[Danicka Musil] True to her word -- and there are plenty who would add 'for once' to that, though Lukas is likely not one of them -- Danicka heads to New York City when Lukas tells her he's heading there himself. She books a flight, and it's expensive due to the short notice, but it's not like she has much else to spend her money on. She can go home whenever she wants to. The problem is coming up with excuses not to. Soon she'll have school. It'll help. She contacts her father first to let him know she's coming, and she does not rent a car for the duration of her stay, and she starts to pack.
She sends him a message, giving him little more than her itinerary and suggesting a hotel that is not the closest to her father's house but certainly easier to get to. He never asked her where she lived, never asked his parents to remind him where the house was that he used to go to when he was a child. She gives him the address now, and given the number of years he lived in New York he knows now
(remembers, now)
that his girl is from Ridgewood in Queens, a neighborhood crawling with Poles, Slavs, Germans and row homes.
Danicka lands at La Guardia and taken a cab home. She has already eaten dinner with her father, and put him to bed, and is lying in her own, staring at the window.
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] A few hundred years ago, before cars and railroads and planes, it was entirely plausible and even likely that one would die a hundred paces from where one was born -- if not in the same bed. Villages arose around the same few families. Their descendants carried their names and their bloodlines on. Cities gained their own flavor, their own character, their own personalities and faces.
New York is a little like that. It's old enough that there are ethnic neighborhoods. This one's full of Russians. That one's full of Slavs and Poles. Here are the Italians, there are the Irish, and there's some German-Austrians somewhere over there.
Lukas's folks settled in the Bronx, in a pocket of Czech and Slovakian and Polish and Yugoslavian immigrants. Lot of eastern europeans there once upon a time, but nowadays it's a predominantly black and latino borough, uneven, much of it riddled with poverty and crime, some of it startlingly wealthy. Once upon a time, but not quite so long ago as the great immigrations, the Kvasničkas would have had to cross a bridge or two to visit the Musils. Most often the Triborough Bridge; sometimes the Willis Avenue bridge, and then the Queensboro bridge.
He would've had to do the same, if Lukas had stayed at home. But he doesn't. War makes adults out of children; war and the side effects of war give him more reason than he needs to stay away.
So: he stays in the hotel Danicka recommended, which is east of East River, which means he doesn't stay amidst the towers and pinnacles of Manhattan Island. It's a small inn, actually, a local name still doggedly fighting it out amongst chain hotels and chain motels. A four-square building around a central atrium, with a painstakingly tended garden that no one goes into now except to smoke.
Lukas doesn't smoke. He doesn't stay long, either. His trip was made by moonbridge, and then by rental car. He managed to beat the traffic this time because he left Chicago before dawn, arrived upstate before dawn, paid his respects to Istok Promised-Rain
(and he never fails to do that. He's passed in and out of New York City numerous times, passed literally by the street where his parents live, without so much as a call. But every time he's in New York, every time he's within fifty miles of the Sept of the Stark Falls, he pays his respects to his mentor.)
and left for Sevey, where he picked up his rental sedan five minutes after the branch office opened and drove south.
He passes through the Bronx in the late morning. Finds his way to the hotel just before noon. Takes a shower, eats a quick lunch off the room service menu in his towel, and then calls Danicka while he's dressing.
Sunlight is coming through the window. His room faces the atrium, and it's pleasant and bright by day. He doesn't need to leave on the lights to dress himself in front of the three-quarter length mirror beside the TV cabinet/dresser. He leaves his cell phone on the bed, uses his headset. There's a handheld ban in place in New York state.
When she picks up, he's stepping into his trousers. "I got in about forty minutes ago," he says. "I've sent word to your brother that I wanted to meet him, but I wasn't specific about the reason and we haven't set a definite time. Did you want me to meet with your father first?"
[Danicka Musil] In the subset of sentient life that occasionally calls itself the Garou Nation, the werewolves and their Kin may travel -- and in fact for some tribes and camps this is the norm -- but the lines of descent are about blood and spirit. The family names occasionally matter, especially to tribes like the Silver Fangs, but to most, it's about how strong the offspring are, how many Trueborn children you and your mate produce, the deeds you and yours achieve. Some remember where the Kvasničkas came from, where the lines of Lukas's bone structure came from, the name of the one who forged the sword his mentor handed over to him when he was much, much younger than he is now.
