1.12. Farm-to-Table Unlit

“Right.” Annalise clapped for attention as she strode into the firelight by the carriage. “Family meeting. Couple pieces of news.”

Tiago looked up from the lumpy quadruped he was whittling. “Where’s the hex-engine?”

“Ditched it on the roadside,” Annalise said. “I’m a horse girl, me.” She scratched her dray’s mane. “Hello, Meaty. Who’s a lovely boy. Who is so lovely. You are.”

Demetrius flicked his ear unenthusiastically.

“The news, mother,” Ofelia prompted, her nose buried in a doublewide hardcover novel.

“Right.” Annalise gestured Seth into the clearing. “First off: say hello to the latest member of the retinue.”

Tiago thumbed a long shaving away from his work-in-progress. “No shit?”

Annalise proudly put her hands on her hips. “That’s right. Seth il Gutierre, welcome to the al Ydris gang.”

Seth affected a formal bow. “It’s an honor.”

“Told you,” Ofelia said to Tiago, who shrugged.

Seth straightened up. “Told him what?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Tiago said.

“Told him you weren’t a worthless crook,” Ofelia said.

“Feeli,” Annalise warned. “Be nice.”

“I said he wasn’t.”

“Seth’ll be traveling with us for the remainder of the 841 quota season,” Annalise said. “Which brings me to announcement number two. Next on the agenda for the al Ydrises and guest is a seraph hunt.”

Ofelia oohed. “Throwing him into the deep end, then?”

“Don’t let Ofelia spook you, Seth.” Annalise gave him a light bump with her shoulder. “I do all the work on most of the seraphs.”

“I wasn’t talking about deep end like Seraphs,” Ofelia said. “I was talking deep end like Anna.”

Annalise smacked her lips skeptically. “It’ll be fine. Just when I’m seraph hunting, you might wanna give me a wide berth is all, Seth. I get a bit icy.”

“I’ll adjust,” Seth said, though he didn’t have any idea what they were talking about.

“This would be the Laramme red-feather?” Tiago asked.

“If it is indeed a red,” Annalise said. “I’d like to make it to Laramme, gear up, and ask about it there. But we’ll be moving pretty and public on the road, so let’s stay ready for it to try something.”

Ofelia raised her hand. “What about your head?”

“Seth found us Rohan il Agante’s ledgers,” Annalise said. “I’m not worried. Once we’ve tackled the seraph, we’ll puzzle out where to go sniffing for Alice.”

Tiago set his whittling knife aside. “What if the buyer is trying to, I dunno. Eat its brain or something?”

“I don’t need its brain.” Annalise sniffed her armpit. “What I need is a bath. As does Seth.”

“Do I stink?” Seth asked.

“Probably.” Annalise raised his sleeve with a thumb and forefinger against the crusty crimson stain on it. “But we’re both covered in the blood of about four dead fellas apiece, is my concern. Let’s aim to be trotting into Laramme looking spick and span, hmm? Our first time there, at least.”

“You ever been to Laramme, il Gutierre?” Tiago asked.

“Once,” Seth said. “Didn’t look around much.”

“What were you doing? Stealing from someone?”

“Uh—” Seth wondered how often he ought to be lying to this solemn-faced young man. “Scamming someone.”

Tiago shrugged. “Same difference.”

Seth felt a gray spike of defensiveness at that. “Well, I didn’t chop any heads off.”

Ofelia gave a thin smile. “Get ready to bid that part of your life adieu, Mr. il Gutierre. From this point on, you step into a town’s limits, everyone’ll look at you like you’re rolling plague.”

“You get used to it quick,” Annalise said. “Stream’s about two minutes that way. The kids’ll do laundry while we wash up.”

Tiago sighed, stood, and stretched. “The debasements we suffer in the Sorcerer General’s name.”

Ofelia turned the page on her book. “Have fun.”

“We, Feeli.” Tiago flicked the edge of her hardcover as he passed her. “Shift that skinny butt.”

Ofelia pouted. “It’s cold down there.”

“Bring a blankie, your Majesty.” Tiago ducked into the carriage and emerged with a basket of roadworn laundry, in varying shades of black. “I’m not touching your underwear.”

Seth followed the al Ydrises down a grassy hillock, toward the bubbling churn of the River of St. Hanimak. A mist rose from its surface, suffusing an end-of-summer chill into the air. Annalise, unbothered, plopped down on a protruding chunk of eroded limestone and unlaced her tall boots. The sun was an emerald thumbnail across the water. It sent reflections playing across the paperwhite skin of her calves as she tugged them free. “I’ve been fantasizing about this.” She ran a hand through her black bob. “My hair is unspeakably manky.”

The younger al Ydrises strolled to the water’s edge with their baskets and basins. Seth dawdled. “Should, uh—should we take turns, then?”

“Look at that. A chivalrous thief.” Annalise chuckled dryly as she undid her tunic. “I’ll go on in first and submerge all my bits so you don’t get scandalized.” Her tunic’s topmost button flicked out of its hole with the eagerness of a long-suffering warrior relieved from duty. “If the gentleman would care to turn away, the lady is getting her ladies out.”

Seth cleared his throat and turned away. Behind him were the silky sound of clothes being shucked, and then the splish-splash of a body wading into the water.

“Bring the soap out with ya,” Annalise called. Tiago held up an ashtallow bar and tossed it underhand to Seth. He caught it, stripped down to his linens, and hustled into the river.

He hissed through his teeth as its dark water encompassed his stomach. “St. Borac’s balls, that is cold.”

“Is it?” Annalise’s silhouette turned to him. He caught the curve of her lower back, wide and smooth and lethally honed as a scythe blade, before he turned away. “I think when I went unlit, I got a little less sensitive to it.”

“I think you’re just a tough nut.” Ofelia adjusted her blanket further around her shoulders and huddled over her basin.

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“Do you mind if I ask?” Seth scrubbed the muck from his arms. “How you all ended up going unlit, I mean.”

“It’s not a dark secret or nothing.” Annalise sloshed around behind Seth. He remained facing away from her with some determination. “I was part of a penal legion up north. Winter War of ‘32.”

Seth’s washcloth slowed. “What were you doing in a penal legion?”

“Killing seraphs, of course.”

“What’d you do to get put there, I’m asking.”

“What I was accused of,” Annalise said, “was killing my husband.”

“Did you kill your husband? Is that an untoward question?”

Another husky laugh. “No, I didn’t. And yes, it is. But I did set you up for it.”

“Why’d they put the blame on you?”

“Well, I told him in the middle of a crowded market square that if he ever hit either of our children again, I’d kill him. And then he did it, and then he died.”

“Oh,” Seth said. “That’d do it.”

“But it really wasn’t me,” Annalise said. “Not even being funny. A bottle of Maskayan garnacha pushed that daft bastard down the stairs before I had the pleasure.”

“Father died as he lived,” Ofelia said as she wrung a shirt out. “Drunk and confused.”

Tiago nodded. “Yelling and getting in the way.”

“So up north to the Winter War I went.” More splashes behind Seth as Annalise scrubbed herself. “I served as a hand-and-a-halfer. First into seraph dens and all that. Got a pretty good number of the bastards, too, but eventually one of them got me. Big, black-feather bastard banjaxed me pretty good. And by the time they’d stitched me back together, I was unlit. That’s what a deep enough wound from a seraph can do.”

“One of the rare unlit who got it right from the source.” Tiago put his shoulder into scrubbing a particularly stubborn stain of what was either rusty mud or old blood. “Pure and unfiltered.”