Chapter 18: Felix

INT. EMERALD MANSION – EARLY MORNING, YEAR 947, 23 YEARS AGO
VALLÉE TOURNESOLS, IN THE NORTHERN TERRITORY ENORE

The emerald mansion is quiet, bathed in the clear glow of breaking dawn.

At an ornate dining table, a scrawny CHILD with light, unkempt hair sits alone. He appears to be around seven years old and is wearing a pair of green pajamas.

An open book lies on the table before him.

His GREEN EYES are puffy and bright. The book’s pages are dotted with tears. One contains some large lettering, the other an illustration of an armored knight.

The CHILD’s fingers trace the first words on the leftmost page, his brows furrowing in concentration. The start of his line sounds rehearsed, as if he has been practicing all night long.

CHILD
(whispering to himself)
Il était une f-f…
(Once upon a l-l…)

He stumbles over the fourth word, frustration creeping into his voice.

CHILD
…f-foie… ah, foin?
(…l-liver… uh, hay?)

He slams the book shut, his shoulders sagging. He then goes pale and looks down at what appear as invisible snakes coiling around his waist.

The invisible snakes are loosely binding him to the back of his chair. They tighten suddenly, forcing a gasp from his lips.

CHILD
(upset, breathless)
Non, non…

This strange magic must be a known and unsettling occurrence in the CHILD’s world. He quickly reopens the book to the same page, his fingers trembling.

CHILD
(starting over)
Il était une… fois?
(Once upon a… time?)

He hesitates, glancing down at his waist. The snakes relax into a looser coil. He releases a quivering breath and continues where he left off. Once upon a time…

CHILD
Un cha… shh-sh-che… cheva.. cheva-lerie?
(A cha… shh-sh-shi… shiva.. chival-ry?)

The snakes constrict again, tighter than before. It is too tight. He makes another stifled sound and places a shaking hand on his waist. Fresh tears brim in his eyes.

CHILD
(whimpering, uncertain)
A-a-arrière… malin.
(B-b-begone… devil.)

The snakes squeeze and squeeze. The CHILD is now struggling to draw breath. He bows his head, hiccuping and gasping shallowly.

The sound of muffled footsteps approaches. His light-haired TWIN SISTER, in matching pajamas, creeps into the dining room. Her worried GREEN EYES shift to him and her expression softens.

TWIN SISTER
Vous voilà, mon alouette.
(There you are, my lark.)

The CHILD does not answer. He cannot answer.

TWIN SISTER
(more insistently)
Felix? Ça va?
(Felix? Are you okay?)

The scene is familiar to her. She moves to his side, peering down at the page he is stuck on. She places her finger upon the word ‘chevalier.’

TWIN SISTER
(instructively, with kindness)
Chevalier. Un chevalier errant.
(Knight. A knight errant.)

The CHILD tries to wheeze out a name—Bee, Bee. Beatrix.

His TWIN SISTER’s gaze drifts under the table. For the first time, she sets eyes on the tightly twisted fabric of his pajama top. It is too tight.

The magic is familiar to her as well. Initially, she is scared. She peers this way and that as if worried someone will materialize to scold her.

When no one does, she murmurs a reassurance to the CHILD and places her hand over his on his waist.

TWIN SISTER
(commanding, with authority)
Arrière, malin.
(Begone, devil.)

Light crackles under her small fingertips and the spell breaks. The invisible snakes unwind. The CHILD can draw breath at last.

He collapses, sobbing, into his TWIN SISTER’s arms. A dark, looming FIGURE appears in the entrance of the dining room. Both children freeze.

FADE OUT.

༻❁༺

Present day, Malmuir – 13^th of Foiseach, Year 970

Lark woke with a shuddering gasp. He sat up in a tizzy, clutching his waist. A cold sweat had curled and plastered his own light, unkempt hair to his forehead.

He acquainted himself with his surroundings: his bedroll on the floor, the cracked window above his head and the dull glow of breaking dawn. He released a sigh of relief.

