “Show him the flower water! If he likes the sleep darts, he’s going to love this.”

“Right! Almost forgot.” Jerome starts opening drawers and rifling through them.

David stands up to get a view on what Jerome is doing. “Flower water?”

“It’s laudanum. Made from distilling poppies...Ah! Here we go.” He produces a small bottle, thick green glass and a snap top. He hands it over to David without further explanation.

David flips the top open and raises it to his nose. The Dressmaker waves his arms, and Jerome nearly yanks it out of his hands. “No! Not here!”

“Well, what am I supposed to do with it?” David yells.

Jerome just shakes his head. “I just told you. It’s laudanum. It’ll put you right to sleep.”

Right. It did that. David wasn’t good with drugs, never did them recreationally and never had a reason to learn more about them. But he remembered some things, sometimes. Sabrina was prescribed laudanum once, after a particularly bad tooth infection and needing one of her back molars pulled. It was the only way she could get any sleep while it healed. David had also been given some after he snapped his ankle, on the garden steps of all f*****g things, but he had refused to take it after the first dose. Made him sleep like a rock. He worried something might happen, Sabrina could be attacked in the night and he might sleep through it, or be too dazed to help her.

“Could be useful.” David reaches across and plucks it from Jerome’s hands.

“It’s damn potent. Let someone take a good huff and they’ll be out like a light for at least an hour.” Jerome says, wringing his hands. “It’s not the same as a sleep dart, though. They won’t be totally unconscious. Just mind the noise around them.”

Still, that was a huge advantage. David could choke someone or knock them out and then hold the laudanum under their nose. He couldn’t think of many reasons why he’d still be in the vicinity after an hour anyway. Lives could be spared, and he could sneak through undetected.

‘Of course, why go to all the trouble when a blade to the neck will accomplish the same thing?’

David holds back his chidings of “hush, Billie” before Jerome and the Dressmaker can hear them. He swallows. “Thank you. This is...this is very nice.”

Jerome has turned around again, busying himself with wires and cords. “I can’t take all the credit. Rose gave me the recipe, showed me how to do it. ‘Poppy tincture’, she called it. Girl knows her flowers,” he mumbles.

“Which makes sense, considering she’s named after one,” The Dressmaker adds.

“If only all our names fit so well.”

David rolls his eyes at the two and gets to his feet.

David drops the jewelry box onto the table. Reed raises his head, but he seems to be the only one who takes notice. He ducks his head again without sparing it much of a glance.

He slides into the seat besides Galia. Zhukov is absent, thankfully. He can see Gerald and Rose bustling about in the kitchen, working to prepare lunch for everybody. It’s quiet, save for the sound of pens on paper.

Galia looks up at him with a ready smile. “What’s up, boss?” He can practically see the threat in her eyes. But he’s not here to ask about the code, and it’s nearly lunchtime anyway.

“I have something for you.” David reaches into his coat. Galia puts her pen down and perks up in interest, turning to the side. She watches as David takes the earrings out of his pocket.

Her eyes light up at the sight, and she nearly squeals. “For me?!”

“I lifted them from Abele’s room.” That was practically the truth. “Seemed like your style.”

She grabs them from his palm and immediately goes to put one in. Pearl drop earrings, fell just far enough to brush her jawbone when she turned her head, getting fatter as they went down. Simple, but elegant. Definitely Galia.

‘Her heart is full of bitterness. Something I cannot see draws on it.’

“I love them!” She squeaks. She puts the other one in and shakes her head to get them to swing. “Thank you!”

David smiles, but her joy makes a dark part of him pang. Sabrina had done a similar thing, the first time she got to wear dangly earrings. She had, with time, come to hate earrings and only wore them on special occasions when she was advised to, and even then she wore studs if she could help it, but she had been young then. She was all excited to get her ears pierced, hang jewels from them like a proper princess. Then she balked when she saw the piercing gun, and David had held her hand through it with minimal eye-rolling, though afterwards she claimed it hadn’t hurt at all.

The first pair she was allowed to wear was for the winter festival, nearly reaching her shoulders and adorned with little red bells. So they jangled every time she turned her head. She had giggled and shook her head to hear them ring, feel them bounce. David had been ready to rip them out of her head by the end of the night. Now he’d give anything to hear it again.

Anthony  had also gotten one of his ears pierced, which would have been fine with David if he hadn’t done it at fourteen, without telling him, and had Sabrina do it in her quarters with a sewing needle. Those two would have killed themselves a dozen times over out of stupidity if David hadn’t been around.

Galia startles him out of his thoughts by wrapping her arms around him. She withdraws, quickly, but gives him a smirk as she turns back to her paper.

Gerald exits the kitchen and starts walking towards the staircase, and David takes the opportunity to slide into the kitchen. Rose is at work chopping up a slab of meat. She has to lay one of her hands over the end of the knife and push her body weight into it in order to make a cut. David pulls the necklace from his pocket, considering just draping it around her neck and then darting away without another word, but if she’s anything like the rest of the women in his life then she’ll likely punch him out of surprise. And she also has a knife, so that really wasn’t likely to end well.