Looking into Danicka's family tree, a fang genealogist would see multiple branches, multiple generations of Kinfolk who were twice-mated or more, bearing or siring the children of multiple Garou as they fell. Along her mother's line there are ties to Poland, to Russia, to a heritage of stark violence and vicious defense of borderlands and protectorates. Along her father's, Garou better known for their wisdom, for their connection to their Kin, for abundant fertility. Danicka's bloodline was thinned in previous generations, but it's not hard to see how a woman like her came to be, or why Miloslav Musil was given to Night Warder after his previous mate died.
It is not terribly hard to see how the same purity and mingling of lines that created someone like Danicka could be twisted to become someone like the Adren Theurge. But that is only knowing what Lukas knows.
And he doesn't know everything.
She has been awake since before first light. He doesn't know that, either. He may remember how she would wake at dawn or before dawn when he first met her, regardless of how much sleep she'd gotten the night before. He may recall how she would sometimes leave him in a hotel room bed before noon, leaving him to sleep alone as though staying the night was almost too much for her. He may recall, now, what it's like to open his eyes see her still sleeping as the light from her bedroom windows hits his back, his body shielding and shadowing her. The feel of her breathing at the crest of morning. The way it feels to be the one to leave her.
Danicka answers during the third ring. She says a brief hello before he tells her what he tells her, her voice primarily filled with courtesy. "We were just finishing lunch," she tells him simply. "Vládík and Emílie are --"
Her voice goes faraway, her mouth pulled away from the phone's mic. "Co?"
There's a low murmur of response. Lukas can't make out the words. For a moment, a heartbeat, there's silence, and then her voice is clear in his ear again, closer to the phone once more. "Would you like to join us for dinner?"
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] She's not there to see it, so of course she misses it: the way he reacts to the courteous uninvestedness of her tone, which is something he remembers from what seems like a long, long time ago. She doesn't see, either, the reaction when she says Vládík and Emílie are --
and she doesn't hear the hard beat of silence after, either, because her attention is away from the receiver.
Several months ago, Lukas tangled with a pair of gorehounds, brothers, boys twisted by poison and taint dressed up as pop culture. One wielded a chainsaw and the other a chain of razor wire, and it was the second that sliced him open so fatally, that unzipped the weave and weft of his torso and spilled his viscera onto the ground.
He remembers that sort of surreal and awful gravity, the tug too deep in his bowels, the rip and shred of internal moorings coming loose as organs spilled under their own weight. The pain was blocked out but the sensation of it was still there, and it felt--
a little like this, actually. He did not expect to see Vladik so soon. Over dinner. With Danicka, and Danicka's father, present at the table.
He recovers in seconds, as he did then. Lukas thinks for a moment, and then he says, "I'll see you at six."
--
He doesn't dress after all. He peels off what he'd put on and throws it over a chair, and then he sleeps for most of the afternoon. He stretches himself out on the hotel bed, atop the covers rather than beneath, sets the alarm for 5:15pm, and closes his eyes.
Sleep comes like a wave; he drops into it like a stone.
--
His hair is long since dried when he wakes to the blare of the alarm. The light is westering. It is the beginning of fall, and the days are growing shorter. Lukas brought only a few changes of clothes in a carry-on bag, or what would have been a carry-on bag if he'd taken a flight. He ponders over what to wear for a few moments anyway.
It's nearly 6pm when he pulls up on the curb. His rental is some nondescript american sedan, a Cobalt or something of the sort, silver. The lights flash when he locks it from the fob. He looks up at the house and searches his memory: does he remember that porch, that eave, those shutters, or is he only convincing himself he remembers? It doesn't matter. The stairs are taken in two loose bounds, and he rings the doorbell.
When the door opens he looks much the way he would had he been in Chicago rather than New York City, had he been meeting Danicka for dinner at some trendy restaurant somewhere rather than at her father's house, at her late mother's house, to ask for -- well. Her.
His jeans are dark, only barely blue. His shirt is white, thinly striped in threads of silvery-grey, open at the collar. He has a coat in hand, which is a thin, supple leather, but it's too warm yet to wear it. The irony is if he had met her father alone, he would've worn a tie. He might have worn a goddamn suit.
