More Kit and Edie stuff

[kadharonon]

This follows roughly after the last post. I don't have a name for this story yet, though I've been posting worldbuilding nattering and random character and story stuff over on my tumblr under the tag "kit and edie".

Kit frowned at the unconscious woman in his sitting room. He was used to people reacting with shock and disgust when they first saw his face, but this was, as far as he knew, the first time a woman had taken one look at him and immediately fainted. A lowering reaction, and one he had not been prepared for. He knew he was ugly, but was he really that terrifying to behold?

She seemed very young. He had taken her for one of Charles’ daughters at first, had wondered if it had really been that long since he had last seen his friend, though that impression had lasted only a moment. Charles had only been married for thirteen years; while the birth of his first daughter had followed his wedding with what some thought was unseemly haste, this woman was far too grown to be that child.

“Who is she?”

“Edie,” Charles said, as if it should mean something to Kit. “Trev’s wife,” he added when Kit gave him a blank look.

Ah, yes, Trevor had gotten married, hadn’t he? How long ago had that been? Kit gave Charles’ companion another look. She was not much to look at, truth be told. Taller than him—which was never saying much—and slim, girlishly so, with an unremarkable face framed by a smooth and severe bob. The only attractive thing about her was the perfect little bow of her top lip, and even that he suspected owed more to cosmetic enhancement than any natural charms she might possess.

He realized now how misleading that slender girlishness was. He had taken her as a very young woman at first, perhaps no more than twenty, and had been ready to judge Charles’ brother severely for it. But a closer look revealed weary little lines creasing her face, the sort that only came with both age and deep exhaustion. This was a woman barreling towards middle age with the rest of them, and as worn down by life.

“And why is she here?”

Charles looked at him as if he were stupid. “Couldn’t stay on the road any longer tonight,” he said, stating the obvious. “Figured you wouldn’t mind us here. ‘S what Great Houses are for, isn’t it?”

“Trust you to remember that old custom when you need something.” Kit sighed. Oh, he had no doubt that one of the housemen was already making up bedrooms for these two—Hiram was efficient like that, and would have seen to it after stowing their car—but it had been a long, long time since Langford House had seen any guests, and Kit feared that bed linens and blankets in good enough condition for guests were in short supply. They would probably have to settle for slightly shabby, with not-too-many holes. “And that wasn’t the question I was asking. What brings the two of you to this part of the country?”

Charles’ cheeks flushed, a clear sign he was about to lie. “Doing Edie a favor. She and Trev had a bit of a tiff,” he said, shrugging his large shoulders. “He decided to teach her a lesson and ran off. Last we heard of him he was somewhere up this way, carousing.”

Kit narrowed his eyes, trying to sort the truth from the lies. The initial, thoroughly unfair thought that he’d had, that Charles was running off with his brother’s wife, he dismissed. Charles was too staid for such shenanigans, and always had been; that one of the reasons he and Kit were friends. And by all accounts, Charles loved his wife dearly. He would not be the first man to dote publicly on his wife while carrying on affairs in private, of course, but Kit was certain that his friend’s character did not allow for such lapses, and carrying on with his brother’s wife would have been far more than a simple lapse. Charles’ own sense of honor would not have allowed for it.

His brother having run away, that... was not entirely out of the question. It might have been nearly fifteen years since Kit had spent much time with Charles, and he had only met Trevor all of twice, but back then Charles had often complained of his brother’s impetuous nature. Charles had worked hard to keep the family business concerns solvent; Trevor, the favored younger son of a mother who doted on him, had been the one to reap most of the rewards. Trevor had somehow managed to remain a fundamentally decent man in spite of this, but he was, Kit knew from their few meetings, rather silly. And there were reasons Kit suspected that Trevor might not be particularly happy married to any woman, but he doubted Charles would ever admit to knowing about them himself.

“Well,” he said out loud rather than put any voice to his speculations, “I haven’t heard of it myself if he is, but you know I don’t go out.”

Charles let out an amused grunt. “You’ve got a working telephone in this place now, don’t you? I’d like to call the wife.”

Kit frowned down at the woman on the sofa again. “Aren’t you concerned—“

Charles dismissed him with a wave of his hand. “She’s sleeping now, isn’t she? Probably what she needed. It was a long day.”

“I’d like to have someone look at her, at least. Won’t your wife want to know how she’s doing?”

With a sigh of assent, Charles sat down on one of the seats across from Edie. “I suppose so,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Sorry. It’s been a long day for me, too. She’s... an uncomfortable traveler.”