He ends up tapping her shoulder. Rose turns to him with a confused face. “What?” she asks.

In response, he holds up the necklace.

It’s nothing fancy. A gold chain, a single diamond pendant. Definitely more expensive than peasants could afford, but it was nothing compared to some of the gaudy pieces he found in Joshua’s jewelry box. Far plainer than any of the crown jewels that Sabrina had worn during her life. Simple and pretty.

She blinks, first at him, then at the necklace. Then, “I can’t accept this.”

“Please.” David really doesn’t want to get into it. He’s not good with gifts. He usually just left Sabrina and Anthony ’s birthday presents in their room while they were asleep so he didn’t have to deal with this awkwardness. “Please. I just wanted to thank you. For the charm, and the laudanum.”

Rose looks back to the meat, her hand still clutching the knife. “You saved my brother,” she mumbles.

“Well, he’s the one who stole this. He let me take his spoils,” David says. “So you can think of it as a present from him, if it makes you feel any better.”

That brings a small smile to her face. “Joshua’s been stealing from the rich and noble this whole time?” She shakes her head. “Hypocrite...alright. Thank you, David.”

She goes to take it but stops at the sight of her hands, covered in blood and other juices. David motions for her to turn around. “Let me.”

His hands are too rough for this kind of thing, scarred and clumsy with such small actions. But they remember how to do this, having helped Sabrina with plenty of stubborn necklace clasps over the years. So David tries his best to keep his hands from shaking as he pushes her heavy dreadlocks out of the way and closes the fastener at her nape.

Rose’s freckles just seem to increase in frequency away from her face, and the back of her neck is almost brown with the splotches. Anthony ’s freckles had faded a bit as he got older, but even when they were at their strongest, they weren’t this crazy. The thought suddenly dawns on David that Rose is probably the only person here even remotely close to Anthony  in age. Well, besides Thalia, but she was stuck-up enough that David doubted Anthony would enjoy her company. He would be well-protected here, taken care of and would have David to rely on, but still. Anthony would need a friend.

This isn’t the place to bring that up, though. So when Rose looks down at her chest and smiles at the pendant, David excuses himself and leaves the room before she can thank him again.

Lydia and Paul are at their places by now, and Thalia sits at her own table off to the side, looking pouty. David wants to point out that there were currently six seats unattended and not everyone was going to be present for lunch, but he leaves it alone.

‘She feels unimportant here, though she doesn’t think it in so many words. It’s not a feeling she’s accustomed to.’

Right. She could stew alone for all he cared.

Paul turns to him as he rounds the table. “Hey! David-io!”

David gives him a dirty look. Lydia looks down at the table and tries to hide her giggles.

Galia turns to David as he sits down. “So what’s with the box?” She points. “You dropped it off, but you didn’t say what for.”

“It’s from the Golden Cat,” David says. He wishes for a cigarette. “Not worth selling. Knock yourself out.”

She gives him a curious look, while Paul snatches the box and opens the lid. “By the Void, it’s like a treasure chest! Well, if pirates were prostitutes and all they buried was their shitty jewelry.”

He turns the box over and dumps the contents out onto the table. Reed glances up long enough to look annoyed. Galia stands up to get a look at it all. Lydia picks up a ring that’s rolled her way.

“Obviously fake,” she says, turning it over in her hand. “A diamond this large could buy this entire mill. And nobody-” She rubs at the band, grimacing as flecks of paint stick to her finger. “-would use this kind of setting for it.”

Paul snatches the ring from her and shoves it onto his pinky finger. He’s already wearing three beaded necklaces. “So what? It’s pretty.”

Lydia opens her mouth to respond, but confusion fills her eyes and she closes it again. Then she shrugs and grabs a necklace from the pile. “You know what, you’re right.”

Galia is already sliding bracelets onto her arm. She throws one at Paul, who laughs and tries to fit it over his fist. Lydia gets out of her chair and walks up behind Reed, draping a string of wooden beads over him.

“You’ve been working so hard. You deserve a break,” she says as Reed turns his head up, a protest ready on his tongue. She pats his head.

Reed brings his hand up to finger the beads. “This is pretty.” He almost smiles.

At the end of the room, Joan enters and strikes a pose. “Hey, sluts!”

“There are children here!” David yells to the pile of jewelry.

Joan pays him no mind. She wanders up to the table, Edgar trailing people here, and slaps her palms down. “Well, what the f**k do we have here?”

“Hooker jewelry,” Paul says. His shirt collar is obscured by beads and strings, and he’s fit rings on most of his fingers by now. David can see his skin bulging around them.

“Ooooh, cool.” Joan picks up a string of fake pearls. She doesn’t undo the clasp before trying to put over his head, and it gets stuck around her temples. “f**k it, it’s a crown now.”

Edgar wrinkles his nose as he sits down. “You said you got it from a w***e? It’s probably crawling with disease.”

“Oh, f**k off and have some fun.” Paul pelts him with a bracelet.

