CHAPTER TWO: THE RETAINER
Heart
The Mender had done good work, but Heart’s ribs still ached, and the bruises had not faded. Button by button, the black and blue mottled marks on his chest vanished behind the dress shirt, the collar closing and hiding the evidence of the recent violence the retainer had meted out, and received.
I told them. I warned them.
The memory of two men drawing makeshift weapons and summoning flames stirred fresh in his mind.
I told them. I warned them.
Shifting with a mild grunt of pain, he donned his tie, put on the suit jacket, and shifted his shoulders until they were comfortable. Next came the small adjustments: the positioning of cuffs and the smoothing of wrinkles from the sleeves with the faintest touch of his magic. It didn’t do to present unprofessionally, especially his first day back after his medical leave. Taking his measure, the reflection of his thin, pale face flashed a small grimace behind the rectangular glasses and beneath the professionally trimmed blonde hair. Heart’s eyes were a pale green and missed little.
I cannot betray my vows. They serve a higher purpose than you know.
Last came the small glass lapel pin of the nightingale and Fleur-De-Lis that identified his loyalties as Retainer to the Noble and Ancient House of Vallais. He took a few experimental breaths. The fit was comfortable, and after several weeks of excitement, pleasantly mundane. Good. One last time he looked at himself. Understated. Professional. Just what was required for a day guarding and teaching his liege’s daughter. Pleasantly low-key work.
The bruises still ached, and he heard the words of the two dead men responsible for them in his memory: Traitor. Bootlicker. Royalist.
Even if his hand had been forced, an oath was an oath.
Heart adjusted his tie, flexed the fingers of his sword hand, and headed for the door. Back to ordinary duty, and the company of a willful fourteen-year-old girl. If fate was kind, it would be a long time before he had to kill again.
But first, Heart had an important meeting with one of his enemy’s servants.
Two hours later, after dropping his charge at school, the Retainer opened the door to a brick-walled eatery in Old Town. The sign overhead read ‘The Spar,’ and year-round, the small, hole-in-the-wall pub-and-grub spot was a gathering place for upper middle-class professionals on their daily weight-loss bicycle trips. At night it was a hub for pool games and craft beer. They had good sandwiches, and none of the staff were Wielders, blessed with the power of magic. Mortals, every one of them.
So—Heart reflected—it was the perfect place for two Retainers from secret, rival royal houses to meet for morning coffee. Andrew Fisher was waiting for him at their usual table, his rumpled coat draped over the back of his chair. The House Adelin Retainer was holding his smartphone in one hand, his other resting on an unremarkable black binder. Heart took a short breath as the door closed behind him and reached out with his sixth sense for the familiar skin-prickle of enchantments or rituals in place, and finding nothing, let himself relax a little.
“You’re early,” Fisher said as Heart sat down, not looking up from whatever he was reading. He was a man with a worn face that work was prematurely aging, as if the years he’d spent as a retainer—a number even with Heart’s own twelve—were burning up his youth. At roughly twenty-eight, he looked closer to Heart’s thirty-four. Older, even, on some days, with graying dark hair crowning the sort of pale face that was so average as to melt into a crowd. From what Heart understood, it was this very unremarkableness that his masters prized. Heart still wasn’t certain which Aspect Fisher possessed, which was an unusual obfuscation for someone that long in a Royal Family’s service. Most retainers were known quantities to one another after as many years as both of them had served, their specialized powers a matter of intelligence that was expected to slip free. You simply couldn’t serve the theoretically allied but earnestly rivalrous households known as the Six (once Seven) Families regularly in such a small and intimate world without learning one another’s tricks.
Heart supposed that that level of discretion was just as prized as his undistinguished presence. House Adelin used very few retainers compared to the other families, preferring to entrust their work—bloody-handed and bright alike—to their name-bearing kin. To be kept in service for over a decade in such a family was itself a testament to the man’s value.
“My charge was unusually motivated, this morning,” Heart answered before signaling to the hostess for his usual. “Practically bolted out the door.”
“Fight with her dad again?” Fisher asked. A slight smile curled at the corner of his mouth.
“You know I can’t say,” Heart replied as a mug of black coffee was put in front of him. “Royal Secrets.”
“Mmm,” Fisher grunted in response. “Fair enough. Claire’s what, twelve, now?”
“Fourteen,” Heart corrected him.
“Guides,” Fisher shook his head. “Coming of age for her then, soon. Good luck with that. How long do you have today?”
Heart checked his watch. It was Eight a.m. sharp. “Twenty minutes,” he answered, nonchalant. “An extra twelve, give or take, unless I get a call.”
