Lucky Rabbit

Thaniel and Pandy didn’t swap places until bedtime on Friday. The bait had been taken, and it seemed best to act as naturally as possible. That meant Pandy actually led Small Group for the first time since they began trading places. It was cold, so all the classes except Horseback Riding and Combat Training were held indoors, and Pandy probably could have used the relative privacy of the music room to do some actual teaching. But if something went wrong and she didn’t make it back, she wanted their last class together to be fun, so she just handed out some paper and watercolors and had the children paint portraits of each other. By the end everyone was covered in rainbow hues and giggling, so that worked out well.

As promised, Mistress Rose kept Augustus – and thus Pandy – updated on the Sick Six. By lunch, the two ‘friends’ were fully recovered, though whether it was natural or thanks to the encouragement of the apparently vile Fumewort tea was difficult to tell. Shortly after classes ended for the day, the roommates and Lamont Kimball also miraculously recovered enough to declare that they required no further medication. That left only Lamonia, who apparently vomited up all of the tea along with anything else she tried to treat or drink, while her throat developed white pustules that even Pandy knew were a bad sign. Her family was contacted, and Lamonia was sent home to recover.

A reply from Dear Cousin Andres arrived during chore time that night – late enough that Mr. Musgrave simply called Thaniel to take it on his way to bed, and apparently didn’t see any reason to disturb the chancellor with the information that a rival potential guardian had sent a letter to his ward, if that was something the hall supervisor even noticed. ‘Thaniel’, of course, was actually Pandy, who took the letter to their room and placed it on a handkerchief on the desk, where she watched it with mingled curiosity and wariness.

Once she was certain that no one was coming to knock on Thaniel’s door, Pandy left the Blood Sachet of Misdirection in his room and hopped up to Augustus’s apartment with the letter in her Inventory. She knew – well, she was fairly certain – that her Inventory wasn’t inside her body in any way, but she still felt a little freaked out when she saw the words Mysterious Menacing Missive in her Inventory list.

Thaniel was asleep in his couch-nest when she arrived, and Pandy hopped up onto the table to drop the letter, which appeared beneath her paw. She shifted back to Ms. Wellington – since Thaniel had the Eurydice charm – and waited expectantly as Augustus examined Andres’ reply before carefully opening it with a silver letter opener.

“Exactly as we expected,” Augustus murmured, tapping a gloved finger in the very fine dust that had fallen from the envelope along with the paper. “I’ll get this to Beeswick, but I’m certain this will be the same pheromone powder we’ve been seeing, intended to make Thaniel feel even more grateful to Lord Forrest.”

The letter was simple, only two short lines that read like a legal document, without warmth or personality. It gave ‘my ward’ permission to attend the party, and he signed it with a very neutral ‘Regards, Cousin Andres’. There was nothing there that could be held against him, even though Thaniel’s letter had opened up several opportunities to say something negative about Augustus.

“He’s being careful,” Augustus said, sliding the letter and the barely-visible powder into yet another of the boxes he and Professor Beeswick seemed to be able to produce in infinite numbers.

“He didn’t seem like a careful person when he took the boys to the cemetery,” Pandy said, thinking of the blundering buffoon who had blown in and out of their lives in a burst of boisterous bluster.

Augustus’s lips quirked as he poured the contents of a vial of liquid onto the tabletop, then wiped the surface down with a cloth that looked suspiciously like kivit. “No,” he agreed, “none of the information I’ve gathered on him indicates that care comes naturally to him. I’d say someone else told him exactly what to write, and probably watched as he wrote it, so he’ll have a witness if and when he needs one.”

This was as good of an opening as Pandy was going to get, so she glanced toward Thaniel, who seemed to be sleeping as deeply as he had been when she entered. “Speaking of witnesses… I need to talk to you about something.”

Rather than responding that they were already talking about several things, Augustus just raised his brows and waited for her to continue. Even though she’d been rehearsing this in her mind for several days now, it still took Pandy several tries to finally say, “I need to write a will.”

Augustus’s expression shut down, all warmth and humor vanishing. “Explain,” he said, his voice revealing nothing.

Pandy drew in a deep breath. “I’ve never had anything to leave to anyone before, much less anyone to leave it to, and I don’t think it’s going to matter, because I really am very tough.” She bent an arm, flexing muscles whose size had no correlation to her actual strength. “But I want to make sure… that if anything happens… if I don’t make it back-”

She swallowed hard. Augustus’s face gave nothing away, and the longer he remained frozen, the harder this got. “I’m almost certain Pandora Avington – Preston’s granddaughter, the first Pandora, or at least I assume she was the first, because how many Pandoras could there be? But on the other hand, the Avingtons definitely liked to give their children P-names, and they’d have to start recycling them eventually. You can only have so many Philips and Pierces and Priscillas before it gets really confusing and-”

Augustus laid a finger over her lips, and she managed to stop talking before she bit him. It had been a while since she babbled like that, and Pandy’s cheeks grew red as she wondered what he was thinking. She originally intended to go to Professor Beeswick with this, because the Dragon was good with documents and he would definitely know how to make a will and where to put it once it was written, but-

“I’m sorry,” Augustus said. He tilted his head forward until his forehead touched hers. They were seated at the table again, and somehow they’d moved very close together while they were both peering at the letter, so he didn’t even have to lean that far.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, his breath tickling her cheek. Somehow, the man never seemed to have bad breath, which was really something, because even though Pandy didn’t spend a lot of time smelling other people’s used air, sometimes it couldn’t be avoided, and it had never before been a pleasant experience.

“It hurts to think of a circumstance where you might need a will,” he murmured softly. “But you’re right. It’s the wise thing to do, and I shouldn’t have… I’m ready to listen, if you’re ready to tell me what you need.” With that, he leaned back and removed a few pieces of paper from his cache, along with a pen. He set pen to paper and looked expectantly at Pandy, his gray eyes once again warm as a summer fog.

