A captured cauldron, p.19
A Captured Cauldron, page 19
Ambrose scoffed, a vision of Cassius’ many coats coming to mind. “Enough to wear like jewelry, apparently,” he muttered. “I don’t know. They haven’t told me why, only that they wanted it, and that they never got it from Octavia.” He leaned back against the couch and folded his arms. “At least her doodles are mildly entertaining. She liked to draw dragons in the corners of her notes.”
Dawn gave a hum. “Rory doodles in her notes sometimes.”
“Rory? That’s the reporter who’s been helping you?”
“Mm-hm.” Dawn’s eyes glittered, but she offered no further information on that point. “She just draws spirals and stuff, though. Nothing like dragons.”
Ambrose narrowed his gaze at her, quietly filing away a note to press her on Rory next time. “Tavi eventually got quite good at the dragons,” he continued. “Nat wanted her to draw her with a fireball wand, but I never found that particular artistic commission in the margins.”
“No?”
“No.” He shrugged. “She just kept drawing leaves and flowers. She didn’t color them all in, either. She only filled them in at random…intervals…”
He sat up, his own words clanging in his head. Now that he said it out loud, that didn’t sound quite right. The leaves and flowers she always drew…they were never randomly placed on the page, were they? He always found them framing a small recipe or a stack of notes, perfectly aligned with every line of text. And that archivist—the one who had constantly reviewed her work, who didn’t understand a word of it. What if his confusion had been intentional?
What if Tavi’s silly, idle doodles had never been silly nor idle?
“Ames?” Dawn said. “You okay?”
“I have to check on something,” he said. “Gods, I hope I remember it when I wake up. But”—he stood up—“you will try to rescue me again, won’t you?”
“Eh, I dunno.” Dawn feigned a skeptical look, then slapped his leg. “Of course we will. We just had to find another way to talk to you first.”
His joy bubbled over. “So, you’ll talk to me like this again? Every night?”
“I’ll need to improve the wand before it can be used every night.” Dawn reached for his hand in reassurance. “But I promise. One of us will show up as often as we can.”
Eli, Ambrose thought, his heart stumbling. He could talk to Eli.
The room around them flickered, then held. Dawn’s voice grew more urgent. “What will they have you do next?”
“Another demonstration,” he responded quickly. “A bigger one. Cassius mentioned something about an oasis after we walked out—could you ask Rory what that means?”
“Of course.” Dawn stood with him. “We’ll come up with another plan. A better one. Can you still pretend to make their potion while you wait?”
He nodded, his mind buzzing even as the corners of the room flickered again. “I’ll try. You’ll be safe up there?”
“Says the guy living in a crime syndicate.” She wrapped him in one more hug, tight and warm. “I love you.”
Ambrose squeezed her as hard as he could, feeling her warmth slowly fade and willing it to stay just a second longer. He wanted to remember his idea in the morning, yes—but he wanted to remember this hug most of all. “I love you, too.”
RULE 23:
TAKE A FIELD TRIP
Eli
Eli wasn’t sure what he was more ashamed of: the failed rescue or the fact that he had absolutely no hand in cobbling together Dawn’s new dreaming system.
“It shouldn’t be me talking to him next,” he muttered to Dawn as he walked next to her in the lavender fields. “I screwed up the rescue, and all of you scrambled to fix it. It should be Grim next, or Banneker, not me—”
Dawn slapped his arm. “Ames doesn’t want to see Grim or Banneker. I mean, I’m sure he does, but—you should’ve seen his face when I mentioned you. If we don’t let him see you next, he’s gonna climb out of the dream and hunt you down himself.”
He bit back a smile and let Dawn walk ahead of him on the narrow deer path, all of Rosemond Street now wandering single file through the fields. Dawn’s conversation with Ambrose had only been a few days ago, and the morning after, Eli had brought her a pot of coffee and begged her for every detail: how Ambrose looked, how he sounded, what they talked about.
But it wasn’t enough.