The mildly Northern-accented voice of a middle-aged female, crackly as if from years of smoking a pipe, spoke up from the windowsill. “Another night terror?” it asked.

Certain he was no longer in the emerald mansion, no longer a helpless child, Lark collapsed back onto the bedroll and shook his head.

“In play format,” he muttered. “Stage and all. Completely fucked.”

The terrors were constant, each night a different, long-repressed memory from childhood. It had started shortly after they left Clocktown, and only worsened after…

He shut his eyes. No, he was not going to think about that today.

“You are thinking about it again,” the female voice observed. “It has been over a month. Will you ever speak about it?”

Lark looked up at the nose and whiskers poking out over the windowsill. “Well, bonjour to you too, Blanche.”

“Good morning,” Blanche crooned down at him, “a-louette.”

“You know how I feel about that.”

“That is what they call you here.”

“They call me ‘Lark.’ It’s different.”

“Very well, Fe-lix.”

He bristled—he liked that name even less. Before he could bite back, Blanche retreated into her windowsill den. She had a nice setup up there, far nicer than Lark’s on the floor. A quaint, cozy mouse apartment.

She was twenty-something years old. Field mice weren’t meant to live that long; he wanted her to be comfortable for whatever time she had left.

He started moving around his grim attic room to get ready for yet another grim day. Maudlin, he knew, but every day leading up to it had been the same. Grim, soulless monotony.

He paused while lacing his corset, thinking back to the nightmare. With a scowl, he resentfully wrenched the laces tighter, tighter, until the breath was forced from his lungs.

He caught the dresser to steady himself. “Il était une fois un chevalier errant,” he hissed through his teeth, “qui sauvait le monde.”

Not a pause, not a hitch. Satisfied, he secured the knot and went about putting on the rest of his clothes, very much pretending the steel bones mashing his organs together didn’t pinch.

“Corsets cause deformities over time,” Blanche nosed through the curtain door of her den to say. “One could call that self-mutilation.”

“One could shove it,” he sniped while tying his boots. “You’ll want to make yourself scarce this morning. Shona’s been giving me the eyes.”

“You are plowing through them one a day at this point. What if you catch something?”

“Why are you always so concerned with my body?”

“I have a vested interest in its survival.”

Lark rolled his eyes. “A simple ‘I care’ wouldn’t kill you.”

Blanche’s tail twitched in displeasure. “Would it make you slow down and sit with your grief a while?”

Yep, time to go. He gathered the rest of his things (as if he so many), planted a sloppy kiss on his fuzzy roommate’s head (that made her bare her tooth), and left.

༻❁༺

An hour later, in the kitchens, Lark’s head popped out from where he had been suffocating himself under Shona’s many skirts. His hair was tousled, cheeks and lips red.

He might have looked cherubic, had his trousers not been pooling around his ankles. He grinned when Shona hiked up all those skirts and crowded him back onto a stool.

“Your turn,” she breathed, seating herself upon him.

His head tipped back, a chorus of expletives falling from his lips. She was warm, wet from the labor of his tongue. It made her descent so wonderfully easy, so fluid.

No sooner had he gotten comfortable inside her than she started to move. The stool rocked and his throat rose and fell in tandem with her motions. Up, down, up, down, like a bellows.

Up and down was well and good, but his thoughts were still too loud. He needed more, needed the sensation of her to blind and deafen him if only for a moment.

He placed a hand upon the small of her back to guide her hips closer. Less up-down, less jabbing, more back-forth, give and take. Closer. Deeper. He groaned.

But it wasn’t enough—Shona was still too present. The fluffy sounds she was making were for his benefit; her attention kept wandering to the biscuits in the oven.

He couldn’t stuff his ears with fluff. It had to be real.

He drew his thumb along her tongue and slipped it between them. Gently, he painted slow circles. Gently, the flat side of his knuckles pressed into her belly.

“Relax,” he purred in her ear. “I have an eye on the biscuits. I won’t let them burn.”

The fluff frayed. Her nails dug into his shoulders, lush thighs squeezing his.

