The gala was everything Lillian dreaded, and more.

The crowd was the number one problem. The castle ballroom that housed the party was spacious, even cavernous, but the sheer amount of people made it feel like the inside of a gutter. The crowd was a singular obstacle and a plurality of people all at once, like a wall was both one composite thing and a stack of bricks.

Lillian cradled a glass of white wine and did her best to look collected. She was an enemy of the Order, attending the gala as an Inquisitor, after all. Anything else she was up to had to remain opaque and hidden.

So she and Hannah were both situated near a glass statue of a dying dragon, towards the outer orbit of the event. Said dragon had little metal rods cooked into the glass mold, sticking out in its flesh like ballista bolts… It made Lillian feel sick to look at.

For a good while, the pair of them just stood and drank in the party.

The food table was covered in pre-meal snacks: cheeses and wheat crackers, fruits and finger vegetables, all laid out on silver platters. And, on either end of the white tablecloth, there were a great many bottles of wine.

Right near the food table was a large bowl, made of crystal. It gleamed of colorless light and the shine of coin.

“The collection bowl,” Lillian grunted.

“Wow… they’ve made a whole fifteen coin. Good for them!”

Indeed. The collection bowl was looking rather sparse! Thank goodness for that.

Lillian took in her fellow partygoers with a weary eye. There were so damn many of them! And she knew almost none of them! She turned her focus on those she did know. Most of them were people she disliked, but there was some comfort from familiarity from them.

First was Lord Gaius, who was looking around with the air of a man holding a flyswatter, waiting for a chance to squash some poor bug with it. It was…

Angry. Yes. He was angry. And looking for someone, or something.

Next was Thomas Byserson, who was drinking himself far past silly. He was, ten minutes into the party, drinking himself downright goofy. There was a lot of wandering around in circles in store for him, and he was getting right to it. On occasion, he would go up to a party guest or member of the castle staff on the job and ask if they had seen ‘Bill… his shit of a little brother’. None had.

And then there was Sir Frederick Raymond; he was chewing on a plate of hor d'oeuvres and swinging his glare around like a reckless swordsman. Emma had made several attempts to speak with him, and so far he had heard none of them.

That was curious. Perhaps Lillian could eavesdr--

“Hey,” said a voice that could only be Belladonna’s, “fancy seeing you here.”

Both Lillian and Hannah turned to see the girl; she was dressed in a castle worker’s uniform and wearing a broad smile.

“Now, Bella, Bella, Bella,” Hannah said, “two questions: one, why are you dressed like a maid, two, what are you doing here?”

“I’m in on a little scheme, is all. What are you two doing here?”

“Also scheming. Though our scheme is probably a great deal more outrageous.”

Belladonna grinned.

“We’ll see about that. I’ve got to get back to my shift in a second, but I just wanted to pass on a word of advice: don’t touch the beef when dinner comes. Or the pork. And do not drink the sparkling wine.”

“May I ask why?” Lillian said.

At that, Belladonna mimed sticking her finger down her throat and vomiting.

“Emetic poison,” she whispered, with the air of conspiracy, “me and my co-conspirators here are making some moves against the Order.”

“And anyone who deigns to eat the main course.” Hannah frowned.

“No, no. The beef and the pork are only for the aristocrats who my brother and the head assholes, uh, to eat. The rest of you guests get chicken. It’s pretty good!”

Lillian’s forehead shook hands with the upper reaches of her eyes, and her brow furrowed.

“What scheme is this?”

“Don’t worry about it! I’ve got to get back to work now. See you two around!”

And with that, Belladonna, in the frilliest black and white uniform dress Lillian had ever set eyes upon, vanished into a sea of people.

Huh.

“Will you be okay if I mingle and eavesdrop?” Hannah asked, “Lord Gaius still thinks I’m a journalist writing a story about him, I bet. I’m going to take advantage.”

“Don’t have too much fun.”

“Oh, please. I could have more fun in a convent than I could here.”

“Into devoted women of the faith, are we?” Lillian asked.

Hannah reacted to this with a rude gesture and a laugh.

“Signal if you need me, ‘Ian. We’ve got a long night ahead of us.”

