Eagles and Swans
Chapter 6: A Seed Sown in the Heart
“Ruth.” Ruthenia broke her gaze away from her plate. When her eyes met his, Tanio lowered his sandwich. "Could I ask you something?”
Her eyes darted away again. “What?”
“Are you lonely?” he said.
“Bit rude, don't you think?” Ruthenia muttered, propping her chin up on her elbows. “With you bugging me day and night, I couldn't possibly be.”
“No, in school I mean. You don't seem to have a lot of company there, other than that nice birdkeeper girl.”
It took her a moment to process the question, and another to feel the ache in her throat. “Doesn’t matter,” she replied, casting her gaze to the side.
"Could I do anything for you?"
“It doesn’t matter,” she repeated.
“Sorry, I’m not good at this,” he muttered hastily. “But I just want to know. I know we don't talk about it much, but I would love to help. I’d hate to be a bad guardian.”
Ruthenia rolled her eyes. “You don't have to be my guardian,” she said, staring at her own plate. “I'm here to work for you. You don’t have to do everything the contract says, it’s not as if I'd ever sue you for it.”
“But I want to. As your legal guardian, it would be most morally reprehensible of me not to—”
“Stop trying to replace them!” she burst out, then recoiled, surprised at herself, and even more that her eyes were wet.
“I'm...I’m not,” Tanio said, trailing off. His face was taut with some emotion she had never seen before, and could not place, through the rippling refractions of her tears.
Ruthenia felt like everything might fall out of her. She curled her hands into fists and drew her limbs closer to hold it in. “You don't have to fix anything! I don’t want you to care so much,” she said, lower lip quivering. “I know you want to do this. I'm trying to be grateful. I'm trying to like this. But it never feels—the same—”
A tide of sadness choked her. Titanio Calied was invisible. She took a huge bite out of her sandwich with numbing determination, drowning her thoughts in the preoccupations of homework and school and the work to come—everything that didn’t, that couldn’t, remind her of the life before.
When she finally left Tanio's house, Ruthenia stood for a while at the front door, face to face with the dark. The cold wind blasted her face, carrying the scent of rain.
She walked slowly across the planks of the swaying bridge as the rain began to fall, a step and then another, each one harder than the last. She stopped in the middle, the wind ruffling her hair and clothes as she swung aimlessly in the rain. It drenched her, from her face down to her toes. If only it could wash her memory clean. But she only reached her door rain-soaked, and feeling no lighter.
The next morning came at the end of a series of dreams about the ground shaking and turning into water. Three loud knocks shoved Ruthenia right out of her dreams, and she woke up sliding off her hammock.
She winced as her side rolled on the floorboards, feeling the bruises from the disastrous flight class throb again.
“Who...who’s there,” Ruthenia mumbled, nursing a bruise on her knee as her eyelids unglued themselves from each other. She dragged herself out of her old hammock—another loud knock startled her to her feet.
Pulling the front door open, she found herself staring at the face of Titanio Calied.
“Good morning, Ruth!” he chirped.
“What?” she muttered, rubbing her bleary eyes as the morning breeze gushed into the room. All across the sky behind him, the storm clouds were thickening.
“A package for you. It says 'fragile,'” he said, extending his hands, upon which sat a medium-sized parcel wrapped in dark paper, its wrapping sealed with red stamped wax. “It’s from the house of the Arcane royal family. What exactly have you been up to now?”
At once, every ounce of Ruthenia’s morning grogginess had evaporated.
“Thanks, Tanio,” she said hastily, snatching the package off his palmtop. “I can’t tell you what it is, but thank you.”
Before he got another word in, she dashed back to her desk, heart pounding in her head.
Ruthenia flung her stationery drawer open in a rattling of rulers and pens, rummaging about for her paper knife. Laying the package on the table under the light of her window, she unsheathed the blade, watching her reflection gleam in it.
She stood the package up, gingerly, so that the blood-red wax seal faced upward. “Alright, then, let's see what all that kerfuffle was about,” she whispered, sliding the tip of her knife under its edge.
The paper wrapping came easily undone. She crumpled the sheet into a ball and flung it into the box of scraps under her desk. From the wrapping she had unearthed a black box, about a foot wide and equally wide. A letter rested atop it, folded thrice. Unfolding it, she found a lengthy message inscribed in a trained cursive that she had seen before:
Ruthenia Cendina,
Thank you, firstly, for rendering your services to the Arcane royal family, and secondly, for bearing the risk in accepting this assignment despite not knowing what it entailed.
Enclosed here is the item of critical importance. I ask that you treat it with impeccable care. If you were to open the box, you would find a clock inside.
You may have heard of the dangerous and somewhat illegal procedure known as intersplicing. It is a delicate process by which the Thread of a human soul is unwound from their heart and woven to power a machine, in order that it may be maintained and repaired as a means of prolonging life.
By a series of events in a decade ago that I shall spare you the details of, my mother bound her soul to with this clock.
"Your what?" Ruthenia let the sheet flutter onto her tabletop. She had only ever heard stories about intersplices, had only ever scoffed at the notion that some people believed they worked.
It has functioned flawlessly for almost a decade in tandem with her health, until now. It seems to be malfunctioning, and she has begun to ail. We cannot entrust this task to anyone with even a remote interest in the politics of nobility. Eldon has been emphatic that you are trustworthy like no other, and I have seen from your repeated refusals that you are not a person swayed by the temptation of scandal.
So, I hereby implore you to do whatever you can to save my mother, and that you take the secret of what you have seen and done here to your grave.
This will be in return for the agreed price of a hundred and fifty aurs. But know that a hundred and fifty aurs could only signify a minuscule fraction of my gratitude, should you succeed without incident.
Please write me personally when you are finished, so I may send a courier to fetch it, carrying your reward. Use the messenger signature given below.