David sits back and watches them all divy up the jewelry. Reed takes extra for his sister, and Lydia laughs as she compares her expensive necklace of river pearls with the ones made of wood and paint. Even Edgar loosens up and tries on a particularly flashy brooch. Their joy is infectious. David finds himself smiling.

‘Our hands do violence. But there is a different dream in your heart.’

David lowers his head to hide the somberness he’s sure has flashed across his face.

“So, can I ask a serious question?” Lydia says, after the they are all decked to the gaudy nines. Even David has a necklace of colorful beads on.

“You just did.” Joan drops her chin into her well-adorned hands.

Lydia ignores her. “Why couldn’t one of you be our assassin? I mean, it’s good that we got David out of prison,” she waves in his direction. “But it was a gamble whether we’d even find him in one piece. Not to mention we thought he’d be half-dead by the time he got here.”

“I’m glad you had such faith in me.” David bites back. Joan slaps his arm.

“You looked like the walking dead when I first saw you. We figured you’d be injured, starving and s**t. You bounced back way quicker than any of us expected.”

“My point exactly,” Lydia continues. “We were expecting it to take weeks for David to recover, and that was if he survived the escape. But you and Edgar were in the Navy, right? And Galia was one of the Empress’s personal guards!”

Sabrina didn’t have a squad of bodyguards, David thinks, besides him. There were the guards assigned to Dunwall Tower, which David personally vetted and only contained highly skilled officers who actually stood a chance at fending off assassins, but that was different. Their duty was protecting the Empress first, of course, but they had a range of other responsibilities. David’s position was purely to protect the Empress at all costs. Galia was skilled, certainly, but he’d have never chosen her to guard Billie’s life.

“I’m not exactly, uh, ‘cut out’ for the assassin life,” Edgar explains, straightening his lapels. “I don’t do stealth. Too big for it.”

‘He has the bloodlust. But he would never have gotten as far as he has without Joan Catspaw. So he defers to her. He won’t think to resent it on his own.’

Reed pipes up from the end of the table. “Not all assassins are short! The Rat King is over six feet tall!”

“Well, it’s about more than being tall for me.” Edgar slaps his belly. “Unless you wanted everything to become a bloodbath, I wouldn’t be a good choice.”

“My sister still works for Delilah,” Galia says in a small voice. “I don’t think she wants to, but I doubt she can leave. If Delilah found out what I was doing, she’d have my sister killed.”

David fists clench under the table. Quinn. Young, sweet Quinn. May not have been the most capable fighter, but David kept her on more for her sharp wit and her medical knowledge. The girl had saved a few officer’s lives by providing first aid before a real physician could make it onto the scene.

If Delilah had hurt her, David would make her suffer all the more. Burn her and everyone she loves.

Lydia nods in sympathy. “I understand. If it were Waverly, I’d feel the same.”

‘She loves both her sisters dearly. But she worries. The youngest Boyle is cold and cruel to her peers, and has never seemed to show anything akin to empathy.’

“You have a good point though, Lids.” Paul points a pen at Lizzy. “Why not you, Catspaw? You’re tiny, good at killing things. No one around you love that the b***h Regent can use against you.”

“Well thanks, I appreciate you reminding me how lonely I am.” Joan rolls her eyes. “Well, I wanted to try my hand at assassin work, but I-”

“She got sick.” Edgar grins.

There’s the audible sound of Joan kicking him under the table. “I broke a rib.”

“Because you were sick!”

“Shut up , Wakefield! I’ll still cough on you!”

Edgar just keeps laughing. Lydia raises an eyebrow. “Wait, so you had the plague? And recovered?”

“No, f**k off, I didn’t have the plague.” Joan huffs and crosses her arms. “I got pneumonia. In the middle of the goddamn summer.”

“It was fall by then,” Edgar mutters as he sips his tea. Joan just glares at him.

“Anyway. Yeah, half the city’s dying of a plague and I got laid up with f*****g pneumonia, of all things. Had to move back in with dear old pops, so his nurse could treat it and dad could fuss over me like he cared.”

“The dad who owned the mill?” Reed asks.

“No, one of my other eight dads.”

“She managed to break a rib during one of her coughing fits,” Edgar laughs. “I had to bring her herbal tea and s**t. She was a f*****g mess.”

“Yep, cracked my rib and Trimble told me I couldn’t strain myself for eight weeks,” Joan sighs. “I still am, but it’s better if David does the heavy lifting for now. I can provide some support, help keep the old man safe.”

“Quit calling me old,” David grumbles. Sabrina would have gotten along great with Lizzy. Anthony  will definitely like her.

David thinks on his bruises. How they healed almost literally overnight. How the ache in his joints abated. He had suspected he had some broken toes, but even those seemed to be perfectly fine now. The Mark had healed him.

“Are you sure that’s okay?” Lydia actually looks worried. “Can’t someone else accompany David?”

“I’m not about to let anyone else put their grubby paws on my skiff.”

A door slams below them, followed by the sound of feet running up the stairs.