He kept at it until the pressure building inside her seized and released, seized and released. Finally, eyes falling shut, he was able to lose himself somewhere in her neck.

Her long, brown hair had tumbled out of its bun; still damp from a morning bath, it swished around their grinding hips.

He buried his nose in it, inhaled. Upon the secret canvas of his closed eyelids, brown darkened to—

The door to the kitchens burst open before he could go careening over the edge. Tamsin barged in, cantankerous as ever.

Upon seeing them going at it, she smacked a hand over her eyes. “You fucker!”

Unfazed, Shona rode out her bliss. Lark nearly perished in his effort to slip out of her, shielding her dignity from prying hallway eyes. “Close it, you bastard!” he wheezed.

Tamsin kicked the door shut. Without peeking, she dangled the jangly jester’s ruff he was seconds from tearing to shreds in the air. “Teatime.”

He sighed, gave Shona’s behind a mournful pat. “Up you go.”

“Put it back in,” she cooed. “I don’t mind an audience.”

One scathing glare from Tamsin changed that tune. Shona righted her skirts and left out the side exit, ‘inexplicably’ in need of a rutabaga from the courtyard.

Once they were alone, Tamsin crossed her arms over her chest and watched Lark stuff himself back in his trousers.

“Seeing your cock and balls was not on my list today,” she scolded.

Miserably, he snatched the ruff from her hand, then took the biscuits out the oven and went about prepping the queen’s tea.

Teatime was a daily thing now, the ruff a strict requirement. As was serving Hel on his knees ever since she decided she didn’t like how tall he was. As was not speaking within earshot of her ever since the tongue debacle.

Every morning, he silently shuffled into the throne room like an absurdly proportioned penguin and was forced to kneel there and take it while Hel and whoever she was entertaining cracked jokes at his expense. They weren’t even funny jokes.

As he and the kettle simmered, Tamsin lingered in the kitchen, which was unusual.

The bloody wounds her own men had inflicted on her at the party and Lark’s wicked concussion were long healed. Still, they hadn’t really spoken since their time as cot companions in Aghna’s sickroom. That was weeks ago.

It didn’t help that Tamsin had been demoted for trying to save him. From what he gathered, she’d known about the hunt, the secret motive, to some extent. She did not expect him to intervene—nor did she anticipate how Hel would react to his ‘betrayal.’

Because of him, Tamsin was no longer captain, a title she poured her heart and soul into. Her armor was no longer resplendent but the same as every other peon—shoddy, tinted-gold iron. The tint was already flecking from all her angry sparring.

She rested her patchy iron elbows on the kitchen island. “Why Shona?” she asked.

“Tonight’s pie needed filling,” Lark said. “Cream, had you waited a moment longer.”

“You’re sick in the head.”

“Don’t I know it.”

Tamsin scratched at a healing scab on her cheek, suddenly awkward. “D’you…wanna talk about it?”

Lark paused. First Blanche, now Tamsin? What was in the air today?

Because he hadn’t gotten his release, because he now feared an explosion of a different nature was nigh, he played dumb. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“You’ve been stuck to my hind like a burr for the last twenty years,” Tamsin said. “I can tell when you’re moping.”

“I’m not moping.”

“You only drown yourself in flesh when you’re sad.”

“I am not sad!” And here the explosion came, erupting from his lips like the hot steam whistling from the kettle. “I have been shuffling everywhere on my knees—my knees! I just turned thirty, Tamsin. Do you know what turning thirty means? It means I groan now—I groan when I stand.”

“Keep going,” she nodded. “Let it all out.”

“So, going off the national average of you Southern slobs with your plagues, poor hygiene, and shabby healthcare—”

“Least we don’t fuck demons. Northern snob.”

“—I’ve got about a decade of life left. And this is how I spend it. I have to wear this stupid ruff, I’m not allowed to speak in her presence—and yes, I know, I’m lucky my tongue is still in my mouth—”

“Unlike Seamus’s.”

“Unlike Seamus’s.” He deflated. “Poor Seamus.”

