Chapter Text
The nights whiled away in sweet cocktails and sweeter conversation, all of them getting looser and looser and more undone. When they were too sloppy to keep up the games, someone would take the initiative to call for their return. Usually, it was Kremy or Frost, but tonight it was Gideon, slapping backs and coaxing them into the sharp, wet chill of Agwe’s midnight streets.
They tottered back to their place, whooping and hollering, leaving prints on the walls they touched, and some of the filthier walls leaving prints on them. Sometimes one of them would run off with a stranger, but most of the time they stuck together.
On chilly nights, Kremy invited Gideon to his room, and in the coldest freeze of winter he poured gratitude from his expensive collection of spiced rum and whiskey, his very favorites. These were the nights Kremy got absolutely sloshed, and at the end of it he would command Gideon with the weakest trace of disorganized suggestion to dress him in his silk pajamas and curl under the blankets with him. Then, only in the privacy of his room, in the deepest night, under the insulation of the snow when the brilliant city was at its quietest, Kremy would speak about death.
Kremy did not speak about death the way other people spoke about death. It was not grim, or despairing, or afraid. Gideon supposed that came with the territory, being the worshipper of a god whose domain was death. Drunk Kremy was a preacher. Sometimes Kremy gave him lectures about the afterlife and the work of the Baron, sometimes he spoke musically in turns of phrase Gideon’s intoxicated mind couldn’t parse, as if reciting old prayers that didn’t translate well to Common. But most of the time it was a simple discussion of plans.
Kremy planned funerals the way young women planned weddings, sentimental and giggly, his tail curling under the sheets. His voice was thick and cracked from a night of festivities, his accent having at some point been buffed of its city boy crispness. But Kremy, always so put together, was an astonishingly well-spoken drunk.
“When you die,” Kremy slurred, a he had many times before, “I will hold you fast. I’ll set you in a casket of wicker, and when the time comes to put you under I will steal away with you into the night. I’ll steal you away from all who wish to pay their respects, your friends and your enemies and any of your blood who join the party, I will leave your grave empty. When the morn comes the jittering cockerel will make no sound. He will be strangled and bled dry at the altar for the favor of my god. Then I will beg for your return on hand and knee. The Baron does not give unnatural magics passage so freely. I will have to do something immense to justify my request.”
Even under the deafening blanket of snow Gideon picked up the cheering of people and the strains of faint music. Someone somewhere was having a party, even now after Gideon’s night was over. He had the urge to go find the party, join the revelry, but he was tired and Kremy was draped over his shoulder like a bony, scale-mailed queen.
“What’ll you do?” Gideon asked blearily, after a few seconds of expectant silence, Kremy’s silvery eyes eager for his attention.
Kremy looked the way he did when he was showing off a trick and waiting patiently for the audience to prompt the next step in his performance.
He leaned forward, his maw stinking of smoke and soured sugarcane alcohol, “I will give him the rhythm in my step.”
Gideon’s brain chugged along for a moment to process what Kremy was saying. Kremy came up with a new version of this plan every time he was suitably wasted.
“Are you making fun of me?”
Kremy laughed, rough in his broken voice, the scavenging bird’s cackle.
“I would never. I think my rhythm is a good deal in exchange for a life,” he jeered, “Maybe not a bundle of sticks, though, huh?”
“You sure your rhythm would be enough to get me back from the dead?” Gideon asked genuinely.
That was the wrong thing to say.
Kremy twisted to glare at him, “My rhythm is magnificent, Gid, I---” he hiccuped, “In fact it is more than enough. I’d need to ask the Baron to throw in something extra. Maybe give you a lock for your mouth so you know when to shut it.”
Gideon laughed, “Maybe you should ask him for my rhythm back. I miss it.”
Kremy sighed, “Oh, me too. Sometime in the autumn we could have gone down to the riverside apartments and had a night. I knew a girl there, once.”
He had gone quiet.
Gideon thought him in contemplation, until he noticed his eyelids slipping shut.
With an affectionate sigh, Gideon pulled closer the loose spool of alligator in his arms and settled down for a dreamless sleep, the type of sleep you didn’t just stumble upon, but had to find at the end of a bottle.