[Danicka Musil] When he tells her that he'll see her at six, there's a murmur full of words he can almost make out, until he realizes they're in Russian. And then Danicka says, somewhat quietly: "I'll see you then."
And he can guess, he can almost certainly know, why her voice is low. Who is speaking to her in that house in Ridgewood, his mere presence reminding her -- reminding Lukas through her -- that he is not the ranking Garou here. The house is not his. The woman is not his. But there's no correction to the time, though it is not technically his place to set it. There is a reason the Musils are known as hospitable and Vladik is known as friendly. The low voice he can just barely hear before hanging up does not sound angry, and Danicka does not sound browbeaten. Softspoken, maybe, which only strikes him as strange because he knows her as he does.
Hours go by. He does not get to see Danicka alone before meeting with Vladik, he does not get to sit with her aging father, and ultimately he has a fraction of a day to sleep and prepare to deal with a situation that, apparently, makes his stomach drop to think of.
The house is a single-family Stier, with a small stoop of a front porch and a back yard he knows is luxurious in New York no matter which way you slice it, a tree that he can barely see over the roof even standing in front where he is. It's been there forever, it seems. There are two large windows in front to the left of the door, smaller windows on the second floor. Even from the outside, memories start to filter back. It's nondescript. It's like all the other houses around it, but for that enormous tree...and the inhabitants.
White lace curtains over one of the downstairs front windows flicker as he's approaching the door; the movement is rapid. He can hear footsteps inside as he gets to the door, small and pounding and striking recollections back into his mind:
Lukášek, Anežka, pro lásku boží, zpomalit!
And he can see a prism hanging in one of the windows. The door is blue. And the person who answers it is being called to: "Irča, zpět nahoru!" but the voice isn't familiar, nor is the name, though he knows it to be a nickname, just like 'Danička' is and always was a nickname.
Irča looks to be about eight or nine years old. She is tall for a child that young, lean of limb but clearly athletic, with large, round green eyes and light brown hair that falls in thick curls and tangled waves to her ribbones. It looks like it was in the process of being brushed before she bolted to answer the door. She is wearing jeans with folded cuffs and a long-sleeved pink shirt with a tiny plastic purple heart sewn on at the collar. She looks up at Lukas unblinkingly, then a low, tired-sounding male voice says
"Irena, poslouchejte své matce."
And he knows that voice, too, though he may just be fooling himself into thinking that he remembers it. He may just be pretending to himself that he remembers the man who has almost no hairs left, and they are all white, whose eyes rival Lukas's in their sheer clarity of color, who used to smell like wood polish and sawdust and whatever he and his daughter were cooking. He comes towards the door far more slowly than the long-haired eight year old who also, in her way, seems familiar, and instead of going back up as she was told, she whirls around in a flailing of arms and jumps onto her grandfather, who is still strong but pats her back, murmuring something else to her.
Lukas can't see very far into the house. He can see Danicka's niece as she kisses Miloslav's cheek and then drops back down to the hardwood floor, and he can see past Miloslav to the stairway that Irena bolts up, and he can see a woman's legs on the stairs before she, with Irena, vanishes upstairs. And then all he can see is Miloslav, shorter than him and nearly seventy, beckoning him in.
The house smells like lamb.
"Come in, Lukášek," he says, as though he is still five. Or six. Or seven. As though he is here to play. "The women are upstairs. Dinner is soon."
He leads Lukas into the house. His footsteps shuffle across the circular rug in the living room where rainbows from the prism used to cast themselves. Where children used to lie down and examine their toes against the ceiling. Where apparently, children still do.
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas expected to see one other at dinner -- Danicka -- and at the outside, two -- her father. Then he called, and she said the names, and when he got over it he expected four: Danicka, Miloslav, Vladislav, Emilie.
Then the door opens and it's a child, it's a child that looks nothing like Danicka did fifteen years ago, and everything like her. Something of the resemblance is here, this half-niece of hers; not the color of the hair, no, and certainly not the athleticism, but -- something. She stares at him with no fear.