There was no way in the world Hannah could have known how correct she was.

 

***

 

If there was one thing Hannah could fake it through, it was polite schmoozing. Years of patiently sitting through the Very Nice Church Ladies talk (how wonderful the debtor’s prison had been for Lantern Springs; how the very depressed town drunk would ‘get his due’ and die any day now) had trained her in this field. She could spot the knives hidden in the gleaming white teeth of a smile, the way a person could tell another, through euphemism and polite aphorism, that they wished you were dead and that your soul was stained pitch black.

So a little bit of party gossip with strangers was easy and low-stakes. For the time being, all she had to do was not make a scene and snoop around.

This led her straight to Lord Gaius. With a glass of ice water in hand, she smiled her fakest Church Lady smile and bid him hello.

“Oh! Hello, hello. Come to write your next front page feature?”

“If I’m lucky,” Hannah said. She omitted the fact that, if she was lucky, Lillian’s report re: the Order’s financial crimes, and the next few hours, would bury this man and destroy everything he ever held dear.

“Good, good! I didn’t see your Dragonquell story, I’m sorry to say.”

He was dressed in plate armor that seemed more decoration than protection; the stuff looked good, with its silver engraved designs and inlaid jewels, but Hannah saw those ‘diamonds’ around his wrists and knew them to be glass.

“Oh, the paper killed the story.”

“They what?”

She smiled, like the way one smiled before ripping someone’s throat out with their canines.

“Yeah. It turns out,” she swished her glass in a cyclonic motion, “that your Order isn’t as popular as I thought. What a shame!”

Lord Gaius exhaled. “Yes. We have enemies. Even in the church! If you can believe it.”

(“I can’t,” said Hannah, who could absolutely one hundred percent believe it.)

“We’re… can I let you in on a secret, miss journalist?”

It occurred to Hannah that she had never offered him an alias. Though, she realized, it didn’t matter, since he never asked her name.

“We’re probably about to lose all our money.”

“What?”

“Yes. When that Inquisitor scum reports us,” he said, with a snarl pointed at a distant Lillian, “we’re going to lose our funding. No more grand parties… no more nice castle to call home.”

She had more sympathy for an infectious disease than she did for this man, but she forced her mouth to take on a concerned shape. It mostly worked.

“Why tell me?”

“This is our last hurrah, miss journalist… you see the wealthy men over there?”

She did. There were about six of them, dressed in finery that cost more than freedom from a debtor’s prison.

“They’re our main hope, to keep our grand line of history going… and with my son and Thomas’ brother missing…”

Hannah let some of her more direct approach come out. She asked, “Why tell me?”

Lord Peter Gaius seized her by the shoulders and looked at her with pleading eyes.

“Write an article about us, I beg you. Help us regain our pride, our history! People read the Daily Apocalypse, all across the nation! The High Luminaries in their gilded courtroom read it! Your words can save us, if only the right person reads them.”

Was this a nightmare? Or a farce? Either way, Hannah wasn’t enjoying this sudden turn.

“Okay.” She pried his hands off her shoulder, one at a time, “I can try, sir, but if it’s all as you say?”

She shrugged.

“Sounds like you need divine intervention more than you need a favorable article in the Apocalypse. I will observe this event, and I will see what I can do.”

She said all this, knowing that she would do all in her power to help make this man bleed. Figuratively. Or… yeah. Figuratively.

“Walk with me? I can show you around, make some introductions.”

“Alright,” Hannah said, “introduce me.”

 

***

 

Lillian coped with the party the one way she could; sticking her hands in her jacket pockets and moving her fingers in and out of interweaving patterns. The motion was a comfort, a grounding sensation in the wash of stimulus of the event.

This was good, because the next thing of note that happened to her was that she ran into Emma. Grounding was exactly what she needed when this happened.

“Oh,” Emma said.

“Hello, Ms. Raymond.”

Lillian did her best to channel the sound of hypothermia when she spoke. Calling Emma by her last name would be only the tip of this iceberg of frigid manners.

“Wow. Last name basis? Really?”

“I’m sorry. I’m here in a work capacity.”