“Good,” Fisher said, then slid the binder across the table. “Keep it,” he said. “All copies of the files I promised. A few relevant details have been erased or removed. There are certain protocols I can’t bend even for friends.”
Heart idly opened the gift, flipped through the pages with a carefully neutral expression on his face. “Is that what we are, now? Mind you, I tend not to place too much weight in definitions. They’re malleable.”
“Fair,” Fisher answered, “but we’re only as changeable as we let them make us. Read pages thirteen, five, and seven. See what jumps out.”
Heart’s eyes raked the papers as he flipped through them again. Swept across the summaries. Seeded among the heavily edited details of the Adelin family’s execution of its duties was the report of a multiple homicide of four commoners, and a messy one at that. The binder closed with a snap, and Heart reached for the cup of black coffee the hostess had put in front of him. “Four commoners dead,” he said after a pause. “Did you compile this?”
“My notes are attached,” Fisher said, “but no. This is a preliminary summary.”
Heart’s coffee cup made a small tapping sound as he put it down. The smell of rain wafted in from outside as another pair of cyclists stepped out into the drizzle. “And footnote explanations for each,” he finished.
Fisher’s smile was faint. “Noticed that, did you?”
“Hard not to. I assume you can’t tell me the full story?”
“No,” Fisher said. “My liege is paranoid… but this has the scent of seriousness. So far as I can tell, none of these people had any family. If they were better known, had more connections, there would be more uproar over their deaths. There may still be, but not enough people seem to know about it yet.” His face evidenced the slightest hint of pain for just a moment. “You’ve more of a detective’s mind than I do,” the younger retainer who looked so much older said. “And when you read about how they died… well. Hopefully some part of our shriveled souls can still remember what it is to want justice for someone.”
Heart nodded slowly, the words a resonating echo dredging up fresh pains. Shriveled souls. How apt. He pinched the bridge of his nose and the act of raising his arm made his chest ache. He didn’t hide the wince as well as he’d have liked. “How bad?”
“The mortal police were as baffled as they were horrified,” Fisher said. “I spent four hours modifying memories at the scene.”
Heart’s eyebrows raised. “You were there?”
“In the distant aftermath,” Fisher said, and he looked at once very tired. “It was a mess. Look. I’m not asking you to chase connections without telling you what you’re pursuing.”
Something about the way he paused at the end pricked at Heart’s suspicions, and the spectacled man leaned forward. “… You’ve been ordered to stop your investigation prematurely.”
Fisher stared back and said nothing. That was sufficient.
“And you want me to pick up where you’ve been told to leave off.”
Fisher sipped his coffee, and echoed Heart’s earlier words. “Royal Secrets.”
“Damn empty slate you’re handing me,” Heart replied. He opened the binder again, looked at the names.
“Nothing seems to connect them other than a tie to a specific location” Fisher said. “I really can’t say anything more… except most of the commoner factions are likely to start pointing fingers at each-other. At least the ones that know about it are.”
Silence followed. There was something to be cherished, Heart reflected, about a few moments without the need to talk. A retainer’s duty was motion, repetition and diplomacy. On unlucky days, it was violence and brutality. Even those who served rival families had more in common than not… except Heart. Heart was born lowest of the low, a fact that other retainers seldom let him forget. Fisher had just handed him a difficult responsibility. Who tends the burning world, when royals bicker? Went the question. The ones they kick, came the answer. And me, Heart thought. The traitor to my class. He flexed the fingers of his sword hand reflexively.
“Got roughed up, did you?” Fisher asked at length. Their time was almost up. “I heard something about it, I think. Rebels?”
Heart snorted. Tales grew in the telling, even in a world of secret, supernatural oppression. “Nothing so dramatic. Just two poor bastards out of their depth. I took no joy in it.”
“Don’t lose sleep over it, Heart,” Fisher said, and his stoic face turned sympathetic. “Easier said than done, I know.”
“Yes well,” Heart said, finishing his coffee and standing, “once upon a time, they were boys I knew.”
Fisher closed his eyes. “Damn. I’m sorry.” Then he rose as well.
“Part of the price,” Heart answered.
“You never told me,” Fisher said as they walked towards the door together. “What made you join up. You came to the work older than most…”
“… And?” Heart answered the pause, not the first words.
“And we all know that you’re an Outsider by birth,” Fisher sighed. “That’s not a background that chooses this. They hate us. They must hate you even more.”