"Hello," he says. "You must be --"
she's spinning away to leap on her grandfather. He raises his eyes to Miloslav. Lukášek, Miloslav calls him, as though he were still five. Or six. Or seven. Or human -- as close to human as creatures of the nation ever were. Lukas remembers walking up the much quieter steps to his parents' much quieter house a few months ago. He remembers the door opening, and his father, who was always so imposing when he was a child, looking up at him. And bowing his head. And calling him Wyrmbreaker.
It passes in a flicker; a blink of his sky-touched eyes. He smiles, and because Lukášek was always a polite boy -- loud, a little wild, but polite -- he shifts his coat to his other hand and hands Miloslav a bottle of good Polish vodka. It's not Wyborowa; it's something a little plainer than that. Chopin. These casual details, every last one of them, may have been mulled over, considered, debated, decided.
"Hello, Mr. Musil," he says. "Thanks for having me."
He steps into the foyer, and he feels like a stranger to this home that he knows he's played in a dozen times or more as a child. He's slid down that banister. Raced down this hall. Crashed into that wall, right there, went down in a dazed heap -- had he cried? Probably not. Lukas didn't cry often when he hurt himself playing, not because pain was familiar to him the way it was to Danicka, but simply because wiping out and running into a wall was familiar.
He can't imagine this house ever having been familiar to him, though it was, and is.
The door closes after him. He asks if he should take his shoes off, and where he can hang his coat. He does not ask if he can help in the kitchen, though in the mornings, on the rare occasions Danicka cooked, he's always asked -- or else cooked something himself.
What he asks is, "Is Vladislav here?"
[Danicka Musil] He may or may not remember now being with Danicka at the Shedd in May. Handing her a pair of earrings in front of Gabriella, and how that made her angry, and how quickly that anger was gone. He may or may not remember now talking about her half-sister moving to America with four of her six children. But either way, Lukas figures quickly who the small girl answering the door is: Danicka's niece. He knows she has a niece and nephew who will Change. He has no way of knowing if Irena is one of those two, or if Sarka simply raised all of her children so differently from how Danicka was brought up that an eight year old can look up at an Ahroun without instantly flinching.
Or maybe it's the fact that her aunt, her mother's twin, is a Philodox of a higher rank than Vladislav. Or maybe she did flinch, and that's why she held onto Miloslav so tightly after turning away from Wyrmbreaker. She must be... someone. Irena, called Irča, whose footsteps thud on the wooden steps as she heads upstairs where 'the women' are. 'The women' must be her mother, and Emilie, and...Danicka. He can hear them overhead, multiple sets of footsteps, multiple voices.
Miloslav reaches out as they step inside and takes the Chopin, observing it with... it's hard to tell. He's harder to read than his daughter is, though this may not be quite as intentional. All his reactions are dampened, deadened, numbed. He seems pleased, but that could be an act. He does not seem surprised. That may simply be his age, and his life: it is difficult to surprise someone like him, perhaps.
He does wave a hand at Lukas. "Host do domu, Bůh do domu," he answers to the Ahroun's thank-you, peering over at him after the proverb leaves his lips and then heading towards the kitchen, past the upright piano, past some shelves. The two on the sides are tall, elegant bookcases. The one in the middle is a more ornate cabinet, the doors made not out of glass but wood carved into scrollwork, a screen of artfully, delicately created leaves and vines and birds and flowers. Inside the cabinet, if he looks, he can barely make out the sight of more books. Knick-knacks and pictures in frames are on the bookshelves amongst other texts.
"If you would like," is the answer to the question of shoes. The floors are hardwood, and around the corner from the door there are indeed rows of shoes of all sizes and styles. He can see some that he knows are Danicka's, a pair of somewhat slouched leather boots. He has seen her wear them at least once. He has fucked her while she wore them, after walking in the rain. There is a coatrack in the corner beside the piano. Miloslav does not offer to take his coat for him, though he does look at Lukas like he's considering it before he goes to the kitchen with the vodka.
Is Vladislav here.
Miloslav, in the arch between kitchen and living room, turns to look at the male who shares his dead mate's auspice, and there's a beat of silence. He has not said whether he knows why they've invited the Kvasnickas' boy over tonight. He has not asked Lukas his intentions towards his youngest daughter. The way he looks at Lukas then, though, seems like he knows something he is not saying.
