“Exactly. Having information can’t do any harm, can it? How were you as a student?”
“Horrible,” I said. I could see her face fall.
“But I can do this. I have a good memory. I struggled at school because I don’t have a lot of patience.”
“How far did you get in Essentials?”
“The introduction,” I said, preparing my toothbrush. I’d managed some before fatigue caught up with me, and I’d napped. I’d woken, mid-afternoon, and decided to shower to clear my head. I didn’t function that well when I was grimy and unshaven.
“Only? I’m nearly done,” she replied.
I looked up at her in surprise.
“Apparently I don’t sleep,” she said, and she sounded somewhat distant, even disconnected. “I don’t get hungry. I don’t really breathe. I barely have a heartbeat.”
“You were up all night reading?”
“More or less. My focus sucks right now, because I still feel drained from earlier, but I read where I could, then wandered, looked over the library, trying to get a sense of what books are there. Or at least the books the mirror’s facing.”
I nodded, toothbrush in my mouth. On a level, I was glad I had an excuse to stay silent. I was bothered, that she was ahead of me, that she would likely stay ahead of me, without a need for sleep.
How could I even articulate that? On a level, I wanted us to be on the same page, so we could cooperate, play ideas off each other.
On another level, well… All of the most foolish and brutish Others have been captured, slain, consumed, driven off, or tricked away. Recognize all Others for what they are, and know that they, by a process of elimination two thousand and six hundred years in the making, are cunning by nature, they are slave to those who are, or they were made to be cunning to better serve in their duties. Wit is the greatest defense and the sharpest weapon, on battlefields such as these.
Essentials, chapter one, the introduction, on Others. Laying down the ground rules, the most basic stuff we needed to know. Others were liars.
What was Rose, if not an Other? New enough she wasn’t bound by the old rules that forbade lying and mandated oaths, but still an Other. Not of mortals or the mortal’s world.
“I’m glad you’re up,” she said. “Three hours alone in this house was too much. I don’t know how I’m going to get through a whole night. Dealing with being what I am.”
For all that time had done to heal her weariness, it had made her emotions more pronounced.
In my case… well, it would have been easier to say if any emotion was showing if I could see myself.
“I really like your tattoos,” she said. She fumbled for words for a second, which caught me off guard. “I’m… actually envious. I couldn’t pull that off, but it’s the sort of thing I’d get if I could.”
I looked down. Small birds perched on tree branches, in pale grays, whites and yellows, against a backdrop of reds, in watercolor hues. “Thank you.”
Were we similar in some respects? In tastes?
Or was this a manipulation from a cunning Other? What was there to guarantee that she was really me, with one not-so-small change?
I left the bathroom, making my way down to the living room.
“I take it you didn’t get to chapter eight,” she said, reflected in one of the glass picture frames along the stairwell.
“No.”
“Take a look,” she said. Or it was all she could say, before there weren’t any surfaces for her to communicate through. I made my way into the living room, and saw her there, waiting for me, in the mirror I’d taken from the bathroom. The book lay on the coffee table.
Essentials, chapter eight. Dangers a practitioner faces.
I pulled on pants under the towel as I leaned over the book, reading the headings aloud. “Being forsworn, betrayal within the coven, betrayal by familiars, covens, crusades, death, demesnes, execution, exquirere…”
“Skip ahead.”
I did, picking up the book to better flip through it. “Lords, loss of implements, loss of sight, loss of soul…”
“Towards the end.”
“I’m not patient enough for that. Give me a letter? Or, better yet, point me to the section you want to talk about?”
“W. Witch hunters.”
I flipped through until I found it. “‘Witch hunters are markedly different from inquisitors. Where an inquisitor is organized by an outside party, the witch hunter is in the employ of practitioners or Others. Oft used to guard a Lord’s power, maintain a balance or hunt down rogue parties. Witch Hunters do not use faith or innocence as tools, but use gifts provided by those they serve, alongside the protections the uninitiated enjoy, as well as the ability to circumvent defenses that would ward off practitioners and Others.'”
Rose was looking at me, expectantly.
“I’m not sure I follow your line of thought.”
“I want to see if you reach the same conclusion I do,” she said.
“You’re thinking of that pair of siblings we saw. The ones who were getting all geared up to come after us.”
“I’m less focused on them than on the path.” she said.
I thought for a minute. “Yeah, I’m not reaching the same conclusion as you, I don’t think.”
She looked a little agitated, nervous. “I think we can go this route. Avoid getting into the ugliest stuff, the books on demons and whatever else. If witch hunters and inquisitors can survive this sort of thing, maybe we can too.”
“Borrowing power instead of using it?”
She nodded, too much, too quickly. She was talking faster. “Kind of. Not getting in the thick of this. We learn what we need to learn in order to survive. We circumvent this whole situation.”
“While meeting her demands? Getting a familiar, getting a tool, carving out a little world for ourselves? Rose, I get what you’re going for, I almost get why, but that’s not going to work.”
With that, I seemed to have upset her.
Rose leaned closer to the mirror, “Why not? We can do it, while avoiding everything else. We need workarounds.”
“I get that, but the most basic, number one step? The one I’m supposed to use to awaken myself… there’s a cost associated with it. I give up the ability to lie. What that one guy said in the vision? There’s always a price. Become a Witch Hunter, and you face obligations.”
Rose was getting more into it as she argued. “We can minimize the effect. Follow the letter of the law, instead of the spirit. We get a familiar, but we go with the smallest, weakest spirit possible, something small, that won’t demand anything of consequence or challenge us. We pick an inoffensive tool. Carve out the smallest possible piece of land for our demesnes. That only leaves us the problem of some reading, which is a good idea anyways, and getting married.”
“And the debt? We’re supposed to clear the debt. How do we do that if we handicap ourselves?”
“If that’s the one problem we have, I think we can find a way around it with some research.”
No, I wouldn’t convince her that way. Better to get to the root of this problem, first. “Where does the witch hunting factor in?”
“We figure out how they protect themselves, and we do the same things. They have sponsors, sources of energy and tools. So do we. Kind of. It’s what we inherited.”
“I don’t want to shoot you down…” I started.