Pandy blinked, nodded, and tried again. The first few words were definitely on the squeaky side, but after that they flowed more easily. “I’m almost certain the first Pandora Avington, the real one, was one of Thaniel’s ancestors, but even if she wasn’t, I want to leave Avington House to Thaniel. Lian will have the Dunning-Conroy title and estate, and I know he’ll make sure Thaniel has everything he needs, but Thaniel will be happier if he has his own place, and it’s probably his anyway. Or at least as much his as anyone else’s.”

Augustus’s pen had started moving about halfway through this jumbled speech, and it continued scratching for quite a while after Pandy finished. When it finally came to a halt, the chancellor looked up again, simply waiting.

“There’s a dress in the upstairs closet,” she told him. “A white one, with a long silver train. Empress Glory knows which one it is, but don’t let her have it. That goes to Clara. Clara Reedsley,” she clarified, as if there was any other Clara of whom she might be speaking. “Isidor can have any books he wants, and the estate needs to pay for him to keep going to school, because he deserves to be able to do that. He can live at Avington House until he graduates from Condor, too, even though I’m sure Thaniel would let him even if I didn’t say so. Same for El- Um, the other child who lives there, though I don’t know if they’ll want to.”

She shot another glance at Thaniel while Augustus wrote this down, but the boy still seemed to be fast asleep. The fingers of one hand hung limply over the side of the couch, and she knew one of the first things he did when he started to wake up was tug his hands beneath the covers like a little bear who wasn’t quite ready to emerge from his winter nap. He’d been having nightmares lately, but since he began spending time with Lady Arabelle and then started sleeping in Augustus’s apartment, those had stopped.

“There are some old, fancy dresses in the closet, too, and Geraldine or El- the other children, or even Clara can have as many of those as they’d like, or if they prefer pants, there are some of those. I think they must have belonged to the last kids who lived there, whenever that was. Geraldine and Abbington can move in whenever they want, for as long as they want, and Brook can go inside whenever she wants.”

She hesitated, then added, “Abbington isn’t in the game – Gacha Love – because I have to use CP to cast spells around him, which means he probably has to go back to the Valley sometime in the next few years. But if whatever happens happens, and he wants to stay here and go to school, I’d like it if the estate could pay for that, too. I know it doesn’t have a lot of money, but I have some left, and I’ve fixed the house up a lot, so maybe they could rent out a few rooms as a bed and breakfast or something.”

This time a snort of laughter escaped Augustus, and he was definitely twinkling at her when he said, “I wonder what the aristocracy would have to say to that; one of the great houses renting out rooms like a hostel. Though I suspect it could command a high price, especially since it’s one of the few remaining houses with elementals. Historians would probably pay quite a bit to speak with your Apparitions.”

That hadn’t occurred to Pandy. Nox and Nyssa had been around even before the founding of West Altheric, and they’d known some pretty important people, including both Preston Avington and Queen Nora. Somehow she suspected anyone who tried to get Nox to talk would leave disappointed, if they didn’t end up in an unmarked grave in the backyard. Nyssa seemed perfectly willing, even eager, to chat about the past, but she also had a… very unusual perspective.

“Surely there are plenty of other elementals for the historians to talk to,” she said. “Professor Beeswick, for one.”

“Most people don’t know our beloved librarian is anything other than an old man. He changes his appearance every thirty or forty years, pretending his previous identity retired or died suddenly, and he’s the replacement. It invariably angers the librarians at the other schools, who are all ‘senior’ to the new one, which he quite enjoys,” Augustus told her.

“The other elementals of his age are… not as coherent as Nox and Nyssa. There seems to be some limit to how human-like each kind of elemental can become. Quite often they simply stabilize into something like Nimien, Falconet’s elemental: powerful and intelligent within the space to which they’re bound, but certainly not human.”

Pandy stared at him. “Falconet is like Avington House?”

“Of course.” Augustus gave a teasing grin. “All of the schools are. Your game didn’t mention that?”

“No,” Pandy said firmly. That… might explain a lot. A lot. But she didn’t have time to ask all the questions that were hammering at her brain. She added one more thing to her mental to-do list: learn more about real elementals, rather than depending on what she’d read on the Gacha Love wiki and in the little primer about Dark elementals she’d found in the abandoned library.

Returning to the task at hand, Pandy quickly ran through a few more things she wanted the children to have, then said, “I think Nox will accept Thaniel as the real Lord Avington, because-” she touched her chest in the spot where Thaniel’s heartstone rested. “I worried there might be a problem if Thaniel showed up there while he was just a guest, but I think the Lord or Lady is supposed to have that thing, so it will be all right. If Nox does something, though-”

She bit her lip. She liked the Apparitions, but she wouldn’t allow them to hurt Thaniel. “You may have to destroy Nox. Maybe both of them. Can you do that?”

“I know someone who can,” he answered obliquely. “But only if necessary.”

“Good.” She nodded. “If they don’t freak out, then they’ll need someone to give them Dark Mana. Dark magic, I mean. Maybe Suzanne? Nox and Nyssa don’t deserve to just fade away, but Thaniel won’t be able to feed them. I don’t even know if he can use the books, since he’s a Light mage and they’re Dark. Light and Dark seem to be particularly bad together.”

This time Augustus’s smile held no real humor. “Indeed. Is there anything else?”

Pandy shook her head. “I don’t think so. There’s only one person left I’d want to leave something to, and I have no idea what he’d want.” She absolutely couldn’t say the words that were pounding in her brain, and her cheeks flamed as she forced herself to meet his eyes.

“You,” Augustus murmured, setting down his pen. “It’s you or nothing.”