“When do you think you’ll have the next prototype?” he asked. “If you need me to break into The Griffin’s Claw to brew anything—”
“I heard that,” Xavion called from behind them. Eli ignored them.
“It’s all right, we’ve got it handled,” Dawn said. “Well, Grim does. They’re making something way better than my wand.”
“Rather you not set the bar that high,” Grim muttered ahead of them. “Eli, I’ll get it to you in a few days.”
Grim and Rory were leading the charge for the day’s little escapade—a quick jaunt to what Rory called the Oasis.
“We’re not far now,” the reporter shouted back to the merchants trailing her like ducklings. “You’ll know it when you see it.”
“Why am I here, again?” Xavion grumbled, tugging their gauzy robes off yet another bramble.
“This is a street effort,” Sherry huffed from the back of the line. “And you are part of the street.”
Just ahead of Xavion, Viola floated effortlessly above the uneven path on an enchanted, cushioned chair—one of Banneker’s own prototypes for ease of travel.
“How’s it working?” Banneker walked alongside it, squinting at every angle and poking the little handles on the sides. “I can always recalibrate it when we get back.”
“Works great,” Viola said. “Just needs a nice little ghost pattern on the cushion.” She delicately unwrapped a mini cupcake she had brought with her. “Xavion wants one next.”
Xavion yanked their robe off a lavender bush with an audible rip. “I’m doing perfectly well on my own, thank you.”
Viola gave a bemused hm and floated on. Just in front of her, Dawn called up to Rory, “What do you mean you’ll know it when we see it?”
Rory turned and winked back at her. “Like I’m gonna ruin the surprise.”
Dawn stifled a giggle and kept walking. Eli glanced between the two of them, a new, delightfully distracting thought simmering. Dawn had been…particularly happy upon sharing that dream idea she had brainstormed with Rory. Giggly, even. Giddy, one might say.
He had been so focused on Ambrose, he hadn’t done his due diligence in interrogating the friend right in front of him. It was time to fix that.
“So”—he lowered his voice—“how’s everything going with you and Rory?”
“Hm?” Dawn took a second to drag her eyes off Rory. “Oh. Fine. It’s fine.”
Eli grinned. “Just fine? How…exactly did you and Rory brainstorm that dream idea? I missed some of the details.”
Dawn shot him a look; he folded his hands in front of him and donned his most innocent face.
“It’s nothing—” she tried.
“Oh, no, it’s not nothing.”
“It’s—I don’t want to sound like—like I’m bragging in front of you while Ambrose is—”
Eli stopped walking. “Oh my gods, you kissed.”
“Shh!” Dawn scrambled to cover his mouth with her hand, though the ecstatic sparkle in her eyes gave her away. “Not so loud!”
Eli laughed through her hand. “You’re telling me everything when we get back, are we clear—?”
“Okay, okay!” Dawn pulled her hand away and glanced around at the others. “But when we get back. If Sherry finds out, who knows what she’ll—”
“Did someone call my name?” Sherry asked.
“No!” Both Eli and Dawn called back, and walked along arm in arm, both of them stifling grins. This was what he needed, Eli thought. A lovely, wholesome tidbit of gossip to take his mind off its constant replay of the failed mission. If it meant he could go more than an hour without thinking about it, he’d demand every possible detail from—
The crackle of magic in the air stopped him in his tracks.
“Damn,” he mumbled, waving his hand through the air. The magic was invisible, but tingled around his fingertips like static. “Rory, you weren’t kidding.”
Just as she had promised, the wide sinkhole ahead of them had announced its magical presence before they could even see into it. Rory stopped a careful distance from the edge, her hands on her hips.
“Here it is,” she said flatly. “The Oasis.”
Eli edged closer to the sinkhole, careful not to go much farther than Rory. He caught a glimpse of ragged walls, bursting foliage, and delicate streams of water falling down into the depths—and beyond that, a shadowy stone dais.
“Aphosian royalty’s little gem of a sunroom,” Rory said, derision dripping from her words. “And where they’ll show off their new potioneering toy in a month. Now, there’s no shield down below, but up here…”
She picked up and tossed a pebble into the sinkhole; a shield flared where it struck, briefly glowing red before fading once more.