“GUUUUUUYS!” Jerome bursts into the room, his face red and sweaty. He pants from exertion, but he’s smiling. “Guess what I did!”

“Considering you’re holding our old speaker in your hands, I’m guessing you fixed the speaker,” Paul says, boredly.

If Jerome picks up on his tone, he doesn’t let it spoil his mood. “Heck yes I did! Listen to this s**t!”

He puts the speaker down on a table, grabbing for a heap of tangled cords and wires that looks like something they beat David with in Coldridge. His fingers find the right one, and Jerome takes several tries to plug it in. Then he waits with excitement written across his face. The machine crackles. Then-

“-former High Overseer, Thaddeus Campbell, is not longer a citizen of Dunwall.”

The group cheers. Joan gets up and goes to the speaker. “Wait…”

“He now bears the Heretic’s Brand, and it is now a minor criminal offense to offer this individual aid or housing, in accordance with one of the oldest…”

“Holy s**t!” Edgar claps his hands together. “David, you took down the High Overseer? Just, while you were in the area? Nice one, man.”

David shrugs. “That wasn’t me. He was like that when I got there.” Right, he never told the others what had happened. Come to think of it, they hadn’t even asked. This was as good a time as any to fill them in. “The Pendleton twins were attacked too. One’s dead, the other’s missing. Not sure what happened.”

Thalia sighs in a dramatic manner from the side of the room. David had forgotten she was there. “Just as well. They were no friends to the Timshs.”

“Yeah, because that’s our goddamn priority here. Your f*****g family,” Joan spits. Then, to Jerome, “Have they mentioned Abele yet?”

He nods, rubs the back of his neck. “Yeah. Officially they’re blaming his assistant, who’s apparently missing now-” David rolls his eyes at the thought of skittish, malnourished Joshua being able to hold Luca down and shove a blade through that fat gut. “-but people have been talking. Word from one of my contacts over in the Cloud District is that people think the Butcher is responsible.”

That piques David’s attention. “The what now?” he says, sitting up straighter.

Everyone turns to look at him with confusion written across her face. Then Joan slaps her hands down on the table. “Outsider’s balls, you f***s, do you all keep forgetting? He was in prison getting his ass beat during all this.”

“But the murders started before he was arrested.” Lydia frowns. “The first few were vocal opponents of Empress Billie. They were all found completely torn apart-David, don’t you remember that?”

“We were a little busy with a plague on our hands,” David grits his teeth.

Edgar c***s his head. “Didn’t they blame David for that?”

“Yeah, at first.” Galia shoots back. “They still did for the ones that happened while he was away from the city. When they kept going on while he was in prison, then people stopped saying it was him.”

David was committing an awful lot of murders he knew nothing about, it seemed.

“Anyway.” Jerome approaches and puts his palms down on the table. “The Dunwall Butcher, the Hooded Felon, the Grim Stranger, the Wolf on Wyrmwood Way-there’s a few different names, but they all refer to the same string of murders. They’ve racked up quite the body count in the past few months, and the guard is stretched too thin to go after them.”

“More like the Regent doesn’t care enough to go after them…” Joan snorts.

David eyes search the faces around the table. “Who are they targeting? Anyone who opposed Billie?” Not that David would shed a tear over the people who were against her, but you couldn’t just slaughter people for saying so. The blame would have just been laid at the Empress’s feet. He wouldn’t have done that to her.

Lydia shakes her head. “Nobody knows now. People against the Regent, people for her...seems like anyone even slightly important is fair game.”

“They’re all f*****g brutal,” Joan says, with a gleam in her eyes. “Duchess Clothilda was scattered across eight different rooms in her mansion, and her kidneys and liver were just gone .”

Ricardo happens to be passing by at that exact moment, and he runs forward to slap his hands across Reed’s ears. He yells something in Serkonan at Lizzy.

“Attention Dunwall Citizens. The heir to the throne, Lord Anthony  Lurk, was abducted some six months ago during his sister’s horrendous murder. He is still missing. Anyone with information leading to the return of the brother of our late Empress is required to report to the City Watch at once.”

The group talks over the speaker with ease. Edgar turns to Lizzy, who is skillfully tuning out both the announcement and the angry mustached man between them. “Hey, I always wondered. Why do we have useless Duchesses that don’t rule anything, while another Duke and Duchess are in charge of an entire country?”

“The Duke of Serkonos’s full title is Arch-Duke, Edgar. They call him that because that’s what Serkonos chooses to call their rulers.”

“Oh, like we call Gristol’s the Empress?”

“No. That’s because they’re in charge of everyone in the Empire. Hence the name Emperor. ”

“Oooooh.”

David ignores the two and turns back to Lydia and Jerome. “Are they any suspects? Could it be Delilah’s work?”

“I doubt it.” Jerome shrugs. “It would be tactically stupid, even for her. I personally don’t think it’s political. I think the Butcher is just someone really f****d up, and he’s counting on the plague to cover his tracks.”

Lydia leans forward. “Esma talks to a lot of philosophers, and there are some that are tracking the case. The consensus is that the Butcher is most likely a woman.”