Heart paused in the doorway. The work didn’t give him the option of what most would call ‘friends,’ but there were times when the question nonetheless came up from people he felt guilty saying nothing to. The smell of fresh rain and cold air hit his face as he stepped out through the door. That guilt never lasted long. A retainer had few privacies, and the luxury of loyalties to anything other than liege-lord and household wasn’t something they were permitted. Ironic.
Heart turned and shook his counterpart’s hand. “Best of luck, Retainer,” he said. “And thanks for the tip.”
He walked back to the car alone.
A full school day later, Heart sat in the Mercedes outside the dance studio, poring over Fisher’s notes. They formed a rambling extension to the information already in the binder, and usefully, they were primarily about how the different commoner factions were reacting—or were expected to react—to the killings. He rolled the names over in his head again: Allison Taylor, Will Brown, Joana Davies, Tiffany Silverton. Of these, only the last one held any familiarity, though Heart couldn’t put a finger on why. Everything about the description of their demises was pedestrian, couched in the obscuring language of reports, and officially chalked up to renegade spirit activity, which only partially managed to obscure the horror of the murders, lingering unwritten between the carefully crafted lines.
Two of the murdered were ordinary commoners, neither wealthy nor as poor and downtrodden as the Outsiders, who were poverty stricken both within the world of Wielders and without. And it was from that class that the latter two came from.
Like me, Heart thought. Once upon a time.
Like the two men he’d killed only a little while ago.
Heart leaned back in the driver’s seat, tapping a pen idly against the binder as he closed it. Four dead, all of them commoners, none with any ties to one of the families to speak of. Fisher had handed him four pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with neither picture nor board in which to place it. Most concerning was the listed, and vague, cause of death.
Renegade spirit activity.
That was almost certainly bullshit. The manifold spirits with which the magic-using humans called Wielders shared their world were many things: temperamental, capricious, as alien to humans as they were similar… but not murderous. Not usually, in any case.
Tiffany Silverton. Why was that name familiar?
The retainer frowned and looked at the time on the dashboard. Then he put the binder back in the glove box and shelved his worries. It was time to chauffeur Claire Vallais home from her after-school dance class. Heart got out of the car.
Prince Jacob Vallais’s daughter and only child took classes at a studio on South Sixth Avenue near the north end of the city. There were fancier places. More status-conscious establishments existed than the loft studio in the old brick building up ahead, but Heart’s liege cared about quality, and so his daughter was sent here, rather than to the sort of expensive dance academies one of his peers might have selected. Another prince might have objected as well to his daughter mingling casually with a bunch of lower-class mortals, but again, Claire’s father was unique in his approach.
Heart hoped it would be good for her. Guides, he hoped.
Music wafted from the studio as the students did their cool down. Parents idled around outside, most of them giving Heart odd looks, and that was uncomfortable, but it was what it was. The suit made him appear overdressed, but even amongst the mortals, the Vallais were wealthy, and Heart wasn’t just a tutor. He was a bodyguard.
As the music wound down and the students stretched, Heart caught the eye of a woman standing with the numerous parents. Her clothes were plain, her demeanor tired, her skin brown and her hair black and curled. She might have been just another working-class mother, waiting among peers for her child to be done, except for the fact that Heart knew her, or had known her, once upon a time. She was a Wielder. A commoner, and an outsider. Her name was Annie, and once upon a time, Heart had known her very well.
He averted his eyes, opting to avoid a scene, but when he looked up, she stood before him, eyes livid and hurt. “I prayed that what my cousin told me wasn’t true,” she said.
“Hello, Annie,” Heart answered, clipped and conversational. “How’s your mother?” He felt the cold anger rolling off her. He checked his watch again. The class was almost out.
Her eyes flashed dangerously. She was practiced enough at keeping her posture controlled, but the rage and grief suffusing her frame was plain to see. “You’ve got a lot of nerve bringing her up.”
“Just a question.”
She stared back at him. Anger turned to pain and back again. He watched her glance about them—ensuring no ordinary people were within earshot—then she continued in low tones. “Two men she used to babysit as children were killed four days ago. Killed by a Retainer serving the House of Vallais, who rumor has it used to play alongside them, when he was also young.”
Heart shifted. He dropped his left hand down to his side as a precaution. She didn’t notice. “I am sorry for her loss,” he said with genuine sympathy. “And yours, for what that is worth.”
I told them. I warned them.
Annie’s eyes blazed out of the corner of his gaze. Heart sensed the small spark of her Wielder’s powers rising with her temper. They were in public. The fallout wouldn’t be beyond repair, but if she attacked him so close to his Liege’s daughter, Heart would be obligated by oath to damn the consequences and clean up the mess later. He still didn’t meet her gaze. “Please don’t be foolish.”