“Why did you bring her along, then?”

“She’s worried about Trev,” Charles said, his face flushing with another lie.

Kit let out a noncommittal hum and sorted through the rest of his house staff in his mind. There, Hiram and one of the housemen—Jonas, Kit thought, and no wonder, he probably wouldn’t get to sleep until Hiram did—making guest rooms ready. But where in the house was… ah. Letty wasn’t asleep yet, thank goodness. And neither was his chef, Trus. He hoped they would forgive the interruption and sent for them, with a quick subvocalization the house would see to it they heard. “Two guests. They’ll probably need something to eat. One is ill.”

That had been one of the hardest things to master, that speaking without speaking. It hadn’t come naturally to him. But the house had been patient, and what remained of the house staff after the plague that had killed the rest of the family had been patient as well.

The message sent, Kit turned his attention back to his guests. Well, to the one of them that was currently conscious, at least. “You could have telephoned her as well. No need to drag her cross-country if it’s just going to make her ill.”

“She was very worried,” Charles said, his face still flushed. “Wouldn’t be left behind.”

Kit frowned, wondering if his face was going to get stuck like that. There was clearly something else going on here, and just as clearly Charles didn’t trust Kit well enough these days to confide in him. But if Charles intended to hold the matter close to his chest, there was little Kit could do about that. So for now, he pried his rusty selection of small talk out of the depths of his mind and asked Charles how his wife and daughters were doing.

Five minutes of affectionate monologuing from Charles later, and Letty came bustling in, only slightly disheveled. Ah. He had interrupted something. But she made no protest; her eyes went directly to Edie on the sofa. “Ah, poor lamb,” she murmured in her broad downcountry accent as she approached. “Trus will be sending something up for the two of you, but let me take a look at this poor girl.”

Letty had been with the family since before Kit’s father had left the house, and had welcomed Kit with open arms when he had joined it. Her healing gift might only be minor—and she had burnt out much of her former capability when trying to keep Kit’s family alive, beyond the house’s ability to heal her in return—but she still retained knowledge of countless remedies and an understanding of how the human body worked, and could at least make certain that nothing was truly wrong with Edie.

“She’s cold as ice,” Letty said, laying her hand against Edie’s forehead. Her fingers went to the pulse in Edie’s throat next. “Sluggish,” she muttered.

“Should we move her closer to the fire?” Charles asked, sounding worried. “Or another blanket?”

“Hm,” was Letty’s only response as she pulled back the blanket. A frown creased her brow, and then she set her fingers to Edie’s throat again. “I see,” she muttered. “Well, that’s no good.”

“What’s no good?” Charles asked.

“Kit, if you could?” Letty asked, paying no attention to Charles. “She’s completely drained.”

Kit got to his feet and came over to the sofa. “Temporary binding, then?” he asked Letty.

“Please. And I could use a jolt too,” she said, kneeling beside the sofa and holding up her hand.

“You sure you want that?” he asked her. “You’ll pay for it.”

Letty grimaced. “I’m sure.”

“Kit, what on earth…?”

Kit waved Charles back towards his chair. “Just giving them both a bit of a boost,” he said. “The house needs to recognize her for it.”

Charles scowled, but retreated back to his chair. “If you harm her…”

“You’ll have to sue me, because I doubt you’d want to be responsible for a Great House going mad,” Kit said evenly, taking Charles’ protectiveness into account in his theories about what might really be going on here. He plucked the stickpin from his tie and pulled his lighter out of his pocket, using it to sterilize the point of the pin. Letty took the pinprick with the ease of someone who had been living and working in a Great House for as long as she had, and swiftly squeezed a drop of blood out onto the floor. She shut her eyes and shuddered as Kit opened the dormant conduit between her and the house to its fullest extent, letting a flood of raw magic enter her. For the next couple of days, she would return to her old capabilities… and then, she would find herself ill in bed herself, paying for the fact that she had overextended herself.

He fished Edie’s hand out from under the blanket and pricked her finger as well—something she hardly reacted to, which worried him—and held her hand over the floor, squeezing the fingertip until a drop of blood fell. A new connection opened in his mind, and he reached for it, intending to provide her with a similar boost… and then he hesitated. There was something strange about the mind at the other end of that connection, something that made him cautious. It was depleted of magic, yes, but something was… different. “She doesn’t have any issues with magic, does she?” he asked Charles.

“I shouldn’t think so. Her parents were government magicians.”