Galia raises an eyebrow. “How can you tell?”

“Size of the wounds, for one.” Lydia sips her tea as if she wasn’t discussing murder. “The Butcher kills with their bare hands, and they were able to figure out the hand dimensions from there. I guess it could be a man. With very small fingers.” She puts the teacup down. “There’s other things like the body parts that were targeted and that all the victims were murdered in private, but I won’t pretend to know enough about criminology to explain that. Ask Esma.”

Jerome scoffs. “There’s no way the Butcher is a woman. Women aren’t serial killers.”

“And what makes you say that?” Lydia asks with a very neutral expression on her face.

“Because a woman couldn’t do that! Women use poison and s**t to murder, they can’t kill like that!”

Galia stands up and crosses her arms. “Do you want to test that theory?”

David stares at Jerome impassively. “Did you ever see the Empress up close? She could have cracked your skull like a watermelon with one arm.” He peers behind Jerome. “Or ask Joan what she thinks of that; I’m sure she’ll tell you.”

“What?” Joan turns around. Jerome quickly throws his hands up.

“No, no, that’s okay. My mistake. I get it.”

Galia sits back down. “Anyway,” she says, fluffing her hair. “Do you think it’s really the Butcher? With the High Overseer, and Pendleton and everything?”

“The Butcher doesn’t leave people alive.” Jerome shakes his head. “Even if they started now, it’s too clean. This isn’t the Butcher’s work. It’s just Dunwall panic, assigning blame to the first person they can think of.”

David knew that all too well.

Lydia shrugs. “Maybe the Crow Queen’s active again. She hasn’t done much of anything lately. A lot of people are starting to think she’s dead.”

Reed snaps his head up, the first indication that he’s been listening at all. “She’s not dead,” he says sternly.

Lydia holds her hands up. “I’m just repeating the gossip.” She leans forward to peek at Reed’s paper. “How are you coming along? Are we getting anywhere close?”

“Maybe. I think.” Reed bites his lip, his eyes still narrowed and angry.

‘His intelligence would never be enough, and his magic could never rival his sister’s. But Reed had the one thing his siblings did not, one thing that held back his mother’s hatred for him. He was pretty.’

David is startled out of his thoughts when Joan Catspaws over and slides herself into his lap. “Hey, big boy,” she says, and immediately starts laughing to herself.

“Get your bony ass off me, or you’re not going to have one much longer.” David bites.

Joan rolls her eyes, but she does slip back into her own seat. “Jerome, I hoped you put an OFF button on that thing, because I am not listening to it all through the night.”

“You can just unplug it, Lizzy.” Jerome sounds exasperated.

David nudges her to get her attention. “Have the announcements really been that frequent?”

“You have no idea. It’s been ridiculous. I couldn’t sleep the first few nights after we docked.”

Joan turns back to the rest of the group and gets sucked back into the conversation. David’s eyes pan across them all, to Jerome and Edgar chatting off to the side to Paul standing up and talking to Thalia. But his eyes return to Lizzy.

‘She adheres to her own moral code. It is not one most would find virtuous, true, but it is important to her. She has lines she will not cross. Values she will not sacrifice. She is only brutal when the situation demands it.’

Gerald appears to announce lunch. Jerome ducks out, and Reed starts shoving papers into piles to make room on the table. Edgar says something to Lydia that makes her face screw up like she’s sucked a lemon. There’s the din of plates, the clink of glasses. Laughter.

“This is a public warning. Former Royal Protector David, assassin of our beloved Empress Sabrina Stark, has escaped state custody and is at large within the city. All sightings of this dangerous criminal are to be reported to the City Watch at once.”

“Lizzy!”

David whisper-yells across the mall plaza. Joan is lounging on the staircase, trading verbal blows with Ricardo, who is sweeping up dead leaves a good twenty feet away from her.

“Psst! Hey, Lizzy!”

She finally turns towards him. David rounds the end baluster and stares her down. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself.” She tucks her arm behind her head. “What brings you to this neck of the woods? We headin’ out?”

“No.” David shakes his head. If only they were so lucky. “No, but come with me. I have something to show you.”

At that, Joan raises an eyebrow, lowering her arms and leaning forward. “If the surprise is your d**k, I have to warn you I have a knife.”

“What? No.” David recoils slightly.

“I’m just letting you know. You wouldn’t be the first man whose d**k I’ve had to chop off.”

“I promise you, this has nothing to do with either of our genitals.” He almost says it’s not inappropriate, but considering the subject matter, that was up for debate.

Joan shrugs and gets to her feet. She yells something unintelligible to David’s ears, and Ricardo spits back with something even he can identify as a string of curses.

David turns to Joan as they walk back to the mill. “I didn’t know you spoke Old Serkonan.”

“I don’t. I just like yelling s**t at him. Gets real funny.”

They don’t talk as David leads her into the mill yard. There’s no one out and about, but there are windows, and anyone could walk outside and see them. “Follow me,” he says.