Too much.
The kinsman whose blood sings with the exact same sort of purity as Danicka's, the same hearth-warmth and familiarity, that same scent of home and comfort, nods. "He is outside with Miloš." A diminutive of his own name. "I believe they are talking to the tree."
He goes on into the kitchen. And then there's movement on the stairs. There's a girl crouching on the steps just under the line of the ceiling, looking at him through the railing. It's not Irena again. It's certainly not Danicka or Emilie or Sarka. This girl has straight blonde hair with hints of nut-brown, and her eyes are more hazel than green, and her skin is still a golden tan from summer. She's perhaps fourteen, and lovely already, but with the same large, round eyes as her sister and yet not as much of Irena's blatant boldness.
When she notices she's been noticed, she scrambles back up the stairs, stifling a laugh, saying her aunt's name even as an unknown feminine voice snaps Renáta! at her, all but hissing it.
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas looks at the house, looks at the furnishings, looks at the ornate scrollwork on the cabinets that, perhaps, Miloslav carved once upon a time. Before he was old. Before he began to fade: worn thin by a lifetime of thankless service to the Tribe, by siring and raising the children of his two mates, by bearing their love and, in Night Warder's case at least, her abuse; her terrible temper -- and by bearing the horrors of his own blood, the things his son did to his daughter.
Or maybe he never knew.
Still, Miloslav's eyes are as clear and brilliant as Lukas's, which perhaps gives lie to the old tale that the eyes are the windows to the soul and the spirit. He had seemed old when Lukas was small, though Lukas knows now that he was not. He's old now.
He's fading.
But what he still has is a house full of children. Family. That's one thing Danicka has that Lukas does not: the benefit of a large, a huge family. Her blood and her face reflected in those around him.
It's jarring for him to see them, her extended family tree, all its branches and tiers. Not only because there's so many of them, and so suddenly, but because he cannot reconcile it.
With what he knows. And with what he remembers.
Sometimes Lukas envisions this house and imagines a house of horrors, a terrifying, ravening god of a mother; a sociopathic monster of a brother; a father that could not protect. And sometimes he envisions this house the way he saw it as a child, playing on this rug he stands on, shoving with his sister on the couch, running down that hall, slipping and hitting the wall right there. Sometimes he remembers it as a wonderful place, quiet, smelling of floorwax and carpentry, with an older boy that came through once in a while that he was in awe of and a small girl, older than him but scrawnier, who couldn't keep up with him and his sister.
But never like this -- smelling of cooking, full of voices. Full of blood-bonds, memory, history ... and somewhere out back, talking to the tree, a man that may as well be a monster in Lukas's mind.
He thinks to himself:
I cannot allow myself to be overwhelmed.
He thinks to himself:
I have to remember why I'm here.
He remembers why he's here. He's here for Danička. Every strategy, every structure, every move has to build around that. And he stops looking around the house, and he looks at Miloslav, and his smile is merely polite.
"Do you think I might go to him? I want to pay my respects to my elder."
And like that, with a cool deliberateness that verges on brutality, that some part of him despises, Lukas draws the line clearly: he answers to Vladislav here.
Not Miloslav.
[Danicka Musil] Off the banister and into that wall. Stubbing his toe on the grandfather clock between the front windows. Tripping on the rug. Falling asleep on the couch as the adults sat in the breakfast nook in the kitchen playing cards, talking in a language all three of the young children found familiar in their own ways, comforting in their own ways. It's different now, somehow. He could imagine it quieter than it was in those days, silent for years. Danicka's half-sister and her nieces and nephews have only been here for a few months.
This was not her life, either. The footsteps, the children, the peering eyes: this was not Danicka's life in between their first meeting and the next. This was not what her life was like after she fell out of the tree until she moved to Chicago. She was only a little older than Renata when she became not babysitter, not nanny, but 'governess' to the future mate of some fullblooded Fang.
There is much he doesn't know about what Danicka's life was really like. And sometimes it still seems like too much to know. He should not be surprised, even though he's unaware that Danicka will never inherit this house -- even though he's unaware of why -- that Miloslav seems almost relieved when Lukas asks to see Vladislav so he can pay his respects. He calls him by his childhood nickname, he dodderingly quotes some old proverb, but when Lukas draws that line between himself and the aging kinsman, the aging kinsman...seems grateful, almost. That things are as they are. As they have always been.
