Elva Rackthorn and the Tears of Azrael

Demons at Teatime, Part 3

Elva was halfway through her second serving of scalloped potatoes— the red meat on her plate noticeably untouched— when her father set his silverware down, folded his hands together, and said, "Elfie, dear, I've been thinking."

Silas Rackthorn's voice was slow and deliberate, with an edge Elva hadn't heard to it in a while. Not really since he'd caught her with more of Mother's books the week after the accident and declared, with flint in his eyes and iron in his voice, that Elva was banned from studying necromancy, that he wouldn't have her risk her life that way ever again.

"It's about time you go to school proper. Your tutors say you're a bright enough girl, and Miss Westley seems to think she has little more to teach you."

Elva tilted her head in a bit of a nod and suppressed a snort. Elva and Tora Westley, school matron for the village, had lively debates about runes before wayday lessons started. When the students from the village did arrive, Elva acted as a teacher's aid for maths and runes, even though she was the same age as half the class. It was a shame that Father only sent her there on waydays, and had private tutors visit on workdays— Miss Westley was far more lenient about Father's ban on advanced sigilmancy than those he could keep a close eye on, and Elva would have preferred the ratio be six days to two of valuable learning rather than the current two to six.

"Where, then?" Elva asked, already running through options and not all that surprised, though her nausea was back. She hadn't been apprenticed at thirteen, it would be silly to keep hiring tutors for her, and even if it were still fashionable to marry your children off when they turned sixteen, she still had two years to go. Seaport she thought the most likely scenario. It was the nearest city with a boarding school, and though it would be a right pain, she could probably come back every other endspan to keep up her necromancy skills.

"I think—and I know this might sound a bit extreme, but it is, I believe for the best—" Father took a deep breath and at the same time all the air seemed to leave Elva's lungs. "I think you should study in Glimrick, like Matthieu did."

Elva's fork hit her plate with the sound of a bell ringing. "In Glimrick?"

"I've been writing your uncle, and he says there's space for you with his family. And there's a fine school nearby you could attend..."

"But in the capital? So far away from my—away from you and Henri? From Mother?"

Henri, pushing his greens across his plate with his fork, looked up at his name.

"You can always visit, but I think it's time, dear. There's not much more we can offer you here. You'll be fifteen soon, and you need to be in society, socializing with children your own age. Your own..." Silas spread his fingers out across the tablecloth. "This will be good for you."

There it was. His so-it-will-be voice. The old Rackthorn aristocratic breeding showing through. Elva pushed back her protests— they wouldn't do any good now.

"I... I see." This could be good, actually. She needed new books, more resources. And away from her father... away from his prohibition... perhaps her necromancy could thrive. And in the capital maybe she could even take the Royal Sigilmancer's exam. "When do I leave?"

Silas sighed, but his face softened. "In a month. That will give you some time to pack. To say goodbye."

So soon! But there was a half moon in eleven days. Six of those days would be their bimonthly trip to Mother, but if she scrambled, Elva could still be ready to summon her familiar by then.

"All right." Elva nodded, then picked up her fork and prodded at a piece of steak. She could make this work. "All right."

***

Was it all right?

Elva leaned her head against the window frame, and stared at the contours of the land she had always known. The brambly hedge maze, the loping lawns, the wandering stream and the tree planted at her birth. Rackthorn Manor was her home, even if its warmth had faded with Mother gone. If she left its halls, she left all the memories of Mother soaked into the warm wood and colorful rugs. She would leave behind the fields where she played with Mother's familiar Reggie and caught piksies in jars, the forests with its patches of purple wolfsbanes and red specks of ginseng and a myriad of other herbs useful for necromancy.

Elva flopped over on her bed to stare up at the ceiling. If she left, she'd leave behind most of her books, too. The ones she had managed to steal from Mother's study before Father locked it up, and the old leather-bound behemoths that had been scattered decoratively about the manor. She could fit, what, a dozen books into her traveling chests before Father got suspicious? And it wasn't like she could sneak Mrs. Winthrop and her abattoir into Glimrick with her. She'd just have to find a new butcher to get scrap entrails and waste blood from, and an apothecary too.

And her room! Her beautiful room with its generous floorspace for pentacles. And its privacy, tucked away passed Mother's now-cursed study, where nobody dared go past. When she left, she'd lose her books, her materials, her workshop.

At her side, Elva's hands twitched, then came alive like the legs of overturned beetle. She flopped over on her bed and grabbed a sketchbook from where it rested on the floor. If she set her hands to sketching she could keep them from worrying at each other, from pulling at spikes of skin until blood speckled her hands.

Some days when she got agitated, Elva couldn't stand the rasp of pencil against paper. But today the texture, the weight, the scritch-scratch and slide of it soothed her, let her drain all the tightness in her chest out through fingers tight around a pencil.

When words failed her, runes didn't.

Mother had been of the opinion that runes were taught the wrong way in Vaier, that they didn't belong slotted into schoolroom curriculums next to maths and natural sciences. Children learned by rote common runes and combinations, helpful household sigilry like cooling and lighting sigils, and only delved into deeper understanding if they pursued some field of sigilmancy— mechanics, aetherium, or necromancy— later on.

But runes were a language, and sigilmancy done properly was as much poetry as science. Mother knew it, and Elva knew it too. She had grown up with toddler-toys that employed and presented basic runes for manipulation, learning the shapes of runes even as she learned the sounds of her native tongue.

So when she couldn't make sense of herself in one language, she switched to the other.

Elva laid her pencil down and took in the sigil she had sketched.

It was a spiral sigil, rather than a circle or line, and its curvature made it resemble a question mark. It wasn't composed of proper runes but rather an inert subsystem Elva had designed over the years to express emotions. Her rune for happiness resembled that for (sun)light, sadness looked like water-(cold), and fear was a fusion of the runes for dark and sharp.

The sigil that had poured out of her today had all three of those, declined differently and modifying each other, and it took a while for Elva to decode the story it was telling.

Fear, about the unknown, about leaving a place saturated with memories of happiness. Sadness about leaving that behind too, but with a speck of happiness— hope, the chance for change and progress in Glimrick. In Glimrick, she could take the Royal Sigilmancer exams, impress everyone with her tangle of wyrms, gain access to the Royal Library, and finally solve the riddle of Mother's illness. There was a second happy-hope too, that she might be able shed some of her sadness in Glimrick, that constant ache weighing down her bones, the isolation of her fervent study and quest to save Mother.

Elva turned to stare out the window, where a buttery fat moon was hiding behind the clouds. Stretching out one hand, she pushed her finger pads against the cool glass. The moon would melt down to half soon enough, and then she'd be plunging into the Night World to bind a group of dangerous creatures to be her soul's companion. She would venture into the unknown alone, and come back with a bond that meant she never had to be alone again. She knew the risks, had planned out countermeasures. It just... it just would have been nice to do it all with Mother by her side.

But that wasn't possible. And tomorrow, when they headed out to the Greenpeak Institute, Elva would remind herself exactly why— why she needed to do this and why she had to do it alone.