Faye waved goodbye.
A block later, she found the address that the mechanic had given her. There was a sign in front of the old two-story home, but the wind had eaten all the words off. A nice old lady with blue hair answered the door. The way she squinted so hard told Faye that she was mostly blind, and by the way she shouted all her words and kept saying “Eh?” she was hard of hearing too, but she eventually ushered Faye inside. The other knights were eating supper in the plain dining room downstairs. There was a pot of stew in the middle of the table. The smell made Faye’s stomach rumble embarrassingly loud.
“Look who decided to grace us with her presence,” Ian said. “What’ve you been up to?”
“Burning something,” Whisper suggested. Of course, Whisper was a Torch. Her strange fire magic had probably told her what Faye had doing. Whisper wrinkled her nose. “You smell like smoke.” Or maybe not.
Faye was embarrassed. “I had some things to do. See, I grew up near here…” She crossed her arms nervously. Being recognized by a local made her feel stupid. “And, well…”
“It don’t matter.” George got up and pulled out a chair for her. “I’ve been doing this for twenty years now and I’ve yet to meet a knight that didn’t have some things they didn’t feel like sharing.”
“Thank you.” Faye sat down. The old lady brought her a bowl and spoon, shouted a few questions about if the stew was good or not, said “Eh?” and cupped her hand over her ear when Ian tried to answer that everything was fine, and then shuffled back into the kitchen. “She seems nice.”
“Anytime a proprietor is willing to serve me without making a scene,” George said, “I’ll take it.”
“She’s blind as a bat and deaf as a stone. She probably thinks you’re white as snow. When everybody’s equally blurry, you don’t discriminate,” Ian said. “On the bright side, that means we can talk business.”
“The car is almost done. We can leave tonight if we want,” Faye reported as she scooped herself some stew. “The winds get worse at night, and if it’s bad you can’t hardly see until you drive into a ditch.”
“I say we leave in the morning then,” George said. “Did he say what was wrong with it?”
“Some doohickey melted,” Faye said between shoveling stew into her mouth. It was mostly potatoes and carrots, flavorless, like they’d been buried for quite a few seasons and then boiled until they were chewable. “What about Lance and them?”
Ian seemed cranky as usual. “Last we heard, they’re hunkering down for a bit, so they won’t miss us for another day. They made a real mess with the Iron Guard. Maybe if we’re lucky we’ll be asked to do something useful instead.”
Faye was tired of his negative attitude. “You’re not going to be happy until I Travel your tongue someplace without the rest of your head, are you? What is your problem?”
George tried to intercede. “Now, you two-”
“My problem?” Ian raised his voice slightly. “I think this is a wild goose chase. We don’t know that this creature of yours is even real. Knights have stooped to consulting with Iron Guards! No good can come of that. Meanwhile, our organization is being slandered and our members arrested-”
“And what do you propose we should be doing about that?” George asked with the utmost calm.
“Find out who framed us!”
“Others are working on that. We’re-”
Ian cut him off. “We’re scared of what the answer is going to be if we poke too deep. Japan, Russia, and a dozen other nations have used every excuse in the book to enslave their Actives. You think America is different?”
George’s expression barely changed, but a little bit of anger crept in. “My father was born a slave. You really want to get all preachy at me?”
“Are you nostalgic for the institution then?” Ian furiously pushed his chair away from the table and stood. “Because mark my words, Actives will be property if we don’t fight back now. We have to assert our place before we’re trampled into history.”
“So, you’re one of those,” George grumbled. “Thinking that Actives are better than Normals, not equals. I should have known.”
“I’m no Active supremacist. Don’t you dare put words in my mouth, Bolander!”
“ That’s why you spoke up for Harkeness and Rawls,” Faye said quietly.
“I’m sorry for what they did to General Pershing and your friends,” Ian said quickly. “But those two men struck the greatest blow against tyranny that any of our people have ever accomplished. Through killing the Chairman, how many millions of lives did they spare?”
Faye’s voice was deadly. “That’s easy to say when it wasn’t your grandpa getting shot down like a dog.”
“I didn’t mean…” Ian’s face turned red. “Fine. You know what? I’m one of the best Summoners the Society has ever seen. I should be using my Power to hunt our real enemies, not the imaginary ones.” He stormed out in a huff.
“Can I kill him now?” Faye asked. “Pretty please?”
The look on George’s face indicated that he couldn’t tell if she was serious or not. Just in case, he said, “No.”
Whisper had not spoken during the argument. She waited for a door to slam upstairs. “Ian and I have worked together for a long time. Please do not judge him too harshly. He has had to face some difficult things recently.”
Faye had just burned down the horrible shack that she’d been raised in. She had a pretty high standard for what she considered difficult. “Whisper, I-”
“Ian’s wife was taken by the Imperium.”
“Oh… I didn’t know that.”
“I was very fond of her. Everyone was.” Whisper stirred her stew absently. “Despite Ian’s family’s disapproval, they wed young. She was one of us, Grimnoir. In fact, that is how the two of them met. His family is rather wealthy, aristocrats even, and they saw her as unworthy, their love, scandalous. He was gladly disowned to be with her.”
“How come?” Faye asked.
“She was a quadroon.”
Faye didn’t know what that meant, but George nodded in understanding. “She had a black grandparent, Faye. That can cause some
… legal issues most places.”
“Among other things. It did not matter. She was truly the light of Ian’s life. Her name was Beatrice and they were everything to each other. Such love… it was like a story.”
The French had a way of making things sound extra romantic. For the briefest second, Faye thought that sounded a bit like how she secretly hoped Francis felt about her, but then she decided she was just being silly. “What happened?”
“Several years ago… was it four, five now? How time flies when you’re battling evil… She was pregnant with their first child, residing at home while Ian was away. We do not know how the Iron Guard found her, but they did, and they took her. Oh, how we chased them, but they eluded us. The trail was cold, but Ian would never give up. He went all the way to China, following even the vaguest hints from the spirits he could Summon, but he was too late.. Beatrice had been given to Unit 731.”
Just saying the name of the Imperium’s experimentation unit made Faye’s stomach turn.
“The bastards,” George hissed. “I’ve seen their work.”
“They did horrible, awful things to her. Ian could not save her, so instead he used his Summoned to end her life, to spare her any more indignities at the hands of the Chairman’s Cogs.”
“That’s awful,” Faye said quietly. That would sour anyone. “I didn’t know.”
“Of course not. He never talks about it, but I know it changed him. He used to have the soul of an artist, even his Summoned were beautiful, graceful, heavenly things, yet now they are misshapen, cumbersome beasts. The form of a Summoned is a window into the soul of the man that commands them. He would certainly be upset to know I had told you of this”-Whisper leaned in conspiratorially- “but there is another thing you must know. I believe you have also met some of Beatrice’s family.”
“Really?” Faye hadn’t met that many Grimnoir, and those that she knew well had confided to her about their losses. “Who?”
“It would have been brief. Just long enough to wring the secrets from you. I’m speaking of Isaiah Rawls…”
