Aísē: My Five Supernatural Wives

Liliana sat beside me.

Not across the room. Not from the armchair where she had been watching everything with that careful composed face since Vanir arrived. Beside me. Same cushion. She moved to do it and saw no reason to drag it out.

She touched my hand.

Just that. Palm resting over the back of my hand, light and still.

I looked at her.

She was already looking at me. The watchfulness was gone and something softer had replaced it.....something she didn't usually let out in rooms with other people.

"Why are you so down?"

Before I had anything to say to that she reached up with both hands and held my face between them. Thumbs at my jaw. Fingers against my cheeks.

Then she pulled the corners of my mouth up.

On purpose. Like fixing a picture on a wall.

I stared at her.

She held it there and studied the result with complete seriousness, the way someone checks their work.

"There," she said. "Better."

"You manually installed a smile on my face."

"I corrected it. The previous one was worrying me."

"I wasn't even frowning."

"You were doing the heavy thinking face." She tilted her head slightly. "I know that face. It ages you."

"I don't even have an age anymore to be aged."

"Hm," said Liliana.

.....

Aisha made a small sound from my other side.

I turned.

She had moved while I wasn't paying attention.....which said more about how deep in my own head I had been than anything else, because Aisha did not go unnoticed. She was close, shoulder almost against mine, and she had the expression she gets when she is trying not to smile and is losing.

She reached up and did exactly what Liliana had just done.

Both hands. Same grip. Same grave focused application of a smile to my face.....except she held it one beat longer and then nodded once, satisfied.

"Much better," she agreed.

They had coordinated on this. Without saying a word to each other about it.

I looked between them. Liliana on my left. Aisha on my right. Both watching me like they had arrived at the same answer through different paths and were simply waiting for me to notice.

"You two," I said, "are a problem."

"We know," Liliana said.

"We don't care either," Aisha added.

I looked at the ceiling for a second. Then back at them.

The arithmetic of the morning had been running since Vanir left. Braham Faust. The sealed texts. The divine signature. Alicia knowing and not saying anything. All of it still sitting there in the back of everything, turning slowly.

And then there was this.

These two, sitting on either side of me, looking at me like that.

The turning slowed down a little.

'Stop going over it,' I thought. 'It will still be true tomorrow. You are not going to solve Braham Faust before noon.'

I let the breath out. Settled back into the chair properly.

Smiled.....actually this time, not the version they had built for me.....and watched both of them notice it with the look of people whose plan had worked exactly as they expected it to.

.....

Eva and Eve came out of the hallway.

Together, as they always were. Eva had her hair down. Eve had braided one side of hers. Both of them looked like the morning had been much kinder to them than it had any right to be.

They stopped when they saw the room. Me in the chair. Liliana and Aisha on either side. The air lighter than it had been when Vanir was standing in it.

Eva looked at Eve.

Eve looked at Eva.

"Heavy thinking face?" Eva said.

"We corrected it," Aisha said.

Eve nodded like she was receiving a satisfactory report from a colleague.

I looked at all four of them.

'There is a committee. They did not ask me before forming it.'

"Since we are all here," I said, "and since we are apparently done hiding....." I looked at the window. London morning outside. Grey-gold light the city made even in spring, somewhere between overcast and clear, the kind that made the skyline look like a pencil drawing. "We should go out."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"Sightseeing," I said.

.....

From across the room Mephistopheles pressed one hand over her face.

Not dramatically. Not performed. Just the quiet involuntary motion of someone whose patience had run into something it hadn't planned for.

"We do not know what the Association intends to do," she said, through her hand, choosing her words carefully. "Vanir said three days. We are in hour one of day one. The situation is not resolved just because he left the room."

"It'll be fine," I said.

The hand did not move.

"It will almost certainly be fine," I said.

"Those two sentences are very different," she said.

I smiled at her. The sheepish one.

She lowered the hand.

She looked at me with a 'Are you Serious?' expression, deciding whether to spend the energy on this.

She decided not to.

"If the Association detains us on a bridge somewhere because you wanted to look at the Thames," she said, "I will remind you of this conversation."

"That's fair," I said.

She made a sound that wasn't agreement but also wasn't a refusal.

I took it.

.....

I looked toward the kitchen doorway.

Victor was still there. He had been there since Vanir arrived and had maintained throughout the entire morning the Background character stance, simply standing in a doorway for reasons completely unrelated to anything being said in the next room.

He had a coffee mug.

He was focused on it the way a man gets focused.

Simply speaking...

When he is pretending very hard.

I looked at him.

He looked at the middle distance.

I let the silence sit for a moment.

"Victor," I said.

"Hm."

"You know London."

The mug stopped halfway to his mouth.