It would’ve been the second time he was attacked in three weeks.
Annie paused. Thought better of it. He glimpsed a small glass talisman—awkwardly made—between her thumb and forefinger, then she pocketed it again. Heart was grateful for that. All Wielders were dangerous, but basics like Annie didn’t stand a chance against one with an Aspect like Heart. Especially not one with combat training and a glassblade at their beck and call. Unlike the two dead men whose blood stained Heart’s hands, Annie could barely summon the fire.
Instead, she clenched her fists at her sides until the knuckles were white. “When they told me that you put on the pin years ago, I swore up and down you’d die before you wore it. Even then, I never dreamed that you’d kill your own. Guess I was wrong. How’s the fit, door-kicker?”
“Times change,” Heart answered. “I am adaptable, so it fits well.
I told them. I warned them.
“Sure,” she snapped back, barely keeping her voice low. Another parent nearby gave them an odd look. “Becoming a retainer is easy for an Aspect like you, even if you weren’t born to the bluebloods. Give you a weapon, train you up, grant you a nice cushy life. No such option for people like us. Who weren’t born to the Families and who don’t have any of those things. They bought your abilities and you forgot where you came from. Anyone can be adaptable if they’re given enough money and comfort.”
Just as the two men Heart had killed had said. First demanding, then begging, and then swinging weapons and summoning fire. It was a cruel thing to hear it again.
She leveled her gaze on him, and Heart wondered for the second time if she’d force his hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She took a breath, closing her eyes and struggling to control herself in the midst of a crowd of parents who had no idea that the quiet discussion amidst them was about magic and murder. “Is that what you told Sean and Hank?”
Their names pained him. Heart sighed. Claire would be out soon, so his time was very limited. This time he looked the woman in the eyes. “I tried to.”
Guides, I tried.
The last time he’d seen her, Annie had been fifteen. Tanned, with dark curly hair and a face that used to be thoughtful and kind. She’d been through hard times in the nineteen years since, but her eyes were still the same: hazel. Angry. “Was that before, or after you killed them?” she whispered.
Heart met her gaze. “Before. They didn’t listen.”
“You arrogant pig,” Annie said as quietly as she could.
“I assure you,” Heart said quietly. “Pride is not one of my vices.”
Her shoulders sagged with a despair that Heart recognized all too well, and his heart briefly ached for her. “You had a glassblade,” she said. “They didn’t stand a chance.”
Heart straightened his back slightly. The music had stopped, and the students were starting to exit the doorway. “Please,” he said to Annie. “Don’t make the same mistake.”
“Don’t pretend that you care about me. Or that you cared about them,” her jaw tensed. “Don’t you fucking dare.”
“You’re wrong,” Heart said. “But I’m not thinking about you, or them. I’m thinking about your mother.”
Annie’s voice, barely over a whisper, was furious. “There’ll be a reckoning someday, for you and for the royals. Karma’s a bitch.”
“Mr. Heart, is everything okay?” Heart turned, and looked down to see his charge standing beside him. Claire was a very pretty girl, medium height for fourteen, with bright red hair, a smattering of freckles over her nose, blue eyes, and a pale face alight with concern at the sight of what she’d walked into.
Annie’s eyes flashed to the small glass bead worn on a chain around Claire’s neck, subtly etched with the Vallais symbol that marked her as royal to anyone in their world, and Heart watched realization settle into her features. She took a step back, suddenly afraid. “Fine,” Annie said. “Nothing worth talking about.” Stepping carefully around the red-haired teenager, Annie quickly disappeared into the crowd to find her own child.
Claire’s eyes followed the woman, narrowing slightly. The girl was damned perceptive. Her hand moved reflexively to the glass bead around her neck.
Heart caught her fingers before they grasped it. “Yes,” he said. “Everything is fine. No need to worry, nor do anything foolish.”
“Do you know her?” she asked, nervous.
“I did,” Heart said, steering her towards the car. “A long time ago. Now tell me, how was class?”
The car moved smoothly down the road, its European engine purring as Heart maneuvered the wheel. Claire sat in the front seat, watching him with the perceptiveness that he knew was going to cause her as much trouble as her growing power and abilities. At length, tiring of the attempt to dissect his brain with her eyes, he sighed and asked “yes?”
“Three days medical leave,” Claire said. “After two weeks spent on a different assignment of some sort that Dad wouldn’t tell me about, and then some lady threatening you about something you did. Can we talk about what’s actually happening, now?”