And then, Lillian added, “Which is good, for you. If not I might be asking you which fingers you liked the best and how sad you would be if they were broken.”

Emma took a swig of wine out of her glass. She looked the perfect picture of class and normality, in her little crystal tiara and her pink gown and crystal heels.

“Oh, are we doing this, Lillian? Are we?”

“No. We aren’t. When we do, you won’t need to ask,” Lillian said.

“What’s this about? What bee have you got stuck in your little bonnet?”

Lillian cleared her throat, and waited one… two… three beats.

“You hurt someone I care about. A great deal.”

“Bailey’s a big girl,” Emma replied.

“Bailey did not get out of bed for four days. Bailey is angrier than I think I’ve seen any other human being ever be angry. And I can’t help but share in that rage.”

A long time ago, Lillian had discovered that the best way to get the upper hand on certain types of horrid people was to seem utterly cold and unemotional. If she fought back, against the children who insulted her cognitive abilities, or her mannerisms, or the way she dressed or moved through the world… she got in trouble.

So she studied, and studied, and considered each interaction. She saw how the children, when someone above them in the hierarchy came by, feigned innocence. They were just kidding, they were just having fun, Lily was just being a sensitive baby. They were laughing with her, you see?

No adult in the Inquisition would hear her cry. So she took to another method; get as cold as possible. Watch their insecurities, and when they tried something…

Slowly and calmly inform them that everything their mind whispered to them, about how the Inquisition would not love them, how they were all just prize racing dogs who would be shot the second they broke a leg, were all true. 

This didn’t end the slurs, but it did make them whisper them instead of yell them. They learned to hesitate before fucking with Lillian Andrei Stone.

So, she channeled all of that. In Emma and her tiara, she saw every kid who ever thought she was an acceptable target; every child taught cruelty as a virtue who knew they could get away with hurting the weird girl with the funny way of talking and odd mannerisms.

“And, may I say, Emma? The church doesn’t love you.”

“It does!” she said, shocked at the very idea that it didn’t.

Lillian smiled, without showing a hint of tooth, and shook her head, “No, it doesn’t.”

“You can play by its rules all you want, you can trap yourself in smaller and smaller boxes, until you’re so small that your future clergyman husband’s fingers are the bars of a cage…”

She let that pause stand for a second or two. Then, she spoke up again.

“But the wound in your heart where there ought to have been the love of a community won’t heal. As long as you value your own normality over the flesh and blood animal that you are, you will be miserable and angry, and you will blame that on whoever has the unlucky affliction of caring about you.”

She felt the slight growl in her rise as she spoke, but all in all, Lillian held it together pretty well. The ice queen facade didn’t crack.

“I--”

“I am going to get a glass of water. Good day. Enjoy the party, Miss Raymond. You earned this.”

And Lillian went to go get a cool drink of water.

 

***

 

Hannah was more than ready for the party to be a dud for the first hour. After all, all of this was preamble for Bailey and Henry’s big entrance after dinner began.

But she found a simple joy in the social maneuvering of it all; she had found a way to meet many of the prospective patrons of the Order, all rich bastards with hard-ons for the honor of old bloodlines and the grand tradition of murdering dissidents. She made a game of not telling them her name, and making them guess hers.

“Are you… are you, oh, the opinion columnist, what’s her name?” was one guess. “You’re Crescha Colwin, aren’t you! My cousin went to university with you.”

It was good fun. They were all guessing her identity on the lie that she was a journalist; they could never guess that she was Hannah, a girl who was ready to have a good time and break some rules.

“No. Good guess, though! I know her. We’re good friends,” she said.

She kept at the game until she grew bored of it, and decided to go poke a more fun-looking bear. She went right up to Sir Frederick and said hello.

“Oh,” he said, not once looking up from his plate of finger pastries, “hello.”

“Nervous?” she asked, all too sweet and interested. If half what she heard was true, she hoped he was roasting in guilt like a glazed hog.

“Extremely.”

He said no more. With one shaking hand, he picked up a pastry, tore a piece of that buttery goodness off the main part of it, and began chewing on it.