‘Her trust is hard to earn, but she is fiercely loyal to those who have done so. And there’s few people she trusts now more than you.’

Joan rolls her eyes, but she follows him into a narrow space in between the side of the mill and the concrete barrier wall that surrounds the courtyard. It’s still too open for David’s tastes. But it will have to do, for the moment.

He turns back to Lizzy, who crosses her arms. “Okay. I’m here.” She bumps her hip, and David is reminded for all the world of Sabrina whenever she got an attitude with him. “I’m serious, David, if you try to kiss me or something I’m going to stab you.”

“I’m not.” He extends his hand. “Close your eyes. If you don’t like this, I promise you can stab me all you want.”

She huffs, but she takes his outstretched hand and shuts her eyes. David pulls her towards him and slips his right hand around her waist in one swift movement, then lifts her off her feet and Blinks.

Joan lets loose a very un-Lizzy-like squeal and digs her hands into his jacket. David holds her tighter as they land on the pipe, then Blinks again to the roof of the mall before Joan has a chance to extract herself, and then most likely fall to her death.

David sets her down on stable ground, and Joan pushes him and jumps away. Her head spins around for a moment, her eyes eventually settling on David. “What the f**k ?” She yells. “How did you do that? Where are we?!”

“Calm down. We’re on top of the mall,” David explains. Joan deflates, slightly, but the fury in her eyes doesn’t abate. “I told you I was going to show you something.”

“Okay, great, you showed me what the top of a building looks like!” She stomps her foot. “Now take me down!”

David almost laughs when the realization hits him. He never imagined Joan f*****g Catspaw being afraid of heights.

“In a minute.” With that, David takes the end of the bandage he keeps wrapped around his hand. Joan stops her panicking to take notice, her curiosity outweighing her fear for the moment. She watches as David pulls the last of the fabric off, and turns the back of his hand towards her.

Joan slaps her hand over her mouth. She removes it after a second, but her mouth remains agape. “Holy s**t…”

David presses his lips into a thin line. He had thought about what to say, how to explain this to her, but he can’t remember now what he decided on. So he just stays silent.

Joan grabs his hand and touches the markings. “Outsider’s balls…” she mumbles. “This is what was on your hand? You were so dirty that day, I couldn’t tell...I thought the black stuff was grease…”

Well, good that she was taken by surprise. That meant the others likely didn’t notice it either. Not that it would really be the end of the world if his allies knew, but…

Joan looks up at him and grins. “This is how you...oh my f**k! You met Him! You met the Outsider! Did you see the Void? What’s He like?”

‘A little b***h,’ David thinks. But he just shakes his head. “Getting past security turns out to be pretty easy when you can go over it.”

“f**k, I bet!” Joan practically vibrates with excitement. “Is that what you did here? Teleporting, or whatever?”

“Something like that.” But not. David thinks of the Outsider, the way He dissolves into black and appears where He pleases in the same manner. That was true teleportation. “It’s more like...like I’m going really fast. Like the Mark is pulling me.”

Joan nods, like she actually understands this bullshit. “Like you’re...fuck, what’s the word? Transversing!”

That was probably a more accurate way to describe it. “I’ve been calling it Blink.”

Joan spins around. “By the Void, David, do you know how much cooler you are now?”

David hadn’t realized he was cool to begin with. Not very much, apparently, but it was something.

He thinks, with a pang in his heart, how he’ll never be able to show this to Billie. He’ll never see her face screw up in excitement, hear her tease him about being old. Never again.

But Joan is still standing in front of him, so he shakes off those thoughts. “There’s something else I think can do,” he says, brow furrowing in concentration. “But I’ve never tried it before.”

“Does this mean you brought me up here to be your test rat?” Joan stops bouncing. David lets himself show a small smile.

“Pretty much. Give me your hand.”

Joan rolls her eyes. “Should have figured...aw, what the hell? Why not?”

She reaches out her right hand to put in his left, and David shakes his head. She raises an eyebrow, but she gives him her left hand. He presses their palms together like they were shaking hands.

David lets the magic pool in his hand. He feels it thrumming through his body, the tingling spark of the Void flowing through his veins, his muscles and his flesh. Feels the heat radiating from his bones.

The Mark glows a bright, impossible blue. Joan stares, slack-jawed, and David concentrates. Slowly, he turns Lizzy’s hand over, so all he can see is the back of his own. The Mark is almost white.

It takes.

He feels his own energy flow from his palm to Lizzy’s, the tips of his fingers leaking magic into her veins. Joan gasps, and David both hears it and feels it. He can feel all of her, from her spiny fingers to her webbed little toes. Her still slightly cracked rib and the pain she feels in her left lung whenever she breathes, the breeze against the side of her head where her hair is shaved. For a moment, his energy is hers completely.

David pulls away. The Mark crackles against his hand, and his entire arm is sore. But his connection to Joan remains. Not nearly as strong, but he can feel her presence and her energy.

The electricity of the Void still flows in her veins, albeit less powerfully than in David’s. And she can feel it. Joan blinks and stares at her hand, then back to David. He motions to the long stretch of roof they have before them. “Go ahead. Try it.”

