Chapter 4 – Turnip Farming

The silence that followed was worse than the gunfire.

Gunfire, at least, had direction. It told you where to look, what to do, how to move. The silence told you nothing. It simply sat in the room with the bodies and the smoke and the two girls standing in the middle of it, and waited.

Florence had not moved.

The pistol was in her right hand, the barrel pointed at the floor, a thin ribbon of smoke curling from the muzzle in a line so straight and undisturbed it looked drawn. Her left hand was still extended toward the place where the Leader had been sitting, the fingers spread, trembling with the echo of effort that had already ended. The crimson light was gone. The hand hung in the air anyway, holding the shape of something it no longer needed to hold.

Florence’s eyes were open. She was not looking at anything in the room.

Alice reached out.

Her own hands were shaking. She noted this with a detached, clinical irritation, the way she might note a stain on a glove. But her fingers found the pistol grip and closed over Florence’s knuckles and applied a gentle, steady pressure that said let go without requiring the words.

Florence’s fingers opened. The pistol came free. The absence of it in her hands didn’t change her posture. She stood there with her arms extended and her palms empty, holding the shape of a thing that was no longer there.

“Florence.” Alice’s voice came out wrong. Thin. Papery. She cleared her throat and tried again, and what emerged was closer to functional but still several registers below the voice she normally presented to the world. “We need to move.”

Florence looked at her. The expression on her face was one Alice recognised, not because she had seen it on Florence before, but because she had seen it on other faces, in other rooms. The look of someone standing on the far side of a line they hadn’t known existed.

“Not now.” Alice tucked the pistol into the waistband of her skirt and suppressed the flinch as the cold barrel settled against her hip. She couldn’t afford to be gentle. Gentle was a luxury, and the currency it required—time, safety, distance—was not in her purse. “The Clients are coming at dawn. If we are still in this cabin when they arrive, everything that just happened will have been for nothing. Do you understand?”

Florence nodded. A small, mechanical motion.

Good enough. Move.

Alice stepped over Miller’s body. She did not look at the burns. She crossed to the Leader, crouched beside him, and went through his pockets with a speed and efficiency that would have impressed her father’s valet. She found coins first. It was a heavy leather pouch of gold and silver, enough weight to be useful. She pocketed a folding knife. She left the pocket watch. She grabbed a box of ammunition from the table and stuffed it into the satchel she’d retrieved from the pile of rugs.

She stripped the wool coat from the man at the table. It was too large, it smelled of tobacco and gun oil, and the left sleeve was stiff with something she chose not to identify. She threw it to Florence.

“Put that on. You look like you’ve been dragged through a hedgerow by a horse, and I will not walk into Dunwick next to someone dressed like a crime scene.”

Florence caught the coat. She held it against her chest and looked at it, and looked at the man it had come from, and looked at Alice.

“It’s a coat,” Alice said. “It doesn’t care where it’s been. Put it on.”

Florence put it on. The hem fell past her knees. The shoulders hung four inches below her own. She looked, Alice thought, like a child playing dress-up in her father’s wardrobe, which was almost funny, and almost unbearable. Alice turned away before either of those things could settle.

She kicked the door open.

The night was cold, clear, and aggressively indifferent to them.

The rain had stopped. The forest dripped in its aftermath, every branch and leaf releasing the water it had stored during the storm in slow, irregular taps that filled the dark with a quiet, arrhythmic percussion. The moon was working its way through the clouds, and where it broke through, the light fell in pale, fractured columns that made the trees look like the pillars of a cathedral that had lost its roof.

They walked. Alice led, because someone had to, and because the alternative was standing still, and standing still was not something she was willing to do in proximity to five dead men. She kept her pace brisk, her posture straight, her stride projecting a confidence that was approximately eighty percent fabrication. Behind her, Florence followed. The oversized coat swished against the undergrowth with each step, and her breathing was audible. It was not panicked or laboured, just present. One foot in front of the other because she’d been told to, and no reason yet to stop.

Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes of wet bark and mud and the slow, physical work of moving through forest at night, and the cabin fell behind them, and the distance helped. Not enough. But some.

Alice stopped at a fork in the game trail.

The left path sloped downhill, vanishing into a thicket of birch. The right curved deeper into the woods, the canopy closing overhead like a fist. Both looked identical in the dark. Both looked like nowhere.

Alice stared at them. She stared at the sky, where the clouds had sealed the gap the moon had found, restoring the darkness to its full, unhelpful completeness.