He nods towards the kitchen, the breakfast nook, the door out onto the porch. He goes into the kitchen just ahead of Lukas to check on some things at the stove. He does not put the vodka in the fridge but sets it on the counter beside the sink, and as Lukas passes by on his way to the back porch and back yard, his slightly quavering voice straightens itself out, saying lowly:
"On ví, proč jsi tady."
Miloslav does not have his back turned, not completely, so Lukas can see his profile if he likes. Miloslav does not look like he's said anything. He's checking on a pot full of potatoes.
Footsteps tap overhead. There's a thud and a peal of laughter.
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas turns his head, but it's neither sharp nor reflexive nor startled.
It's measured. Even. Casual. He looks at Miloslav for a moment. He's not surprised; not really. Certainly not shocked. Of course Vladik knows. He's a fucking Theurge. He's a fucking Child of Crow, and their ears are everywhere.
Lukas's spine feels tight, like he wants to shudder. He doesn't.
He says, "Ty brambory vůně nádherné."
And he pushes out of the back door, out onto the back porch and the yard he remembers perhaps better than the house; the magnificent old oak with its glorious, gnarling branches most of all.
He climbed it, right there. That path. Those branches, with those nubs on them that were perfect for a small, active boy's hands and sneakered feet. He shimmied up that stretch, walked across that one -- holding onto branches, carelessly quick, which was half confidence and half bravado, while his sister shouted that he was a show-off and the small blonde girl watched in half-terror from the porch until Anezka said he was scaring Danicka, and he should knock it off and come down so Danicka could play with them too.
Which sent her up into the tree.
Which ended in her crashing out.
Which ended in him running for her father,
who is not, was not, was never who was really responsible for Danicka, anyway.
That man stands before him now. That wolf. They're talking to the oak tree, and Wyrmbreaker comes up behind them -- but at an angle, from the side, allowing the Theurge to see his approach easily. He comes right up to the old oak and puts his hand on its trunk, tilts his head back.
This smile is genuine. He even manages to make it last while he looks at Vladislav, this charming, affable monster.
"I remember this tree. Do you think it remembers me?"
A beat.
"Heals-by-Pain-rhya."
[Danicka Musil] There's a bench on the porch. There are flowers and vegetables lining the interior of the fence that goes around the back yard, which is dominated by the oak tree. It's branches shade most of the grass. It's branches scrape the upstairs windows as the breeze moves them. And sitting on the grass is a man who looks so startlingly similar to Danicka that it would not be hard to imagine them getting mistaken for twins. Even though Vladislav is several years older than Danicka, where he is regenerated against the effects of time, her life has aged her to look older than she is. In terms of appearance, they appear the same age.
They have the same soft features paired with the same slightly angular, pointed jaw. Vladislav is just as thin, though underneath his button-down shirt and the blazer he wears over it there's an obvious strength that outclasses Danicka's by leaps and bounds even if it does not come close to Lukas's. He is sitting cross-legged on the lawn in his slacks near the roots of the tree, and though Miloslav mentioned someone else being out there with him, Lukas can't see anyone else when he first steps off the porch.
That man, that wolf, is playing with the blades of grass rather than rising to greet the freshly minted Fostern. He does glance up, and his eyes lack the mottled coloring of Danicka's but also the piercing quality of his father's. His eyes are bright, and vivid, and earnest. His mouth has an almost nervous sort of cast to it, the sort of lip shape that lends itself to looking uncertain, the sort of face he's spent years forming into other expressions so he can accentuate his strength and not what might look like weakness.
He is sitting with his left side facing the back of the house, so Lukas comes towards him more at an angle than behind him. More the better. Vladislav does eventually stand, unfolding himself into his full height, which is just over six feet tall, just a couple of inches shy of Lukas. He brushes his long-fingered hands off against once another as the other Shadow Lord approaches, and watches silently as Lukas greets the oak tree.
