Page 31 of Confounding Oaths
“It’s dawn,” the captain reminded her, “and you’ve people at home.”
Mr. Caesar had, by this point, caught up with them. “We should get you back at once,” he agreed. “Mother and father have been beside themselves.”
Time is different where we live—
“Do you absolutely have to tell them every little thing?” asked the Lady, but I ignored her.
—and so it was not surprising to me that Miss Caesar looked uncomprehending. “It has not been so long, surely?”
“A full day, Mary.” Mr. Caesar’s tone was sharp. It was, I suppose, the kind of sharpness that comes only from affection, but that distinction is so often lost on people. I myself find sharpness of all kinds delightful and appreciate the variety. “We have been frantic. The captain’s whole squadron has been out looking for you. They spoke to the river police.”
Another feature of our magics is that they can make mortals callous. So perhaps that was the reason that Miss Caesar seemed unmoved by her brother’s admonition. Or perhaps it was just that she was sixteen. “Well, I am back now,” she said, “and I was in no danger. The Lady took care of me.”
“Nice to get credit for your work, isn’t it?” the Lady said to me.
“Actually, I prefer to remain anonymous. That’s why I let that awful mortal slap his name on—”
“Yes, yes, let’s not talk about that particular incident now. You win some, we win some.”
I took my eyes off my charges for a half a second to challenge her. “Which ones have you won?”
“This one,” the Lady replied, “for a start.”
When I looked back, the mortals were already leaving, Miss Caesar gliding with inhuman grace in the direction of town—although admittedly one direction out of the heath was as good as any other for that purpose—while her escorts kept pace and did their best to steer her.
Their best, by and large, proved lacking.
It is often said by chroniclers of this era that there are two Londons, and that they change places at sunrise. This is of course an oversimplification. There are, to my certain knowledge, at least 234 distinct Londons, some visible to mortals, some not, some literal, some metaphorical, some that if you enter you will never leave. But I do not wish to overload your fragile human minds, so let us keep to the more encompassable convention, that the capital of the Empire is merely a dual city, and that its nocturnal inhabitants change places with its diurnal ones at their appointed hours, passing only briefly through the shadows of the demimonde between.
So it was this daily changeover through which the trio now walked, chancers and cutpurses stumbling to bed while clerks and costermongers stumbled into work. As the sun rose, its rays caught Miss Caesar’s new form and danced about within her, becoming a swirling, lambent permanence which would, when she moved just so, radiate out from her like a blessing from a particularly casual god.
She was, to put it bluntly, a distraction, and when she had been the proximal cause of two carts ploughing slowly but dangerously into each other, Mr. Caesar and the captain renewed their efforts to persuade her homewards.
“Look at it like this,” the captain tried, “it’s morning. Nobody worth seeing is out in the morning.”
Mr. Caesar nodded. “He’s right, this is hardly the visiting hour. Indeed it’s hardly the breakfast hour.”
“And proper rogues only come out at night,” added Captain James, unhelpfully to Mr. Caesar’s eyes.
Stopping in the middle of the street and causing, as a result, a tremendous snarl in the foot traffic, Miss Caesar observed the crowds and did, indeed, find them wanting. “I suppose,” she conceded, “it would be rather fine to see Anne.” She smirked to herself. “What will she think?”
In large part, Mr. Caesar already knew what Anne thought. She had made her opinions about how selfish Mary had been in running away quite plain over the last day, although he chose to attribute this mostly to displaced anxiety.
So with Captain James clearing away the gawpers and Mr. Caesar leading his sister gently by the arm, the three of them set out for home.
They arrived to find a house not in uproar exactly—neither the elder Mr. Caesar nor Lady Mary were given to uproar—but an obvious state of agitated expectation. And I will confess to the slightest pang of professional jealousy in this matter. Because the Lady had indeed orchestrated a wonderful chaos. And that is the entire purpose of our people.
When they came at last to the drawing room of the Caesar household, Lady Mary rose to her feet, embraced her son with an in my opinion uncreative cry of “John, I thought you’d been killed,” and then stared over his shoulder at the transparent vessel of luminance that was her eldest daughter. “Mary?”
Miss Caesar nodded. “It’s me.”
“John said”—the elder Mr. Caesar remained sitting as he spoke—“that you had been taken by fairies.”
“I made a wish,” Miss Caesar replied. That this statement by itself did not evoke horror amongst all present is testimony to how little mortals understand of the truths beyond their reality.
Her father gave her a look that was not disapproving but spoke of a deep, private concern. “And you wished for this?”
“I wished for beauty.”