“It’s exactly like the shield you saw in the receiving room,” she said. “Keeps anyone from sneaking in through the sinkholes connected to Aphos. The fact that they added one to the throne room, though, was a surprise to me. They must’ve tightened security there.”
Banneker appeared at Eli’s shoulder. “Can we deactivate the big guy?”
Rory grimaced. “Probably, but they’re well-monitored. Deactivating it might send up a bigger flag than you want it to.” She folded her arms. “If you really want to get in undetected, your best bet is to go in as a guest at the demonstration.”
Dawn sidled up next to Rory—not too close, but not too far, either. “So, we steal an invitation, then,” she said. “You want to go out together, do our bad dance routine, steal an invite or two?”
“Yeah, go out together,” Eli muttered just loud enough for Dawn to hear. She nudged him hard in the ribs.
“Well…” Rory hesitated. Eli had expected her to agree immediately, particularly given who was asking—but to his surprise, she shifted from foot to foot instead. “I don’t think I can. Aphos only invites its richest clients to these sorts of things, and they don’t exactly hang out in ground-floor taverns. They’re all people who do business with Mila—I mean, Madam Mila—personally.”
“But you know where we could find them, right?” he pressed. “If you have names—”
Unexpected anger flashed across Rory’s eyes.
“Of course I have names,” she snapped. “But they didn’t come easy, and they’re far too close to my—” She cut herself off and scowled. “Her inner circle. If any one of them finds out I’m sniffing around, I’m done. All my contacts, all my—”
“It’s all right.” Dawn set a hand on her arm. “You’ve already risked yourself by getting us this far. We’ll figure something else out.”
Sherry jumped in to help, her tone smoothing the air. “What if we didn’t steal an invitation at all?” she offered. “What if we forged one and used that to fool the guards?”
They all murmured in agreement at that. Even Rory’s unease dissipated.
“That could work,” she said, “if we get the details right.”
“And we’ll need disguises again.” Viola nodded eagerly, the floating cushion bobbing with her movement. “New ones. I’ll need some new extracts…”
Somewhere in the fields, Xavion groaned. Dawn held up a hand.
“We should talk to Ames about this first,” she said. “See if he can find anything else out about the demonstration before we get too far.” She tugged on Eli’s sleeve. “You wanna tell him all about it when you see him? Or will you get too distracted”—she wiggled her fingers here—“and forget?”
Eli snorted. “Come on, I’m a professional. I won’t forget.”
Eli had to remind himself upwards of twenty times that week that he had actual messages for Ambrose apart from love and sweet nothings.
“Okay,” he said, pacing back and forth in front of Grim’s couch—this was not a time for remaining still. “I gotta tell him we know what and where the Oasis is. We’re gonna forge an invitation to get in and grab him. He just needs to tell us if he hears anything else about the demonstration.” He stopped and looked over at Grim, who was hunched over the kitchen table. “What am I missing?”
The orc didn’t look up from their work. Their bulky arms blocked whatever they were tinkering with, but Eli could still see their furrowed brow and the tiny silver caustics dancing across their fingers.
“The street updates,” they said, not missing a beat.
“Right.” Eli rattled them off on his fingers. “Sherry bought him some new tea for when he’s back. Banneker says his horoscope is looking good for the week. And Xavion hasn’t burnt down the shop yet. Anything else?”
Grim finally stood up and wiped off their hands.
“Tell him I said hang in there.” They grunted and handed over their work. “Now, put this on and go to sleep already.”
Eli stared down at the shining crown in his hands: a bright circlet of silver, interwoven with deep blue crystals and gold flowers. A piece fit for royalty, not for sleeping. “Grim, are you sure?”
“What, sure it’ll work?” They shrugged. “The dream might be shorter than what Dawn could manage, but you won’t need three pots of coffee to survive the next day. And since my living room is, well…” They waved to the sparsely decorated walls. “Just think about a better setting when you go to sleep and you’ll probably see it in the dream.”