“You’re, what, a journalist, right? You’ve interviewed people?”

“Yes,” she lied, “why?”

“You must have a sense of first impressions, then. How do I come off?”

Like a sad sack, Hannah thought. Like a great big sad sack of a man who had blood dripping off his hands, warm as the day he first spilled it.

“Haunted,” she said, in lieu of that.

“That’s the word for it.”

Sir Frederick tore off another piece of butter pastry, and then tore another piece, and a third, but did not eat any of them.

“I would ask you to keep my next statement off the record,” he said.

“Fine by me. I’m here to party first and foremost.”

“When you have… ghosts... following you, it’s one thing. But when you know those ghosts’ names?”

Sir Frederick dropped the three pieces of delicious bread treat onto the shiny marble floor. Someone was going to have to clean those up later.

“You remember it for your whole life. They stay by your side.”

“And what are those ghost’s names?”

She mostly said it to twist the knife a little, but to her shock, he actually answered.

“Ozma,” he said the name like a curse, “Patrick.” Whether the curse was on ‘Ozma’ and ‘Patrick’ or on him was unclear, though. But then he choked out another name. It was so quiet and unclear that Hannah wasn’t sure she’d actually heard him say it or not.

She was pretty sure the name was ‘Laura’. It meant nothing to her, but it clearly meant everything to him. If it weren’t for his many crimes and atrocities, she might even feel for him a little.

“Laura?”

“Not so loud!”

Hannah felt the urge to shout it out, at the top of her lungs, so even the horses in the stables on the ground floor of the castle could hear it. Laura! Laura! Laura! A woman he killed? A woman he loved whom he killed? A woman he hated whom he let live?

“Who was this? This… Lau--”

“I will tell you if you stop saying her name.”

Hmm… tough call.

“Alright.”

He brought his voice to a whisper.

“If I see this in the news, I will personally remove your bowels with a knife.”

“Sir Knight?” she asked, because there was no proper response to a threat like that.

He caught sight of himself in the polished marble floor, and saw something horrible in that visage. Sir Frederick closed his eyes and released his tense and angry muscles.

“Sorry,” he sighed, “old habits from decades past. When I think of her, I feel myself as a younger, less measured man than I am today.”

Hannah said nothing.

“She’s… a phantom. Of a lost future. I had a choice; her, or the man I am here, today. I chose the man I am.”

“What choice was this, exactly?”

“One dripping in viscera,” he said.

Huh.

“I see,” she said, because she saw. Or did she? No. Yes. She did. Sort of.

Hannah needed to go sit down after that conversation.

 

***

 

Lillian was sitting up against a wall, watching the party go by like a crashing wave, when Hannah hobbled over and sat her ass right on the floor.

“You too, then?” Lillian asked, with a knowing twitch of the mouth.

“Me too, what?”

“You’re socially exhausted already.”

Hannah groaned and leaned her whole body weight into the cold marble.

“I can’t do much more of this. How long until they get here?”

“Not sure. Soon,” Lillian said, “I hope.”

The pair of them stared at the collections bowl; it was still more white crystal (or was it also glass?) than coins, but the coins were starting to form a pile.

This would not do. This would not do at all.

“This idea of Bailey’s better work,” Hannah said.

“Do you think it will?”

“I think that if anyone can make a scheme like this work, it’s us four, but I have my doubts.”

Lillian said, “Then why agree to it?”

Hannah just shrugged.

“Seemed like the thing to do. Plus I want to fuck her so bad it’s not even funny.”

Neither said anything, because the simple truth was that they both wanted Bailey Thistle very very much. Lillian would not jump off a high roof for Bailey, but anything else was on the table.

It occurred to Lillian that this, this thing she was doing, was against all her strictures. If ever someone from the Inquisition found out she was ‘relapsing’ into her non-monogamous and woman and man loving behaviors…

She would be in more trouble than she had ever been in her life. Once as a naive teen with inexplicable hungers for matters of the flesh was bad enough; as an adult who had already been caught once, it would slate her for some truly nasty punishments.

But for whatever fingers they might remove or months of isolation underground they would put her through, the simple fact that Bailey, Henry, and Hannah were people she wanted. They were her people just as much as she was their person/dragon, and she’d be damned if she would deprive those connections.