"I know London," he said being careful and watching a sentence being built around him and seeing exactly where it was going.

"You know it well."

"I....." A pause. "Yes."

"The good parts. The interesting parts. The parts worth seeing if a person was done hiding and looking for something to do with a morning that wasn't thinking about archmages."

Victor put the mug down.

He turned to face me properly for the first time since Vanir had shown up. Full attention. The kind he didn't hand out unless he had decided to.

"Are you asking me," he said slowly, "to be your tour guide."

"I'm asking you to share local knowledge with people who are guests in your city."

"That is the same thing."

"It's said better."

He stared at me.

I smiled at him.

He pulled a breath in through his nose like a man going somewhere deep inside himself for something he needed.

Then he turned back to the kitchen counter, picked up his coffee mug, and took a sip.

And then he choked on it.

Not a small thing either. He made a sound and spat the coffee back into the mug his expression like the mug had personally wronged him.

The room went quiet.

Then Liliana pressed her hand over her mouth.

Eva turned away very quickly to look at the wall.

Eve did not turn away. She watched with a steady attention and keeping careful internal notes.

Aisha's shoulders moved once, no sound, which for her was basically a full laugh.

I said nothing. There was nothing to say that would help anything.

.....

Mariabell came in from the hallway.

She crossed the room to Victor at a normal pace, not rushing, not making a production of it. She produced a handkerchief from somewhere. Folded properly, because Mariabell was the kind of person for whom a tissue was never going to be enough.

She took his jaw in one hand, turned his face toward her, and cleaned his mouth with the calm brisk attention of someone who had done this before and expected to be doing it again at some future point.

"There there, Vic," she said. "Don't be such a child."

Victor went very still.

The colour that arrived in his face started at his ears and worked inward. Slow. Even. The direction that is the hardest to deny.

Mariabell finished, folded the handkerchief back with a small neat movement, and patted his cheek once.

"Better," she said, and stepped back like the matter was closed.

Victor reassembled his face into something presentable. The blush was still there. He had decided to simply exist alongside it.

He turned back to face me. Dignity intact. Mostly.

"Does it," he said, "have to be me."

"You know where the good coffee is," I said. "That alone makes you valuable."

"I could write a list."

"Victor."

"A detailed one. Categorized. With the addresses."

"Victor."

He held the stare another few seconds.

Then he exhaled. Stood straight. Put the mug down with the finality of a decision made.

"Fine," he said. "But we are not going to the Tower. Tourists go to the Tower."

"Where do non-tourists go?"

He paused.

And despite everything this morning had done to him.....the blush, the handkerchief, the coffee, and the fact that I had spent the last twenty minutes flirting with his wives while he tried to pretend he wasn't in the same building.....something shifted in his face. Small. Easy to miss.

The thing that happens when someone is about to talk about something they actually know and actually like, and hadn't expected to be asked about.

"There is a bookshop," he said. "Off Cecil Court. They carry seventeenth-century texts. Actual ones, not replicas."

I looked at him.

He looked back, a little defensive.

"You asked," he said. "I answered."

"I know." I stood up. "Lead the way then, Victor."

Another pause.

"And before you think of a reason not to," Mariabell said, appearing at his side with his coat already open and held out, "it will be fun. Try to remember what fun is."

"I know what fun is," Victor said, putting his arms through the coat.

"Wonderful," said Mariabell. "Then we are all in agreement."

.....

The room started moving.

Eva found her bag. Eve was already at the door. Aisha touched my arm as she passed.....brief, just a hand on my arm for a second, the kind of touch that doesn't need to explain itself. Liliana fell into step beside me with the look of someone who had decided how the morning was going to go some time ago and was simply waiting for the rest of us to arrive at the same conclusion.

Mephistopheles was last.

She stood in the middle of the room for a moment. Looked at the door. Then the window. Then briefly at the ceiling.

Then she picked up her coat.

"If the Association reaches out while we are standing in a bookshop looking at old texts," she said to no one in particular, "I want it on record that I raised concerns."

"Noted," I said.

"Good."

She followed us out.

.....

The door closed behind us.

London outside. The grey-gold morning, the sounds of the city, cold air and stone and somewhere nearby coffee that wasn't Victor's.

I adjusted the glasses out of habit I didn't have before.

Aisha on my left. Liliana on my right. Victor three steps ahead already, walking with the posture of a man who had accepted a thing and was going to do it properly whether he liked it or not.....which for Victor meant he would probably be excellent at it, and be quietly annoyed about how much he didn't mind.

'The chess game will still be there,' I thought. 'Braham Faust is not going anywhere. The Association has three days.'

'Today can be something else.'

I put my hands in my pockets and followed Victor into the city.

And for the first time since the morning started I didn't think about the glasses at all.