Which would probably make Edie a magician herself. She should be more than capable of accepting what he had offered Letty and more, and no doubt without the same side effects. But something made him hesitate all the same. Rather than opening the connection wide and letting magic flow through to fill what must be thoroughly depleted reserves if she was in this state, he started with just a trickle of the power he controlled.

A moment later, he was grateful he had only attempted that much. Edie’s back arched off the sofa and her eyes flew wide open as she seized, and Kit cut the flow of magic off at once. That brief look at her eyes had been enough; though they had mostly been rolled back into her head, the sliver of iris visible had been a flat, silvery grey.

He rounded on Charles, furious, leaving Edie in Letty’s capable hands. “She’s elf-shot!” he snarled.

Charles looked equal parts confused and terrified, shrinking back into the protective shelter of his chair in the face of Kit’s fury. “What does that have to do with anything?”

Kit took a shaky breath, trying to calm himself. He could have killed Edie just now, and Charles didn’t even understand how badly it could have gone, or why. “Her body can’t tolerate it. Magic,” he said, his pulse still pounding in his head.

Charles still looked perplexed. “I thought…“

He’d probably thought what everyone who wasn’t a practicing magician or bound to a Great House thought: that magic was beneficial, and that all people—even ones with no ability to manipulate magic themselves—carried magical reserves within them. After all, it was what he had thought himself before he had been brought to Langford House and schooled in what a Great House was actually for.

He took another breath, more steady this time, and turned to look down at Edie’s pale face, noticing that it was a better color now that Letty had started to work on her. A good sign that there had been no lasting harm done. It had been a honest mistake on Charles’s part; he hadn’t been trying to make Kit into an unwitting accomplice in his sister-in-law’s murder. Hell, he probably hadn’t realized what Kit had been about to do.

“It’s not just an eye color, Charles,” he said, clinging to the arm of the sofa and swaying as the adrenaline wore off. “They used to think it was a curse.” And if he’d been thinking about that that old folklore, perhaps he would have been able to guess at why Edie’s mind had felt off to him; the children of magicians were stricken with it more often than others, and as government magicians, her parents would not have necessarily been able to avoid the confounding factors that lead to the condition. “If a baby is exposed too often to active major workings in the womb, they no longer have the ability to hold magic when they are born. The eyes are just… a side-effect.”

“Should she be doing that, then?”

Kit glanced over his shoulder at Charles, who was staring wide-eyed at Letty. “That’s fine,” he said. He released the sofa arm and staggered over to the chair he’d been sitting in when Letty had come in, almost falling back into it. “But I was about to try and fill her reserves. What do you think happens when you try to fill a vessel that’s not made to hold anything?”

Charles shuddered. “Do I want to know?”

Kit brought up his fisted hand, and then splayed the fingers wide. “I would have shattered her. Mind and, quite possibly, body.” Bile rose in his throat at the thought, and he swallowed hard.

“She’ll be all right now, though, won’t she?” Charles asked, his voice small with contrition and worry.

“Letty?”

Letty didn’t look up from her work. “She’s worn to the bone, poor thing,” she scolded. “What’s she doing travelling in her condition?”

“Er,” Charles said.

“Family business,” Kit provided.

“Business can always wait, even if it is family,” Letty declared. “She needs a week in bed and regular meals, not to be dragged halfway across the country in a car.”

Charles opened his mouth, looking as if he wanted to protest, and then closed it with a snap, letting out a snort of frustration. Kit thought it prudent to remove him from the situation.

“I’ll take you up to my office so you can phone your wife,” he said, levering himself unsteadily back to his feet. Now where had he left his cane…? Ah. It was leaning against the sofa arm. He laid a steadying hand against Letty’s shoulder as he went to reclaim it, and she put her hand up to cover his, squeezing it gently, a reassurance he needed. These days he was as unused to having guests as Langford House was, and the addition of these two would have unsettled him even without the scare he’d just had.

“I’ll see she’s put to bed, and I’ll sit up with her,” Letty said, adding an additional subvocalization for Kit’s ears only. “And I’ll ask for her side of the story, too.”

He patted her shoulder again in thanks, then turned towards Charles and gestured towards the door. “Shall we? Someone will bring you dinner in my office.”

Charles frowned thunderously. “What about Edie?” he asked, suddenly as reluctant to leave her as he had been eager to do so when he’d thought it was only exhaustion from that day that had sent her into a faint.

“Letty will take good care of her. Shall we?”

Charles got to his feet reluctantly, and, with a final concerned look back at Edie, followed Kit from the room.