Chapter 99. Morning After
“Morning,” Grit shrieked.
Fek was doing something in his corner of the room. Judging by the sound, trying to rip the lid of his chest off by slamming it open and shut.
“Everyone stop making a racket,” I whispered, peeling my face from the pillow. It was really sticky. “I can’t feel my legs.”
“That’s because Minnelil is sleeping on them. I bet she’s dead,” Fek shouted.
“I’m not dead,” Minnelil mumbled.
“I bet you wish you were,” Grit said. “It’s soon lunchtime. Get up, you two.”
“We missed breakfast?” I asked and tried to roll over.
“Stop wobbling me,” Minnelil groaned. “I’m going to be sick.”
“You stop lying on top of me. I can’t move my legs.”
Clickens padded over to the bed. It looked at me with its eye sockets and squinted, somehow.
“Can you pull me up?” I asked.
It screeched, and turned away, lifting its tail in a way that felt rude.
“What’s wrong with Clickens?” Minnelil asked.
Grit sighed. “You both tripped and fell on top of it during the night. The racket was amazing.”
“Twice!” Fek shouted.
I shielded my eyes from the glare of the light orbs. “Frederik knows how to serve dinner, I guess.”
“I should have warned you,” Grit said.
“I knew and tried to take it easy, but it never works with him,” Minnelil said.
“Nah, you two deserved it,” Fek said. “We didn’t have any proper way to celebrate, but the janitor came over and we played cards. He has a really good face for it.”
“Well, he plays normally with a person with no face at all,” Grit said. “Makes sense that he’d learn something.”
I poked the porridge with my spoon. It was thick with large grains and a brown crust that tasted like it had been baked in an oven. Porridge for lunch, huh. Desperate times. The color and the crust reminded me of the flan last night and I breathed deeply, fighting to stabilize my stomach.
“How was the dinner otherwise?” Grit asked. “What did he want?”
“See, everyone sensible assumes he wanted something,” I said, gesturing at Grit with my hand.
Minnelil scoffed. It might have been a gag. She looked really pale, staring at the table without moving a muscle.
“You,” someone said to my left.
I frowned and turned around. Lombarte stood smirking down at me, one eyebrow raised. I was feeling too bad to care.
Smerz stood behind his back, arms crossed over his chest. Lorn wasn’t with him, but I noticed him standing farther back, looking our way with a furrowed brow.
“Yeah?” I said.
“Your trip to see your parents leaves today,” he said. “Better start packing. Probably best to take everything, so you don’t need to do it again when they throw you out.”
The sounds of the Lunch Hall became quieter. Clinking of forks and knives slowed down, the general murmurs of discussions died down. I had half expected that he or Fahn would try something like this.
“This night?” I said. “Okay, thanks for being the messenger. You can go now.”
“Wha…” he said, then grimaced as he realized he had. “You’ll get some special company on the trip too. We won’t let you run loose anymore.”
“Cool.”
The hall was silent. Grit, Fek, and Minnelil barely breathed. Smerz breathed through his mouth.
“Look, I’m trying to have a hangover here,” I said, putting my head down on the table, next to the half-eaten plate of porridge. It let me avoid looking at his hair and I honestly was very, very tired. “What do you want me to do? If you wanted to come, you could have just asked.”
“Huh?”
“You’re just doing what papa tells you to do. It’s okay. I’ll try to be good company.”
I could imagine Minnelil tensing next to me. I hoped she wouldn’t throw up into my hair. Lombarte shuffled his feet and the bells on his ears jingled.
“Whatever,” he said.
I waited for his feet to start scraping on the floor, before cracking an eye open. He walked away with Smerz following him close, looking confused and lost.
“Lina,” Minnelil said slowly, putting a hand on my back.
“Why do you always say it like I’m doing something dumb?”
“You misunderstand me. You handled that beautifully,” she said, but the words were halting, and the b sounded dangerously like a burp.
“What do you want, then?” I asked, preparing to run.
“Can you take me to the nearest bathroom? Right now.”
“You’re still feeling bad?” Fek asked. “Don’t you need to leave soon?”
“I’ve already packed,” I said, lying on my back with an arm over my eyes. “They’ll come and get me when everything is ready.”
“You’re really okay leaving with Lombarte?” Grit asked. She had loaned me a backpack and helped me choose what to take on the trip. She said there was always less time and energy to read than I expected, so I only packed Falar’s book about hiding with the Null. Fek had already finished reading it, but forgotten to mention it to anyone else and had just stuffed the book into his chest. Grit had started to shout at him, but Minnelil had whispered and asked her to keep quiet.
