The Foul Mouth and the Fanged Lady (36 page)

I sat up and she sat down next to me,
looking out over the same garbage-filled area I’d been since the
day dawned. The sun was on the way down, if not falling into view.
I’d been out there for a long time, but I had a lot to think about,
and even more to decide. Nothing would sit right with me.

“Tell me what your thoughts are, King Henry,
and maybe I can help.”

“You want me to join the Recruitment team,”
I said, blunt as always, if a not as vulgar as always.

She shook her head. “No . . . I would take
you if you offered, but . . . no, not that. You’ve graduated,
you’re twenty-one now . . . you’ve earned the right to do what you
want without my pushing, don’t you think?”

“Earned what? A piece of paper that ain’t
taking me anywhere?” I shook my head too. “What the fuck have I
done with my life?”

That earned a ‘
ha!
’ at the least.
“You were stealing, smoking, fighting, cursing, had emotional
problems, were lucky to get a ‘C’ on most tests you took, were
rebellious, racist and sexist, and look at you now. You’ve grown
up, you’re near the top of your year, you’ve done great things for
your friends and enemies alike, and you’re the most sought after
mancer to graduate in probably twenty years . . .”

When she said it like that I had to downplay
it. Twenty years, maybe, of course Ceinwyn Dale graduated about
twenty years before I did. I met her eyes, wondered what it had
been like for her. When I talked, it was still about myself, “That
still fights and curses and has more emotional problems and to this
day loves him some old-fashion rebellion, especially if there’s
whiskey involved.”

Her smile twitched. “We’ll work on those
over the next seven years.”

“And that’s the point . . .”

“King Henry Price can only change so
much?”

“More like, I’m not ready to change anymore
yet.” I gave my chest a pound with my fist. “I want to be this me
for awhile. Not some other person’s tool.”

Leaning back over the bench, she pulled a
bag from where I’d been unable to see it. Clipping it open, she
removed a pair of sodas, handing me one—next came a pair of
sub-sandwiches from the Cafeteria, which were split. Ham and
Pastrami, no mayo or mustard, but onions and mushrooms, just the
way I liked it—what didn’t Ceinwyn Dale know about me? “You’ve been
out here awhile,” she explained.

I guess I had. Was used to waking up at 6AM,
it had to be almost 5PM . . . so yeah,
awhile
was a word for
it. “The Guild wants me.”

“Yes.”

I took a sip of coke. “You’d take me.”

“If I have to . . .”

I took a bite of sandwich, reminding my
stomach it existed and earning a rumble. I wouldn’t miss much from
the Asylum, but I’d miss the Cafeteria food. “Plutarch thinks I
should become a teacher.”

“I’ve heard.”

“Well . . . those are the three choices I’d
actually consider doing,” I told her.

She let me hang myself up in silence as she
had some of her own sandwich, some kind of duck or pheasant or
other expensive organic avian meat in some Frenchy looking
hole-filled bread that only the teachers got to choose from.

“What are the negatives of each job?” she
asked. “Why are you unwilling to try for some more
change
?”

I put three fingers up, my favorite one and
his best two buddies. “The Guild’s a constrictive piece-of-shit
filled with moldy, dust-filled cocksuckers who make this place seem
like a New Age cult. Five
more
years of training to learn
the Guild designs and then . . . what? Pumping out pre-designated
item after item based on whatever the economic needs are, or based
upon whichever containment vial of anima they send to me for the
day? Forget that shit. That’s cog in the machine work.

“And that’s not even getting into their
rules
.
No
experimentation.
No
design upgrades.
And of course, ‘
I hereby swear to never make an artifact that
can harm another human being, especially a mancer, or change the
elemental nature of the world
.’ So no weapons, no defenses, no
change at all with that one. Just the same old bullshit while the
problem keeps getting worse.”

She finished her sandwich, giving me some
more quiet like she always knew how to manage.

Eventually, she asked, “Then why haven’t you
crossed them off?”

I looked at my three fingers, brought up
right in front of my face. “I want to be an Artificer before a
normal mancer. I love working over anima experimentation. When I
finished my Cold Cuffs Hex and showed them to Plutarch, that’s one
of the best moments of my life. But . . .” One of my fingers
dropped. “I can’t stomach the rules . . .”