"Ano, samozřejmě strom pamatuje si." says a voice, and it isn't Vladislav's. It's another child, though this one is far older than eight. His voice is cracking with puberty even as he answers Lukas's question. Vladislav's lips split with a sudden, quirky
agonizingly familiar
smile. He looks up at the teenager crouching in the upper branches, the boy who is wearing nothing but boxer shorts and skinned knees, roughed elbows, scratches across his arms and legs. He looks like a little savage, pale-haired and tan-skinned, blue-eyed like his uncle, his grandfather, his aunt's suitor. His eyes are just like Miloslav's. He crows as he looks down at Wyrmbreaker, echoing back to him:
"'Pane Musil, pojďte rychle! Danička padl!'"
There's a pause.
"Wyrmbreaker," Vladislav says amicably, offering his right hand now that the grass is off of it. "Miloš, vevnitř. Je na čase, abyste se připravte na dovolenou. Go pomoci svého bratra."
The boy drops to the grass with an agility that's almost chilling and a swift obedience that is filled to the brim with... adoration. He looks at his uncle, who does not look back at him except to flick his eyes over and wink. Miloš laughs and bolts inside, scrambling up the porch and letting the screen door bang shut behind him. When Lukas takes his hand, he finds Vladislav's to be the antithesis of Danicka's. It's cold. It clasps Lukas's in a handshake, rather than the arm-clasp of a warrior.
And when they separate:
"I must say, I didn't expect to see you again." he says, sounding genuinely a little surprised. More than a little curious. "The last time I saw you, you were still training under Promised Rain-yuf." A beat. Another smile, a near laugh. "And before that, throwing up from too many koláče." Another, smaller pause. He tips his head to the side, brows drawing together in mild bewilderment. "What's this about?"
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] It's control this time, not lack of startlement, that keeps him from snapping his eyes furiously to the boy in the branches. It's control and not lack of startlement that keeps him from drawing a quick breath to hear his own words repeated back to him.
But it's not the boy's preternatural awareness that that makes his blood run cold. He remembers something about Danicka's half-sisters, one of them a Garou, the other dying of cancer. He remembers something about trueborn children. It's not hard to add two and two together, to understand why Vladik and the boy were outside talking to the tree, to know just who and what this boy will grow up to be.
None of that chills him. He's seen his share of cubs, privileged cubs who were steeped in the ways of the Tribe and the Nation since before their Change. He was a privileged cub.
When the boy obeys Vladik without questioning, not out of fear but adoration, that's when Lukas feels it again: the urge to shudder. He controls it, of course. His mouth is tilted, a faint, wry smile. "Máš pravdu. Ono pamatuje."
Somehow he draws some measure of strength from that: the memory of an oak that was here before he was born, that will be here after he is dust.
He watches the boy run away. He sees the easy affection between boy and uncle, future Theurge and Theurge, the wink Vladislav flicks the boy, the laughter. He knows Vladik will mentor this son of wolves. He wonders if he will twist the boy; he wonders, also, if he will raise him right, teach him the old ways and the proper rites, how to be a good Garou. Lukas knows nothing of Istok Promised-Rain's family; his background; what happened in his youth. It did not matter. For all he knows his mentor was a monster as well. They're all monsters. They're all good Garou, accomplished warriors of the Nation.
He wonders which would be worse: to be twisted and to know, or to grow tall and never suspect.
The boy runs away. He slams the door behind him
exactly the way Lukas used to make it slam, carelessly, a little savage.
And like that he can remember what it was like to look up to Vladik. To be in awe of him, a teenager, almost a grownup, self-assured, too important to play with the children. With startling clarity he remembers this, and holds to it.
Uses it.
He turns back to Vladik with a smile. "Future Theurge, is he?" It's an offhand remark. Vladik speaks of the past, and Lukas lets himself laugh. He lets himself remember -- "I borrowed your clothes that day. I was proud to be wearing them." A flick of his eyebrows, self-deprecating and ironic. "I felt like a big boy."
Even the way Vladislav's eyebrows draw together is familiar. Lukas lets his smile fade, a natural closure.
"It's about your sister, Rhya," he says, "but I'm not in a hurry. If you want to have dinner first, I can wait."