Aleigh Luzerno
Arcane Prince of Astra
Ruthenia stared spent a minute staring at the symbol, tracing its loops dumbly with her eyes. She had worked with clockwork frequently enough that she didn't think the task beyond her. But she had not expected this.
This was somehow infinitely more horrifying than anything she had imagined.
Shaking her head, she turned to the box, where the sound of ticking now rose to her attention. With a thumb on its edge, she lifted the lid a crack as if there were an ancient artifact inside. As it came away, her hand froze, and her breath caught in her throat. It was less clock and more trophy, styled like a house, with crystals laid into the windows, and birds carved into the topmost rim. It was so bright with gold leaf that it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine it was worth as much in aurs as the human soul it substituted.
She lowered the lid back into place and leaned away as if the box contained a curse.
Instead she picked up her messenger device and its stylus, and on its glowing blue screen, began writing with a brief, neatly-inscribed:
Hello,
The singular word glowed in the gleaming surface of her messenger, and she sat staring at it for a while.
It wasn't Tanio’s favourite device, the Thread messenger, considering its creator being was Aena Cerr. She gave the business a bad name, that was what Tanio would tell you. Barely months after a popularity explosion had made it a household item, Aena had sold her message-recording technology to the Astran government for hundreds of thousands of aurs, and now there was no way to be sure if your words were being traced.
Immediately, Tanio had set about disassembling and rebuilding his messenger, and hers, so that the signals were propagated by transmitters through the air rather than on the Threads, leaving no traces on the filograms. There was little they could do for the rest of its users that would not land them in a lawsuit.
Hello, this is Ruthenia. Did I draw the code right?
Scribbling the rest of her message on its glass surface, she twisted the right dial one click clockwise to indicate the destination, Helika City, and watched the message melt into the glass. Glancing at the note lying on her lap, she copied the code to the now-empty display, before depressing a spring-loaded switch at the top of its circular brass frame.
She breathed a sigh, turning to stare at the open box and the clock inside, glittering blue with myriad broken images of the sky through her window. What had she gotten herself into?
Turning once again to the black box, Ruthenia slid the lid off again, and regarded the clock that sat ticking in its velvet nest. Leaning over to hold her ear against it, she found that the ticks were slow and juddering, stopping far too long each time, then ticking twice in rapid succession. Gingerly, she lowered the lid back on it.
She puffed up her cheeks and blew out, covering the box again. "Alright, then."
She stood up and reached for her umbrella, marching to the doorway. A machine was a machine: cogs, axles, ratchets, and a power source to drive the whole thing, like a pulse. But she was no watch expert, and she was not about to risk the life of the Arcane King's mother just because he had not . She could do this; she would simply need some help. At the door she picked up her bag and flung it over her shoulder.
Off across the fields and back to the library it was, a twenty-minute flight that passed quietly amidst her furious pondering. She dove into the gullet of the conical structure, and descended back into the company of the country's best engineering collection. There was no shortage of books on clockwork machinery, including of the Thread-powered kind. She quickly found a manual published by the very brand that she had seen on the clock face: Equere. With a breezy goodbye to the librarian, she was off homeward again with barely a second to spare.
*
By the time she returned, Ruthenia's screen was glowing blue with a new message.
Yes, it is the correct one.
read the succinct reply, every letter meticulously formed.
After a minute rummaging through her drawers and the toolboxes on her shelves, Ruthenia prepared on her desk three small screwdrivers. She shut her window and propped the book up on the stand beside her, flipping to its contents page. She snatched a sheet of felt out of her drawer and unrolled it on her desk.
Lifting the device gently out of its box, she turned it over on the felt and began, ever so carefully, to drive out the screws holding the clock face in place.
The clock lay like an animal on the operation table, its every cog clicking and glinting beneath the balance cock, like pulsing organs. They shivered before each tick, then twitched uncannily, teeth clenching against each other.
Her eyes narrowed as she watched the collection of cogs struggle, as if fighting to breathe. “Alright, let's not mess this up,” she muttered. Flicking again through pages of innumerable diagrams, she paused on a series that appeared similar to hers, comparing the details until her finger landed upon the one: a Equere Wall Horologue from the Year of 470.
The balance cock could be removed without compromising operation. Licking her lips, Ruthenia unscrewed and displaced it, flicking it off with her screwdriver. Naked to her gaze, the labyrinth of mechanical architecture scraped back and forth, the ratchet swinging sluggishly.
That was where she saw it. Right beneath the edge of the balance wheel was lodged a little speck of grit.
No—not grit. It had an abraded skin. It was a seed.
"How'd you get in there?" she murmured. All this trouble and strife, for something so tiny.
By now Ruthenia's neck was aching with craning it so much, so she rested it on the table to ease the pain. From here she could see it much better than before, lodged under the metal.
She placed her current screwdriver on the tabletop, and then reached for her smallest one, its head so tiny it might as well have been a meat skewer from afar. Someone with less steady hands might have flubbed this move. She gently slid the tool under the wheel, behind the tiny fleck of grit. Then she flicked it backward.
The seed sprang out onto her lap. She held her breath. The cogs clicked, and resumed their quiet ticking.
Ruthenia did not breathe again until she had screwed the balance cock back into place. By then, the blood was rushing in her ears, and she could barely hear her heartbeat.
For a minute after the job was done, she sat in her stool, catching her breath as if she had been a second from death herself while the buzz of anxiety faded from her limbs. Then she righted the clock once more, and Talia’s heart ticked on,glinting with a thousand reflections of her face. She finally let her shoulders slacken.
Picking up the messenger pen with trembling fingers, she wrote:
It is done. The clock is ready for collection.
Five minutes later, the reply was equally succinct:
Wonderful. I could not possibly thank you enough.