“Damn it,” she muttered, and kicked a root, which accomplished nothing beyond confirming that roots were harder than boots.

“What’s wrong?”

“I have no idea where we are.” The admission cost her something. She could hear it in her own voice, the small, involuntary thinning of the vowels that happened when control was slipping. “We need to head northeast to reach the city, but I can’t find a star in this soup, and we can’t go back to the main road.”

“Why not?”

“Because the main road has a crater in it the size of a swimming pond, and by now the constabulary will have it roped off and crawling with officers who will want to have a long, detailed conversation about what happened and who was involved. A conversation I would very much prefer to skip.”

Florence was quiet for a moment. She was looking at the two paths, not with the helpless confusion Alice expected, but with a focused, evaluative attention that Alice did not expect.

“If we’re near the Old King’s Road,” Florence said, “and the ground is sloping downhill to the left…” She pointed to the right fork, into the deeper dark. “That way.”

Alice looked at her. “That way.”

“There’s a logging track about two miles in that runs parallel to the river. It feeds into the industrial district on the eastern approach. It bypasses the main gates entirely.” Florence paused. “If the map I studied was accurate. It was published four years ago, so there might be new construction, but logging tracks don’t tend to move.”

“How do you know this?”

The ghost of something passed across Florence’s face. Not quite a smile. The memory of the conditions under which a smile might form.

“I studied the maps,” she said. “All of them. The county, the city, the university grounds, the tram routes. When I got the acceptance letter, I couldn’t sleep for a week. So I memorised the geography instead.”

Alice looked at her—this girl, this baker’s daughter, who had just killed a man and was standing in a swamp in a dead man’s coat and was navigating by mental cartography she had memorised because she was too excited to sleep.

A sound escaped Alice. It was not quite a laugh. It was the shape a laugh would take if it were made of exhaustion and disbelief rather than humour.

“Lead the way,” Alice said.

Florence led.

She moved through the undergrowth with a sureness that surprised Alice, picking her path around roots and standing water with a sureness that came from growing up on countryside that didn’t believe in paved roads. Alice followed. The reversal of positions sat in her chest with a complicated weight she didn’t have the energy to examine. The country girl was leading, and the aristocrat was stumbling behind.

They walked in silence for a while. The rhythm of it was almost bearable. Almost.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Alice broke it first, because the alternative was allowing her mind to return to the cabin, and her mind was showing every indication of wanting to go back there, and she needed to give it somewhere else to be.

“So,” she said. “How long have you been practising?”

Florence glanced over her shoulder. “Practising what?”

“Don’t be coy. I’m not going to report you. But what happened in that cabin was not a girl having a bad day. That was two distinct magical disciplines deployed under combat conditions, and I’d like to know what I’m walking behind.”

Florence stopped. She turned, and the moonlight, which had found another gap in the clouds, caught her face, and the expression on it was not the evasion Alice had been braced for. It was genuine, unguarded bewilderment.

“Alice, I have no idea what I did.”

“You hardened your skin. Twice. The bullet, then the buckshot. That’s physical reinforcement. It’s advanced reinforcement, the kind of output you’d expect from a Tier 4 abjurer, not a—” Alice caught herself. “Not a first-timer. And then the Leader’s shoulder. You opened that wound from across the room. That’s sanguimancy. Blood magic. A discipline so rare that most practitioners are dead or institutionalised or both.”

Florence was staring at her. “I didn’t—I wasn’t—” She pressed her hands together, the fingers interlocking, as though she could hold the confusion still if she gripped it hard enough. “My body moved on its own. When the gun went off, I just… I was in front of you before I knew I was moving. And the man at the end, the Leader, I just wanted him to stop. I looked at his shoulder and I could feel it. The blood. I could feel it moving under his skin, and I wanted it to come out, and it—”

She stopped. The sentence collapsed under its own weight.

“It did,” Alice finished.

“I didn’t know I could do that,” Florence whispered. “I didn’t know I could do any of that. I’ve never cast a spell in my life. I don’t even understand how magic works.”

Alice studied her. It was a habit of reading faces, looking for the tell, the microexpression, the involuntary flicker that separated truth from performance. She had grown up at dinner tables where half the conversation was conducted in subtext and the other half was outright deception, and she could spot a lie the way a jeweller could spot paste.

Florence was not lying. Florence, as far as Alice could determine, was constitutionally incapable of lying. The girl radiated sincerity the way a stove radiated heat—passively, constantly, and in a manner that made sustained proximity slightly uncomfortable.