“Hey, ‘Ian, look alive, they’re serving dinner.”

“What? Oh. Good,” Lillian said, “Good. I could use a bite.”

A group of staff came out and assembled a table out of modular pieces, long enough to fit the forty or so attendees. Another group, which included Yulia (what were she and Belladonna up to?) brought a tablecloth of impossible length, and unfurled it across the dining table.

Lillian and Hannah took seats near the middle of the table, when seats were available. They watched the staff as they dealt with the tedious problem of dealing with the silverware and plates. There was a brief misunderstanding about how many forks and knives each guest was supposed to have?

Thankfully, it was only one fork, one knife, and one spoon. Lillian had studied the etiquette of which was the soup spoon and which one was the salad fork a hundred times over and it still made no sense to her.

Belladonna and a group of other staff set out the meals: chicken, salad, and a lamb and vegetable soup for Hannah, Lillian, and the general public, and then a several-course meal for prospective patrons of the Order.

“Before we begin,” Lord Gaius said, from his spot at the head of the table, “I would like to say a few words.”

Lillian eyed her soup, as a prisoner might eye the key to their cell in the sleeping guard’s pocket. Hannah snuck a bite of chicken and looked quite proud of herself for it.

“Now, many generations ago, my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather, and Sir Byserson’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather, and Sir Frederick’s…”

He launched into another long bout of ‘greats’, so Lillian dipped her spoon in the soup. A chunk of salted lamb floated in the broth tempestuously. She wanted to eat this soup so fucking bad it hurt.

“-grandfather, they killed their first dragon. They were never meant to succeed, but they did. They rallied their condemned men together and won their freedom. With this, the church gave them love and grace again.”

Lord Gaius swept his jagged gaze around the table.

“We find ourselves at another crossroads of fortune. Please, help us preserve this ancient legacy. Help us build the dragon slayers of the next generations. The end of the world is always around the corner. You can ensure it never comes. Help us keep the rebels and the freaks in line.

“That’s all from me. Thomas?”

At that, Thomas Byserson stood up. He put both hands on the table, but that did little to help his balance. The way he was moving, one might think there was a tremor rippling through the ground.

“I want to find my brother and kick--”

Sir Byserson exhaled.

“Kick his ungrateful ass. Everything I ever did was for him.”

“Thank you.” Lord Gaius clapped him on the back, “Thomas Byserson, everyone!”

“No. No. Don’t touch me. Listen.

“Him and Ulysses both, a pair of ungrateful little whelps. Every man in our respective bloodlines, the Bysersons and the Gaiuses, has been raised the same way… and they think that they can just run away? That they can leave? They can’t. They’ll be back. And when they are, I am going to make them wish they had thrown themselves off the castle wall when they had the chance. Our fathers are spitting on them.”

Lillian grabbed a piece of lamb with her bare hands and threw it into her mouth. She let her teeth grow sharp and she tore into the meat. There was clearly no reason to wait and give these men any respect, after all.

“And--”

“Thomas. You’re correct, but please. Have a seat,” Lord Gaius cut in.

Thomas Byserson grumbled all the way down into his chair.

“So, now, if we’re all done with speeches…”

“No, Peter. I have a few words.”

“Fred,” Lord Gaius said, “alright.

“The Hero of Ancient Gulch, everyone. None of us would be here without his military and espionage prowess!”

There was a storm cloud hanging over Sir Frederick’s bearded face. Hell, his beard might have been the stormcloud, given its color and unkempt thickness. Lillian knew a beard that was well cared for; she had been kissed with a well-loved beard, she had run her fingers through a well-loved beard. That was no beard of love.

Sir Frederick stood.

“Thank you, Peter,” he said it like he would thank a hangman for offering a hand up on his way up the gallows steps.

“Twenty-three years ago, I led an attack against a commune built on the ruins of the Sorceress’ old hideout and fortress, which itself was built in the remains of The Anvil, the prison the Dragon once laid waste to.”

He inhaled.

“In the years after that, I put down the sword. People have asked me, why, why, Fred? Why stop there?