“Gideon! Gideon!” an eager little goblin dashed around frantically. He checked Gideon’s room first, but found the bed empty. He checked the kitchen next, and that was empty too except for Frost examining their eggs for cracks. He checked Torbek’s room and found the bugbear passed out on the carpet. He threw a blanket over Torbek. He checked Gideon’s room again. A little nonsensically, he checked his own room. Then it occurred to him to check Kremy’s room.
“Gideon!” he slammed open the door, rattling the hinges.
Kremy hurled a pillow at his head with startling accuracy, “Shut the fuck up!”
The pillow, which was nearly equal to Gricko’s own body lengthwise, knocked him on his ass. Having spent the last few years traveling with a group of people many times his size, Gricko rolled back to his feet near-instantly.
“I didn’t mean to bother you,” he said in his syrupy tone, far too loudly for the hungover warlock, and he nearly took a second, smaller pillow to the face, barely ducking in time, “I have a letter for Gideon!”
“Check his room,” Kremy snarled, “He’s not here.”
Gricko stared at the distinctly Gideon-shaped lump in the bed next to Kremy, “Are you sure?”
A third pillow bounced off the doorframe behind him.
“I’ll just leave the letter on the floor, why don’t I?” Gricko chuckled, not wanting to be here when Kremy ran out of soft projectiles.
“Who’s it from?” the Gideon-shaped lump mumbled, stirring and popping out its distinctly Gideon-shaped face from the fluffy pile of fur blankets.
Kremy hissed and slammed a pillow down over Gideon’s face. He was a very good target due to his close proximity. Gideon flailed, his arms trapped by the tangled blankets, until Kremy let go of the pillow. Now no longer at risk of suffocation, Gideon relaxed.
“Someone named Etta,” Gricko read, “Last name Coal!”
Gideon jolted upright so quickly the pillow flew off of him and across the room.
That was enough to get him bodily shoved off of the bed. Both him and Gricko were promptly banished from Kremy’s room.
“Is Kremy alright?” Gricko asked, concerned in that sideways manner of his.
“Just a rough morning after. He has that tipping point where he’s had too much and he’s too drunk to stop himself from drinking, y’know? He started rambling about cocks and stuff.”
“Ooh,” Gricko waggled his eyebrows, “Sounds exciting.”
“Not like that,” Gideon snatched at his hands, “Give me the letter.”
Gideon tore it open impatiently, and scoured the contents. His face turned strange, his fire dimming as he read on. His jaw wound tenser and tenser until it looked like it had been locked into place by its own muscles.
“What’s it say?” Gricko asked.
With a click, he unlocked his jaw. His voice was rough and raw, like an execution victim’s body dragged over miles of road, “Apparently, I’ve got family in town. She says she’s---she’s my sister.”
“I was an only child meself,” Gricko replied conversationally.
“So was I when the hobgoblins razed the village and killed my Pa,” Gideon worried the corner of the paper in his fingers, that stranger’s name signed onto the letter in curling script, “Either she’s lying, or she was the child of some affair my Pa never took credit for.”
“Your old man was a player like you, huh?” Gricko growled playfully and punched him on the leg, the highest area he could comfortably reach when Gideon stood upright, “Or she’s some random scoundrel who wants to take advantage of you. Who knows.”
“She called me by a…special name. Only somebody who knew me when I was a kid would use that name.”
“What’s she want with you?”
“She’s in the city, traveling. Thinks we might be related, since we’ve got the same surname. She wants to visit.”
“Well, tell her to come on over!”
“I don’t know about that.”
“You’re right, it’s kind of a bachelor pad in here,” Gricko muttered, grimacing at an empty rum bottle abandoned on the floor, its former contents a sticky, dried-up riverbed of liquor beneath it.
“Naw, it’s just she might be trying to scam us. There are other ways to know my old name. Seems like this’ll bring us no good.”
“But if she really is a relative, you’ll have left her all alone in the big city! Think of that poor girl. Scared and alone, only been on the farm...”
“I get it,” Gideon groaned, “I’ll write her.”
To Gideon Coal,
My name is Etta, and I believe we may have some relation in common. I’ve been traveling far from my home in Yona, and I heard your name and that you lived at this address. I’m the sister of Agna Coal, if you know of her.
Seeing as I am eager to gather more information about my family, especially my sister, I’d be pleased to get to know you. Have you got an afternoon to spare for a visit?
Please write back to me at your earliest convenience.
Sincerely,
Etta Coal