“No, I know it’ll work,” Eli said, afraid to move his hands for fear of breaking the piece. “But—it’s incredible. You didn’t have to do this much just for a communication device.”
Grim scratched their beard and gave a noncommittal grunt, but the pride in their eyes was clear. “Couldn’t have anyone thinking my detail work is slipping in my old age. Now, go on.” They nodded to the couch, where a blanket and pillow were waiting. “Get to sleep. I’ll have pancakes ready in the morning.”
When Eli next opened his eyes, he was staring up at the night sky, the stars his new blanket.
He had thought very hard about what he wanted the dream to be like before he drifted off to sleep. He had considered imagining The Gingersnap Café, or The Griffin’s Claw, or, cheekily, Ambrose’s bedroom—but then he recalled that Ambrose had been locked underground for weeks now and might appreciate a bit of fresh air and clear sky.
He pushed himself to sit, the weave of the picnic blanket underneath him tickling his palms. No sign of his boyfriend yet—just the nighttime lavender fields swaying in the breeze. He hoped Ambrose wasn’t staying up late brewing something. Grim had said the spell wouldn’t last as long, and if he forgot any of Rosemond Street’s messages while waiting—
Footsteps crunched in the brush behind him. Eli scrambled to his feet, heart already hammering. There was Ambrose: standing in the fields beyond the blanket, rubbing his eyes and squinting at all the flowers sparkling in the moonlight.
(It was a dream, after all. Eli figured he might as well make it romantic.)
“Where…?” Ambrose turned to Eli and froze. “Is it—are you—?”
“Real,” Eli breathed. “It’s me, I’m here—”
Ambrose fell to his knees, and Eli couldn’t run to him fast enough.
“It’s okay!” He skidded to his knees and wrapped Ambrose in a hug, grabbing fistfuls of his rumpled tunic. “It’s okay, I’ve got you.”
Ambrose clung to him in turn, his tearful, rambling words buried in Eli’s shoulder. “I love you, I missed you, I’ve thought about you every day—”
Eli started planting kisses everywhere in response. His hair, his forehead, his cheek—
When he reached his lips, a shock bolted through him, as if he had forgotten what Ambrose’s kiss tasted like.
He didn’t recall how they reached the picnic blanket after that. He only vaguely remembered murmuring broken phrases in return—love, apologies, reassurances. All he could focus on was Ambrose’s body: his lips, his hands, the warmth that melted him wherever they touched…and the desperate look in his eyes when he pulled away.
“I—” Eli tried to catch his breath. “The others, they didn’t want me to forget—”
Ambrose cupped his face with both hands, eyes crinkling, his smile both pleading and loving.
“With all due respect to them,” he said firmly, “later.”
He crushed his lips against Eli’s one more time, and for a moment, Eli gladly forgot all about the others.
Much later, when the night sky betrayed hints of gray nothingness beyond it, they huddled under a blanket, watching shooting stars cross the sky in glittering shards.
(Another personal touch of Eli’s; he was particularly proud of that idea.)
“I suppose a sinkhole doesn’t sound too bad,” Ambrose mused, once Eli told him about the Oasis. “If it’s as fancy as it sounds. Do you really think you’ll be able to go in as guests?”
Eli peppered his shoulder with kisses. “That’s the plan.”
Ambrose briefly closed his eyes, then reached up and adjusted the circlet on Eli’s head. “You should wear this when you go in. It makes you look like a prince.”
“The Prince and the Potioneer. Classic tale.”
“It could be if you get that reporter to write it,” Ambrose said. “Rory, right? Dawn mentioned her a few times.”
Eli grinned. “Mentioned her a few times, did she?”
Ambrose frowned. “Wait, what does that mean?”
Eli’s grin sharpened to a wicked point. Ambrose gasped.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Did they—?”
“Yes.”
Ambrose sat up. “And I’m missing it? Get me out. Get me out of Aphos right now. I had a moral imperative to help Dawn land a girlfriend—”