“Well, I’ll tell you.”

He picked up his flute of sparkling wine, and downed it all in one long gulp. It was a long moment of watching a very sad man just tip the whole thing down his throat. Considering the wine was also laced with emetic poison, he would regret that later.

“When I agreed to the mission, it was on the heels of me being in trouble. I was… I was taken by the Dragon in my youth, by the gender-bending of it all. I was sick, spiritually. And I got caught, as I deserved, and I was given a choice.

“It was either face the worst physical punishments the meanest sons of bitches of the Order could think of… or make my sickness useful.”

Lillian poked her soup, but suddenly didn’t have an appetite anymore.

“I agreed to the second one. So, wearing a ragged dress and with naught but one bag to me, I went to the Ancient Gulch commune and asked to be taken in; they did so without even vetting me.

“What followed was a year of intelligence gathering. I made friends with the commune, I built relationships… I learned their ideology, their defensive strategies, their evacuation routes.”

He looked at the table.

“I wrote it all down on one long document. I can’t tell you how often I considered burning it and cutting the Order off; but I knew that duty came before conscious belief. So I snuck from the room I shared with the person I was seeing at the time, one night, and I told Lord Gaius and the waiting men in Ancient Gulch everything.”

Sir Frederick looked like he was going to be sick; he looked like he was going to smile.

“So, that next week, we did it. We marched up that mountain in formation, and we cleaned house.

“Each building in the commune, we burned it. Each dragon, we cut or shot down. It smelled like a sausage barbecue when we were done.” Sir Frederick was probably going to either throw up, or jump for joy, and it was hard to say which.

“But that wasn’t enough. We ran back down the mountain, the smoke pillars obscuring the moon, and marched down into Ancient Gulch. The blood running down the mountain covered our boots, I tell you. It was like walking through a marsh.”

Lillian looked to Hannah; Hannah looked at her knife, and seemed to be calculating the trajectory from her spot to Sir Frederick’s jugular vein.

“There was a doctor and a midwife who lived in town, you see. They were friends of the commune, and at one point, I would have called them friends. We went right to their house and I ordered the place torched.”

There was a grim smile wearing Sir Frederick’s body like an ill-fitting suit.

“They cried out to me. They cried out and out and I just stood there, in that nice dress they bought me, tasting the burning tea bags from their kitchen in the air. They cried out, and I laughed at them…”

He looked at the table, and wrapped his knuckle hard enough on the table to break his metacarpals.

“That’s heroism, everyone. When you call a man a hero, that’s what you’re saying. I am a hero, I suppose. Or a butcher… Who can say? I have no right to decide, I think.”

“Oh shut up, Laura,” Sir Byserson said.

Sir Frederick screwed his jaw up and laid out Thomas Byserson with a single punch.

This, combined with the long and quite harrowing speech, caused more than a bit of an uproar. The wealthy patrons were all talking over one another, sometimes to one another, sometimes to Lord Gaius or Byserson or Sir Frederick. The general uproar reached the rest of the party, too, but it was a mix of disgust and entertainment instead of pure vitriol.

Lillian found the noise and motion rather overwhelming, so she placed an earplug in each ear. Unfortunately, being a dragon granted her stronger senses all around, so they didn’t work very well. Damn.

Thankfully, the commotion came to a grinding halt when the main ballroom doors burst open, bearing a horse and two very attractive riders.

All fell silent, and all eyes were on the intruders.

The first intruder, the one holding the horses’ reins, was a woman in a tight black dress that sparkled with night-colored sequins. Her red hair was rolled up in a complex bun, and her face was covered by a shimmering masquerade mask. She gave Lillian and Hannah a wink, which made Lillian feel weak in the knees.

The second rider was a man in an armored tunic and mask over his face. His eyes were alight with a curious look, and his mouth was curved into a crooked smile. He dismounted the horse, and cleared his throat.

“Ladies, Gentleman, and those who know better,” he said, “introducing She who needs no introduction: Her Ladyship the Sorceress!”

The Sorceress waved. The party went apeshit.

Right on time, Lillian grinned. Right on time.