Page 92 of Confounding Oaths
“Come with us,” the captain half ordered.
But Barryson responded to the other half. “This isn’t my fight, Captain. The king’s not asking me to do this.”
“No. I am.”
The words hung in the night a moment. I confess that I may have facilitated their hanging just a little.
“Fuck,” Barryson said at last. “How many times have you saved my life?”
“Three.”
“And how many times have I saved yours?”
“One and a half.”
Barryson frowned. “You can’t save half a life.”
“That time at Cádiz was you and Sal together, you get half each.”
“Fuck off.”
Withdrawing to a more discreet distance, I let the wind die down. Captain James placed a hand on Barryson’s shoulder and looked at him with a sincerity that—moving as I do mostly amongst the rich and the otherworldly—I am unused to seeing. “Come with us. Not for duty. Because it’s right.”
And Barryson sighed. That was the thing about men like Orestes James. They were very, very hard to say no to.
“Absolutely not,” Lady Mary was insisting, back at the Caesar residence.
“It is the only way,” her son was insisting back, although in truth his knowledge of matters supernatural in no way qualified him to make such an assertion.
“You are not taking my daughter to a gaming hell at this time of night.”
“Well, we cannot very well go by day,” Miss Caesar countered, still a little unaccustomed to arguing on the same side as her brother. “We are seeking a witch and I understand them to be nocturnal creatures.”
Lady Mary frowned. “That is not a good argument for your safety.”
“That Captain James will be with us is argument for my safety,” Miss Caesar replied, her many recent experiences having rather altered her position on his acceptability as an escort. “And that I have been there before, and the witch did me no harm.”
The elder Mr. Caesar, who had been watching the discussion unfold carefully but thus far avoiding comment, now ceased avoiding it. “That somebody chose not to harm you once is far from being proof that they will never harm you.”
It was at around this juncture that Nancy entered, announcing the return of Captain James and the strange gentleman with the marks on his fingers. They were welcomed with all due grace and then dropped immediately into the heart of a family debate.
“There a problem?” asked the captain.
“Mama wishes to keep Mary at home,” explained the younger Mr. Caesar. “She apparently believes doing nothing about the fact that her daughter is collapsing into shards of glass is the best thing for her welfare.”
Raised to impassivity, Lady Mary made no reaction to theremark, but her husband reacted for her. “John, you will not speak of your mother in such terms.”
Although he had learned to be acerbic for a range of very good reasons, Mr. Caesar had enough grace to know when he had gone too far, and too far he had, in this instance, gone. “I am sorry, Mama. This whole business has been hard for all of us.”
“Hardest for the young lady, though?” suggested Barryson.
Miss Caesar gasped in adolescent gratitude. “You see how easy that is? Yes, as the gentleman says, this is my affair and I should be free to resolve it as I see fit.”
“Resolving matters as you saw fit,” the elder Mr. Caesar pointed out, “is what brought us to this in the first place. I do not wish to be harsh, Mary, but trusting unknown magic does not sit well with me.”
Ordinarily, Mr. Caesar would have agreed. But if there was ever a time to eschew ordinarily it was when one’s sister had been transformed into a rapidly crumbling mineral. “There is simply no way,” he said, “that we can free Mary from whatever this sorcery may be if we do not at least consider engaging with sorcery ourselves.”
Captain James nodded his agreement. “Barryson, anything to add?”
