Page 27 of Confounding Oaths
Then Barryson reached into—oh, I don’t know, a bag or something, whatever mortals carry things with—and drew out a sheaf of white wooden strips inscribed with symbols of divination. These he cast into the air and, eyes closed, selected from amongst their number. Even a floor down and three rooms sideways I could feel an unpleasant sense of being watched, of human perception interfacing with laws and systems with which your kind were never meant to interact.
“Bibbity boo,” he said, “magic magic magic, probably something about Odin. Yup, definitely fairies.”
“Oh.” Miss Bickle looked oddly disappointed. “Somehow that feels rather anticlimactic.”
“… eels rather anticlimactic,” the genuine, nonspeculative Miss Bickle was saying in the hallway.
“Magic often does,” explained Barryson. “It’s not all raising hanged men from the dead.”
Miss Bickle gasped. “Canyou raise hanged men from the dead?”
“I can, but there’s not a huge amount of call for it, know what I mean?”
I made my way in my spider’s shape to rejoin the companions, which took rather longer than travelling in a larger form. It’s amazing how big a sitting room becomes when one is less than an inch across.
“What troubles me,” Mr. Caesar was saying when I arrived, “is that I haven’t the slightest clue what to do now. If she has, as you say, been taken by fairies, what recourse does that leave us?”
Miss Mitchelmore took her cousin’s hands and looked up at him reassuringly. “We will find a way to rescue her. I am sure of it.”
“People always do,” said Miss Bickle with her typical confidence. “You might have to go on a very long journey, or fight an ogre, or hold on to her while she changes into lots of things you don’t really want to be holding on to. But you’ll win in the end. That’s how it works.”
For some reason, mortals often found Miss Bickle’s unwavering faith in the beneficence of my people wearing but, on this one occasion, Mr. Caesar seemed to take the sensible position that she was extremely right and comforting.
“Thank you,” he said. “And thank you as well, Barryson. This was beyond the call of duty, truly.”
Barryson gave a sly grin. “No worries, I’m sure you’d do the same for my sister.”
Since it had not occurred to Mr. Caesar that Barryson had a sister, or that he really had any life at all beyond being a soldier, that observation reproved him a little. Although only a little; he was, after all, still an earl’s grandson. “If the lady ever needs”—he hesitated—“anything I am qualified to provide, please don’t hesitate.”
“Know any single dukes?” Barryson asked.
If he’d tried, Mr. Caesar could have named at least one, but this seemed to be going to dangerous places. “I fear relationships between untitled ladies and dukes seldom end as well as the popular imagination would have you believe.”
“True enough.” Barryson shouldered the bag that he was indeed carrying (you see, my descriptions were entirely accurate) and made for the door. “I’ll tell the captain they can stop searching the river. Oh and, will you be wanting him to second for you?”
Mr. Caesar blinked. “Second?”
“In the duel.”
The tiny matter of his sister’s abduction had driven the tiny matter of the duel from Mr. Caesar’s mind. “Ah. Yes. That. I suppose his seconding would indeed be valued and, well, is there still a plan for Jackson to …”
“Fuck the whole thing up so you don’t die? Yeah.”
Miss Bickle adopted an expression of approving outrage. “Are you going to cheat in a duel? Are you becoming a rakehell? Do say you’re becoming a rakehell.”
It was, perhaps, illustrative of Mr. Caesar’s vexed relationship with the ton thatrakehellwas never a title to which he had felt able to aspire. Gentlemen with fairer fortunes, fairer skin, and more interest in the fairer sex might have been able to get away with cocking a snook at a world that at once despised and admired them. Mr. Caesar, by contrast, needed to reserve his defiance for dark rooms and closed doors and—very, very occasionally—punching annoying men in the teeth. “I am doing what it takes to secure my survival. And with current circumstances, the sooner I get this silly business with the major out of the way the better.”
“John!” Miss Bickle’s look of outrage grew rather lessapproving. “A duel is not a silly business. It is terribly romantic and exciting.”
Barryson shook his head. “Nae, miss, it’s silly. Now holmgang, that’s a different matter.”
Ever eager for stories of iron-thewed men doing sweaty things to each other, Miss Bickle gave Barryson a wide-eyedtell me morelook, but Mr. Caesar preempted it by opening the door and saying, “Well, we shouldn’t keep you.”
A conclusion that Miss Bickle found dismaying enough that she pouted for the rest of the evening.
Chapter Six
They shared the good or,if you prefer, bad news with Lady Mary and Miss Anne at once, and with the elder Mr. Caesar the moment he returned home that evening.