“Speaking of Plutarch . . .” she
prodded.

“Me teaching . . .” I couldn’t help but
laugh at the absurdity of it all. “Haven’t we learned this lesson?
I can’t believe the Lady would even accept it.”

“I doubt she’d have you teach
Languages
again given the vocabulary your class exited the
year with,” Ceinwyn Dale agreed, “but Plutarch is getting old.
We’ve known it was coming for some time and we’ll need a
replacement in the next ten years. Better to have someone training
up to the spot, maybe as an
Elementalism
teacher. Keith
Gullick spoke highly of you before he caught you making out with
Naomi during Pent.”

“Not my finest moment,” I commented. “I seem
to remember tequila from Jethro Smith’s liquor cabinet being
involved.”

She ignored me. “Or perhaps
Theory of
Anima
, you couldn’t possibly do worse than Audrey Quilt.”

“You really need to get over the whole
aeromancy thing, Miss Dale. You ladies all know it’s the Mancy
making you do it and you still can’t let it go.”

She gave me a cold look. Frigid gale cold.
Cold enough to shrivel my balls up to nothing and it was summer.
“Mind your business with another’s rivalry, King Henry, unless you
want me to bring up Heinrich and your idiotic feud that has cost
this school so much.”

I grunted. She had a point. “Consider me
chastised, I guess.”

“Indeed . . .”

“Getting away from the Asylum, that’s why. I
don’t want to be locked up here. And if I take over for Plutarch .
. . my experiments would have to be approved by the Lady . . . then
her replacement whenever the old bag finally keels over. I have
good memories . . . but . . .” The other friend went down, leaving
only the flipping bird, saluting the entire of the Asylum down
below us.

“And what is so horrible about becoming a
Recruiter?” she asked.

My final finger dropped down to make a fist.
“It’s not artificing. You’ve become family, Miss Dale . . . I’d
love to be out their helping you . . . but . . . it’s not
artificing. So what’s the point?”

Her smile went wane and sideways. “Call me
Ceinwyn, King Henry. You’re too old for
miss
any
longer.”

“I could call you C.D. like Quilt . . .”

“Please don’t . . . one person doing it is
enough.”

“Right.”

We watched over the Asylum, the August sun
beginning to get lazy, sinking slowly. Ceinwyn put our trash back
into her bag. I felt the buildup of anima from her, a soft rumble
at my feet, then, with a flick of her hand a soft breeze blew
across us. “You’ve spoken quite a bit about what you ‘
don’t
want
’. What do you really
want
, King Henry?” she asked.
“If you could just do what you wanted, with no other considerations
. . . what would you want?”

I didn’t even have to think about it, I’d
already been thinking about it for days. Years even. Stewing in the
back of my head, since that Jobs Fair, since before then even. Back
to Mom dying, back to finding out she was sick, back to the first
day I’d met Ceinwyn Dale. It had all built to me saying these
words, something much stronger than a simple breeze.

It led to: “I want to stop it.”

My voice hung in the air. A stone trying to
fly.

Ceinwyn didn’t need to be told what I wanted
to stop. She wanted it too. She fought a battle every year and it
was getting worse and no one was stepping up to end it. Year after
year, the kids left to the Mancy grew, population spiraling out of
control, the Mancy swelling all over the planet. It dragged on and
on and one day, one of those we missed was going to be powerful
enough to not only be insane . . . but powerful enough to hurt a
great many people. Butterflies don’t start hurricanes, but mancers
do. We do volcanoes, and tsunamis, and earthquakes pretty good too.
Years of anima saturation bursting out . . . it’s a nightmare.

“I want to stop it,” I repeated. “I don’t
want to save the ones I can, out on the frontlines with you. I
don’t want to teach the lucky few and I don’t want to follow the
party line. I want to be an Artificer,
my way
. I want to
experiment. I want to move this world forward. I want to cure them.
Artificers can teach any normal mancer to give to a vial, why not
something better, something that can fix Anima Madness? That can
pull the saturation out of their bodies so they stop going crazy.
That’s what I want. I want to ‘
change the elemental nature of
the world
’.
That’s what I fucking want!
” I ended on a
yell that carried up and down the length of the Mound, my chest
tight, my voice hoarse.