She lay on her side of the two beds, curled into a ball. Clickens was curled on top of her, forming a stack of two balls. “If I don’t die, I’ll see you when you come back,” she mumbled quietly, almost without moving her lips.
“You’re not going to come send me off?” I asked.
“Maybe tomorrow,” she said.
Fek snorted. “People always say hangovers get worse the older you get,” he said thoughtfully. “A couple of hundred years, and she’ll explode if she looks at a beer.”
“That’s not how it works,” Minnelil groaned into a pillow.
I stood carefully and tested lifting my backpack. It wasn’t too heavy. I could still run with it, which was the important thing. I had stolen a backpack at some point, but left it behind for some goons that had almost caught me. It was a necessary trade, but I had still regretted it for the rest of my time in Tenorsbridge.
“One day I might stop thinking about things like this as a luxury, and I don’t know what to feel about that,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed and holding the bag between my legs.
“It’s a pretty good bag,” Grit said, shrugging.
“It’s good leather. Stitched twice. It doesn’t creak and no part of it has worn thin or shiny,” I said. “I didn’t have a backpack for a long time, but if I had got a bag like this, I would have sold it, as quick as I could.”
“You’re thinking about stuff a lot suddenly,” Fek said.
Minnelil made a small noise that sounded like agreement.
“Owning one like this would have made no sense. I could have got a satchel for a couple of coppers and bought food with the rest. Or shoes. Now I got two pairs of boots, as good as this bag.”
“She’s just in a delicate condition,” Grit said.
“Pregnant?” Fek asked.
“No!” Grit shouted, making Minnelil twitch. “Hungover.”
“Right, right,” Fek said. “I guess I get it. I never thought of us as poor. We had food and clothes and so on. But it took a while to stop thinking about all that. Being here is pretty nice.”
“For some of us,” I said, nodding at Grit and Minnelil, lying on her face on the bed.
“We’ve got it better now too, actually,” Grit said. “Other people were just drafted into doing chores, but I’m officially a research assistant and she’s a normal assistant. They pay us for that and we don’t need to pay for food or lodging anymore. It helps a lot.”
“There’s nothing normal about working for Jextor,” I said. “Or for Falar, for that matter, but I’m still happy for you two.” I rubbed Minnelil’s back gently. “I don’t want to have to keep rescuing you.”
“Oh, I agree,” Minnelil mumbled.
Someone knocked on the door.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Time to go,” Ferne’s voice came from the other side of the door. “The carriage waits below. Take the time you need, but come when you are ready.”
“Time to go,” I said. With Lombarte to search for my dead parents, all my dead friends.
Would the ruins still be there, villages burned and left empty, blackened remains of houses jutting between green grass and young trees?
“Will you be fine?” Grit asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s just a trip to see some sights. I’ll deal with it.”
“Don’t deal with Lombarte,” Minnelil said, turning to lie on her back. “Remember what Frederik said.”
“I know. I won’t. I’ll behave.”
“No one believes that,” Fek said. “But good luck. Don’t do anything too stupid.”
I scoffed. “You’re the one to talk. Stay away from that door.”
He scoffed too.
Minnelil lifted her hand and grabbed on to my fingers. “Remember me, when I’m gone.”
“You’re not dying of a hangover,” I said, leaning down to kiss her forehead. “I’ll see you in a couple of days.”
“It’ll be twice as long for us,” Grit said. “Be careful. It’s winter, so you probably won’t meet many people on the road. The roads to the border aren’t patrolled as much as the ones leading to the city.”
“Who would try to attack a black carriage drawn by two dozen skeletons anyway?” I said, putting down Minnelil’s hand gently. She had closed her eyes and had her tongue poking out from the corner of her mouth, so I crossed her arms across her chest to complete the image.
She giggled and the laugh made my chest ache and swell.
“We’ll bury her before she starts to smell,” Grit said. “Get going before they leave you here.”
Mr. Clickens had been sleeping, but it twitched and looked at me as I stood up. I guess it was weird to think that an undead cat would sleep, but it did spend most of its time just curled up into a ball without moving, so it was close enough to call it that.
I patted its head. “Try to behave. Don’t bite anyone.”
I nodded at all of them and brushed Minnelil’s face one more time. “I’ll be back,” I said, stepping out of the door.