Joan turns uncertainly. She raises her hand, though David knows the magic isn’t centered there, like his. Her whole body feels the imprint and draws on it.

She disappears in a cloud of dark smoke, and reappears maybe ten feet away. She staggers forward, trying to keep her balance as she waves her arms. “f**k!”

David can’t help it. He laughs.

They practice all afternoon.

Lizzy’s Blink is indistinguishable from David’s, and interestingly, it doesn’t seem to drain her the same way. She does get tired though, and David hands her a vial of blue elixir, shows her how it replenishes her magical energy.

She also seems to have inherited his Pull ability, though she fails to activate Void Gaze. Still, two out of three wasn’t bad. Blink could easily save her life in a bind.

And the main reason he gave the Bond to her was to give her his advanced healing and his immunity to disease. And that’s undoubtedly working. Joan already claims to feel better, as they Blink across the canal and the sidestreets of Draper’s Ward. She laughs unobstructed, without pain in her chest. It makes David smile.

He pulls her aside as they’re making their way back to the mill. “Don’t speak a word of this to anyone,” he says, still gripping her upper arm.

Joan just laughs. “Geeze, not even Edgar? I tell him everything!” She must sense the seriousness radiating off of David, because she immediately drops her smile. “No, I get it. My lips are sealed. This is our secret.”

“Good.” David leans back and blows out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. He didn’t know if he could do that again-didn’t know if he’d want to. The only person he could even think of right now that he might trust enough with the Bond was Galia. Paul could be a close second, better if he wasn’t attached at the hip to Thalia. He didn’t like Edgar. Zhukov was just- no. He liked Lydia, Ricardo, and Rose just fine, but they weren’t fighters.

Joan turns to him, uncharacteristic somberness coloring her face. “This is real s**t, huh? You don’t have to worry about me keeping secrets. I’m all in with you.”

David settles himself down for bed without much ado, the exertion of the day catching up with him. It’s the good kind of tired-the kind that overwhelms his muscles and makes him sink into his pillow with satisfaction.

He wakes up to the sound of banging.

Joan is five feet away from him, bringing her fist down on his table to rouse him. She had evidently learned from their last encounter.

David throws his pillow at her. “What the f**k do you want?” He groans. “What time is it?”

Joan seizes the pillow and smacks him over the head with it, jumping up onto the bed. “Reed did it!”

That wakes him up. “He cracked the code?” He goes to sit up, scanning Lizzy’s face for any sign of joking.

She just smiles, practically bouncing on the bed. “Better! He finished the key yesterday, and he worked all night to decode the letters. We have a location!”

David doesn’t even bother putting real clothes on before tearing down the steps.

Reed is sitting at the head of the table, surrounded by papers, looking completely exhausted but very, very satisfied.

“I can’t believe you stayed up all night.” Jerome shakes his head, smiling all the way. “You could have told us you broke the code. We could have translated for you.”

“He was on a roll.” Rose grins from her place on her brother’s armrest.

Lydia throws her arms over Reed from the other side. “When this is all over, I am personally funding your education. Your choice of schools, anywhere in the Isles-hell, this kid could make it to the Academy!”

“I’m not that smart,” Reed says. But his grin only gets wider.

David approaches the table with wide, fearful eyes. Everyone goes quiet as they slide their eyes towards him. Reed, Lydia, Rose. Jerome and the Dressmaker off to the side, Ricardo behind Reed’s chair. Edgar sitting down to his left, Galia and Paul standing close together. Thalia is strangely missing, but David barely cares. He tries to keep his voice from shaking as he asks.

“Is it true? You know where Anthony  is?”

Reed nods, and his smile slips from his face as he looks down and starts rifling through pages. “It wasn’t immediately obvious-they used code names for everyone, so I had to decrypt everything and comb through it to find a place where they slipped up.”

“There’s a lot of dirty stuff in here,” Rose mutters, rolling her eyes. “She put her goddamn letter s*x in code. Like, who cares?”

“But I did find it,” Reed continues. “They used flower codenames for pretty much everyone. You can figure out who’s who pretty easily-Anthony  was ‘Laurel’, and ‘Willow’ corresponds to Empress Billie.”

“What was Delilah?” Joan asks.

Reed actually rolls his eyes. “‘Dahlia’.”

“Of course.” Rose shakes her head, looking actually angry. “So f*****g pretentious.”

“So where is he?” David’s knuckles are white on the table. He’s trying to avoid grabbing the paper out of Reed’s hand, but, well, if he doesn’t tell David soon, he’s going to.”

Reed frowns. “It’s not good news. They have him at Arnold Timsh’s place-Thalia’s uncle.”

David lets out a breath. Arnold Timsh. A barrister, if he remembered correctly. He’ll probably have his own bodyguard, a small Watch force guarding his home. Maybe a few extra since he’s keeping the heir to the throne captive. They couldn’t exactly keep an entire army stationed there, that would call too much attention. Completely defeat the point of hiding Anthony  in a civilian’s home.