Consider it the Manifesto of King Henry
Price. I want to stop it. That’s why I do what I do. That’s why I’m
putting up with the fucking teapots. That’s the goal. A brand new
day. Where no one ends up like Mom. Where no kid grows up with a
crazy parent like me. Where we can actually fix the problem fate
made for us after a mancer gets missed by a Recruiter. Second
chances . . . where would this world be without them?

I don’t know what I expected out of Ceinwyn.
Not what I got, I know that. Maybe a hiccup or a tear or surprise,
but I got none of that. Instead I got her smile . . . maybe a bit
bigger than usual. I got the Ceinwyn Dale look.
How
Interesting
. That’s her Manifesto. “Would it surprise you to
know that the Lady, Plutarch, Guild Master Massey, and I have been
meeting all day about what we’ve been calling the ‘
King Henry
Problem
’?”

It took the wind right out of my sails and
she didn’t use a single bit of anima. “Oh . . .”

“Yes. Guild Master Massey thinks we should
just hand you over to him and be done with it.”

“Maybe I should punch Guild Master Massey in
the face . . .”

“Perhaps that would work . . . however, the
Lady and Plutarch were more open to compromise and this allowed
Massey to eventually find the light himself.” Her still
slim-fingered hand reached up to sit on my shoulder. Maybe she was
looking for strings. “I’ve been ordered to come up here and offer
you a job.”

My eyes found the dirt floor. “Recruitment
then . . .”

“No,” she said, “not recruitment.”

I frowned. Not recruiting . . . then . . .
“Ceinwyn . . . how long a game have you been playing?”

Her smile flickered. “Aeromancers read
reactions well. We have to be quick to catch air, after all. When I
first met you, I hoped . . . hoped that you would be one to spurn
the Guild. There was another before you actually, Obadiah Paine, a
classmate of mine who discussed the problem with me but he
disappeared, went too far away from everyone. And there have been
Artificers who have worked for various countries over the Guild or
those who didn’t particularly like Artificer work. But you, King
Henry, you’ve always felt
just right
—just rebellious enough
but seeking to do something good. I hoped all these years and
watched you grow and I’ve been so proud of you.

“I’m the last of the Dales, one of the
greatest mancer families in history . . . we make the Welfs look
like newcomers, did you know that?” She didn’t wait for me to
answer. “But for all the family trees I can draw, there’s no one
else. Just friends and colleagues and you . . . King Henry. I live
in a house provided for me by the Institution, I’m paid a wage I
never spend and I already had family money to begin with. I’ve had
plenty of it, just sitting there, no one to offer it to. I tried to
get the Guild to take it in exchange for some experimentation on
what you have in mind but they wouldn’t hear of it . . . before you
came along I had no hope . . .”

I looked away from her before she could meet
my eyes, hers were already tearing up and I didn’t want mine to go
along with them. “Ceinwyn, if you make me cry in front of you, I’ll
never forgive you.”

She sniffled. Badass Ceinwyn Dale . . .
emotional. “I’d like to loan you the money, King Henry, to start
your own Artificer shop.”

Oh . . .

What could be more perfect?

“How would it work?” I asked, curious but
unsure of strings. I wasn’t going to let emotion entangle me. Not
again.

“There would be conditions . . .”

“Always with you, apparently.”

“I’d pay you a wage, provide you enough
containment vials to get started, secure property for you to work
in and, of course, we would have to fund the front of the shop as
well, but eventually you would have to pay me back. This is the
Lady’s first condition,” Ceinwyn explained, back in control. “She
doesn’t want me ‘
blowing my fortune on a fool’s
errand
’.”

“What are the others?” On one hand they were
strings, big huge strings. But on the other . . . being an
Artificer . . . dear Mancy, I felt like whooping out in joy and
planting a big kiss on Ceinwyn.

She finally caught my eyes. Blue and brown,
air and earth. One wearing the other down, the other standing in
the way of the clouds. “You would be on call to the needs of the
Institution and the Council, should something drastic come up.”

“Like ESLED? Like Pak and Ramirez signed up
for?”