“Everything is fine, Claire.”
“Is that why you’re wearing the opposite of your ‘everything-is-fine’ face?”
Heart flashed his charge a sideways glance as they headed down Sprague Avenue towards WA-16. Claire’s earbuds were stowed in the cupholder between them. No deferrals, then. Heart sighed. “Which bit of it?”
“I dunno, can we start with ‘all of it?’” Claire said. Then she added “You know you can’t keep me out of the family files. It’s not like I’m not going to find out later on my own if you don’t tell me.”
A small, sharp laugh escaped the retainer at his charge’s audacity. “You know there’s very little of me in there.”
“The internet exists, Mr. Heart.”
“And you know very well that retainers get scrubbed when we take on the pin. There’s magic for that.”
She scrunched up her face.
Heart turned his attention back to the road. “So unless you can recover the unrecoverable—”
“Why were you on leave?” Claire interrupted him. She let the silence sit for a single instant, then twisted the knife with “Who did you kill, and why?”
She’d overheard more than he’d thought. “Ah,” he acknowledged her perception.
“Yeah.”
“Do you really want to know?”
A pause. The young girl looked uncertain. Then she took a deep breath as they pulled onto the highway. “Yes.”
“One of our spies received word of a plan to kidnap several members of your family,” Heart said. “When your father shared the intelligence report with me, I realized I knew two of the ringleaders in my former life. I asked him for the opportunity to talk them out of it.”
Claire’s face grew a look of worry. “… And they didn’t listen?”
“They tried to get me to change sides,” Heart said. “I refused, and they attacked.”
Claire gulped.
“Indeed.” Heart sighed. “Unpleasant business.”
“Why would they try to get you to betray your oath?”
“The same reason they were willing to plot a kidnapping. Desperation.”
“I don’t… I don’t understand.”
“Naturally,” Heart said. “You have never been desperate.”
Claire fell silent for a long moment as Cheney Stadium whipped by.
“I am not telling you this to shame you,” Heart continued at length. “But people are the way they are for a reason, Claire. It is never so simple as ‘a person is good’ or ‘a person is bad.’ Do you understand?”
They were getting near Skyline, now, where the primary residence of the Prince of Vallais stood on a large plot near the top of a sloping hill. Claire was staring out the window, her mood chilled and expression uneasy.
“Why the kidnapping?” She finally asked. “What did they think was going to happen?”
Heart sighed. “They believed that if they held a proverbial knife to the throat of one of his kin, your father could be persuaded to use his Council vote in their favor.”
A long pause followed. Then Claire tentatively asked a question she didn’t know to be painful. “… They were Outsiders, weren’t they?” She gulped a little, having the unknowing kindness to at least be nervous as she referred to the poorest class of the commoners. The most downtrodden and kicked. “Like you were?”
Were, Heart thought. An interesting phrase. He could have been offended, but there were more sensible ways to handle a teenager’s awkward questions. “Let me answer that with a question of my own: tell me, Claire, were your family to lose all their fortunes tomorrow, would you cease to be royal?”
She frowned, apparently too surprised to take offense. “Of course not, where you come from is like… as much of who you are as your lungs or your brain.”
“Then why would I be any less an Outsider simply because I serve your family?” He followed up.
Claire fell silent. It was not bad for her to have to sit with that discomfort. “Do not worry over my loyalties,” Heart said after a moment. “But yes, they were Outsiders, like I am. A pin and a sword does not change where I come from.”
“But,” Claire started, “my father already frequently votes in favor of Outsider interests! It’s one of his passions!
“I am aware, Claire.”
“The Reformists love him!” she said, referring to that branch of the commoners led by a woman named Daphne Summer, who thought themselves a moderating influence on the royals. Heart sighed. They were also the wealthiest of the commons, which more than likely had something to do with it.
“… My family just donated a huge sum of money to the Kitchens!” Claire continued. “The people who help feed the Outsiders when times are tough!”
“They also wanted his protection,” Heart said.
“So they were going to threaten his family?”
“I did not say they were right, Claire. Only desperate.”
They were pulling up the driveway now. “Your father will be home soon,” Heart said. “He will only be marginally annoyed that I’ve told you this.”
“I won’t tell him,” Claire said, grabbing her backpack as the car came to a stop. She opened the door and hopped out, taking the steps up to the front door two at a time. Alone in the car once more, Heart took a moment to let out another sigh before he started pulling the vehicle around back. Raising his arms still hurt a little. He wondered how long it would be before that faded.
Probably no time soon.