Tamsin said a short Faeltan prayer under her breath—carry him safely across the Threshold. “Such a holy man. His only crime was having a tongue.”

“Still don’t know why Hel needed one,” Lark huffed. “Also, we rarely fuck the demons.”

“I’m sure she thought she had to punish someone. The elf asked that you remain intact.”

“Oh, and bloody Nathair! If I have to put up with another night of him groping me—”

From an iron grate on the kitchen floor, there came a soft, faraway thump. Both Lark and Tamsin stalled, stared at the grate, then continued their conversation.

“—with his eyes,” Lark concluded, “I am going to throw myself from the ramparts.”

“All these problems,” Tamsin said, “yet you still haven’t brought up the big one. What’s that about?”

The mere mention of the ‘big one’ snuffed Lark’s fire right out. He yanked the screaming kettle off the hearth, poured the tea.

While it steeped, he busied himself with arranging the platter: Hel’s favorite rosy gold teapot, matching teacups, milk, sugar, teensy gold spoon, biscuit one, biscuit two, bis…

He licked biscuit three before placing it on the tray. Tamsin snorted.

“Enough about me,” Lark said. “How are you holding up? She still giving you the cold shoulder?”

Tamsin’s amusement waned. “Don’t wanna talk about it.”

“A-ha! See?”

With the tea ready, they no longer had an excuse to loiter. Tamsin picked up the tray and escorted Lark out into the hall. Before the clump of guards marching by could say anything, he got down on his knees.

Even on his knees, he came up to Tamsin’s chest. His pint-sized powerhouse.

She handed him the tray. “For what it’s worth,” she said, “it was nice to see you laugh the way you did with him. Felt like we were kids again, running from patrol in—”

“Balla Cloiche,” Lark fondly finished. “The shit we got into there.”

“D’you remember when you convinced those pigeons to attack the baker?”

“Yes! He kept dumping his hot bread water on us. Like we were stray cats.”

“We did have fleas.”

Lark grinned. “Mangy.”

Trouble had been their constant companion since the day Tamsin found him stowing away on the last ever merchant vessel from Enore to Faelte—before the Southern war got dicey, before the Northern embargo.

No older than nine and ten respectively, she and he became inseparable. They lived on the streets of Faelte’s capital for years, scrounged and performed for every coin, went hungry most nights.

They had to flee to Maul when the Faeltan military draft came into effect and patrol started scooping orphans to conscript. Part of Lark missed the simplicity of their time in Balla Cloiche, however troubled.

“Ah, well,” he dismissed. “Nothing to be done about the ‘big one.’ He belongs to her now.”

“You could rescue him,” Tamsin offered. “Ride off into the sunset together.”

“Pff. How?”

“You pick locks. Just pick the right one.”

“It’s a bit more nuanced than that, Tamsin.”

“I’m serious. You’ve outgrown this place, Fe—” He shot her a look. “Lark. You should consider moving on.”

“But you’re here.”

“Aye.”

“Would you ride off with us?” he asked.

They both knew the answer to that. Demotion or no, Tamsin would never leave Hel behind.

“Three’s a crowd,” she said. “I love you, you know.”

Because he could now count on two fingers the number of times she’d said it, the first being after he told her how he got his scar, hearing it made him go all misty-eyed.

He ducked his face into the ridiculous ruff around his neck to blot the mist away.

“I love you too, Tam.”

Her bruised lips twitched in a half-smile; an expression he’d thought made her look so cool when they were younger.

He thought the same now, honestly. She was and always had been much cooler than him.

“Right, then,” he quickly diverted. Getting sentimental was bad for his complexion. “Guess I’m off to do the big rescue—me and my noble steed. Come on, boy—hya!”

He smacked his own thigh and started shuffling in the direction of the throne room. Tamsin watched him go, mouth twisting to stave off a rare, full smile.

She lost the battle when he turned to her and let out a braying whinny that scared the daylights out of a passing maid. The maid’s tray flew from her hands, he almost lost his own. Nuisance.