It couldn’t be too hard to get him out. David was envisioning fortresses out in the countryside, bunkers half a mile undergrounds. No, this? This would be easy.

“Sounds like wonderful news to me,” he says, and Reed shakes his head.

“Maybe for you, but Lady Thalia is not happy.”

Jerome steps forward. “I’ve been getting intel from my sources around the city. General Turnbull is due at the Timsh estate soon-could be today, at the earliest.”

David’s blood runs cold. “They’re going to move him.”

“Not for certain.” Jerome rubs the back of his neck. “But yeah, we figured that’s likely. The Regent is probably spooked, with Abele dead and his dossiers missing.”

David nods. He figured Delilah would put the pieces together. Still, though. He’d hoped he’d have more time.

“We should get going then.” David turns to Lizzy, but she just bats his shoulder.

“Where are you going in your PJ’s? Go put some f*****g clothes on first.”

Paul clears his throat from across the table. “Lady Thalia would like to see you before you go too. I think you know why.”

“She’ll have to wait until after breakfast,” Rose murmurs, getting to her feet. “They’ll both be f*****g useless if they don’t eat.”

After the quickest clothing change and inhalation of sustenance David’s ever accomplished, he leaves Joan in the main hall with the promise that he’ll meet her at the skiff. Thalia is outside the mall, overlooking the canal. Her back is turned and her hands are linked behind her. She doesn’t turn to face him, probably for dramatic effect.

“David,” she says as he approaches. He wonders if he should stand back or approach her. What the proper etiquette would be. Then he remembers where they are and that he’s stopped giving a f**k about being proper and polite.

“I was told to come see you.” He steps up to the railing. Thalia doesn’t bother looking at him.

“We’ve discovered that my uncle is working for the Regent, and that he’s been holding Lord Anthony  captive. Obviously, I understand this means he has to die.”

Solemnly, David nods. He’d kill Timsh even if he wasn’t ordered to. That man in the Void, screaming at Anthony -it had to be him. David would kill him just for making Anthony  afraid like that. And now, he’s Delilah’s ally. Most likely an important one, as he was entrusted with hiding the Royal Heir. He had to die.

Thalia takes a dramatic pause to pull out a box of cigars. She puts one in her mouth and fumbles to light it, her face turning red as she inhales. David can tell she’s not used to doing this, but he doesn’t bother to correct her.

“Now,” she suppresses a cough. “You had no way of knowing this, but I’m an only child. My parents, my other uncle and my aunt, and all my cousins have been lost to the plague.”

“I’m sorry.” David says it automatically.

“That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.” Thalia takes another drag, and she does better this time. “Uncle Arnold is unmarried. If he has any children, they’re unrecognized and I certainly don’t know about them. I’m sure you understand what I’m getting at here.”

“You’ll be his only heir.”

Thalia shakes her head. “The Timsh family fortune is currently held by my grandmother. She’s…” And Thalia looks almost sad for the moment. “She’s elderly. Can’t get out of bed, and she’s not sound of mind. It’s only a matter of time before she goes.”

David just nods. “And with your uncle dead, you’ll get his share as well. Congratulations, Lady Timsh.” He tries not to let disdain color his words too much.

Thalia turns to him with anger in her eyes. “No. My uncle, he’s rewritten her will. Without her input. I know this because he wrote my mother and my other uncle out of the will, and my grandmother was never informed of their deaths.” She puts the cigar down on the railing, letting smouldering ash drip onto the asphalt. “I don’t doubt he has measures in place to keep me from taking the fortune myself in the event of his death. He hates me.”

Can’t imagine why, David thinks bitterly.

Thalia continues on, paying David no mind. “What I want you to do,” she says, picking her cigar back up and biting the end. “Is take for me my grandmother’s last will and testament. Then, when this is all over and I can come out of hiding, I can inherit what is rightfully mine.” She drops the half-finished cigar on the ground and squashes it delicately with her shoe. “And maybe my grandmother will still have some time left. Maybe I can visit her again, and say goodbye.”

David has nothing to say to that. He watches the melancholy look on Thalia’s face until she snaps out of it, returns her eyes to him and straightens up. “So, David. Do we have a deal?”

She holds out her hand. White gloves, pure as the day they met. David stares at them for a second before he takes her hand in his, and he imagines blood from his own gloves rubbing off on hers, staining them red.

“Deal. I’ll take care of your uncle and get you your documents,” David says. It’s almost like old times. Over a decade ago. Taking contracts for petty thievery and the like, though he didn’t accept jobs that asked him to kill. The killing was always unplanned, just when someone fought back. He never felt too guilty about it then. He was just a working man, trying to make ends meet. Or feed his two streetrats.

Sabrina awakens as he steps away from Thalia. ‘I’d like to tag along, if you don’t mind. Just to keep an old man safe.’

“Hush, Billie,” he whispers, his mouth set in a determined line and his eyes facing forward. He can’t get hung up on her musings now.

He was getting his Anthony  back.