[Danicka Musil] At the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, Danicka had bounded up the stairs from the shark tank underground and told him that the Tribe was helping her half-sister and the children leave the Czech Republic and come to the States because she had borne not one but two fullbloods. If she died due to lack of treatment the burden of raising them would fall on someone else. If the sept back home did a favor for the sept in New York City by sending them two burgeoning warriors, that might be more beneficial to the Tribe and War as a whole, that might be more beneficial to whoever it was pulling the strings.
Danicka's half-sister, the twin remaining in Prague who was born under a half moon, is the age Miloslav was when Lukas was a child climbing that same oak tree that the old man's namesake just dropped out of. She is approaching Eldership. She is older than Night Warder was when she died. It is difficult to fathom the tangles in Danicka's family tree. It is difficult to wrap his mind around the fact that she is the immediate blood relation of some truly powerful, renowned Garou as well as the relation of those with the potential to be the same.
It is perhaps easier, or maybe just as hard, to picture her upstairs now, helping her half-sister and her sister-in-law get four children who are at turns rambunctious, curious, bold, terrified, wild, strange and willful get dressed and ready and most importantly, out of the way. He has never seen Danicka around children. He never saw her in Grant Park accepting an earth worm directly into her palm from a four year old who insisted that the earthworm was saying Eateateateateateateat. All he knows is that she was instrumental in raising one, that she cared for others that came and went through this house, and that every instinct in his body and spirit and savage mind tells him what sort of children she'd bear if he could ever stand her being sent away from him.
She is upstairs right now, brushing and braiding Irena's hair. Irena the Ahroun, Irena the Fearless, Irena the child who is growing increasingly angry at having to stand still for this, Irena whose latent Rage shows itself in her behavior more and more every day.
She is upstairs right now, focusing on the rapid flicking of her fingers through Irena's hair as Miloslav the younger bolts inside and jumps up onto the bedspread beside her, quietly chastising him for getting his muddy feet on the blanket. Miloslav the Theurge, Miloslav the Wild, Miloslav the boy who is so close to his first change that last night his mother covered her face and wept.
She is upstairs surrounded by women and girls and two boys and the weight of her entire childhood pressing in around her, and she knows he is here because she heard the car and the knock. She knows he is outside because that is what Miloslav is whispering in her ear as she tips her head to the side and puts a ribbon around the end of each of Irena's braids. She knows he is with her brother, because it feels like all the air is going out of the room.
Downstairs, outside, with Vladislav, Lukas can hear the breeze move the heavy branches slowly. They groan. He, unlike Vladik and Milos, does not automatically hear the voice of the oak's spirit in the sound. He does not look over his shoulder at the upper windows to see if he is, again, being watched by young and inquisitive eyes. Or a single pair of murky, secret-hiding ones.
Vladislav's eyebrow quirks, and then his mouth curves into a slow grin. He nods. "Ano." He looks mildly proud, but it's tempered; they both know what their Tribe demands of fresh cubs. They both know how the Shadow Lords view their Crescent Moons. They both know that Milos will be damned lucky if he holds on to even a spark of his current exuberance.
Lukas -- then Lukasek -- felt like a big boy that day. Danicka never told him about after that. Vladislav, of course, does not add that tidbit to Lukas's memory now either. He chuckles: "And now you're taller than I am." The chuckle grows. There's no wryness to it, not any self-deprecation. It's simple, warm humor. Height means nothing to him. It's just a joke, all of it: big boy, taller now, younger than both the Musil siblings but currently the largest person in this house and inarguably the strongest.
At least physically.
He slides his hands into his pockets. "I was afraid it was about her," he says slowly, his voice levelling out a bit. "I know you've been her guardian in Chicago for a little while now." He pauses, frowning slightly. His words come somewhat uneasily. It isn't uncertainty. "It shows your honor that you came all this way to discuss it, but I assure you, if she's causing you grief all you needed to do was send word. I would have come myself to collect her, rather than knowingly allow one of the bratři mé krve to continue shouldering the burden of dealing with her."
It's embarrassment.
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas, an honest man by nature, looks at Vladislav smiling his affable smiles, laughing his charming laughs, and feels a great swell of revulsion rising inside him like a dragon.
Lukas, a liar by practice, smiles back, chuckles, looks up at the oak tree when he has to -- just in case Vladik looked too deep, too suddenly, just in case the brother could look as deeply as the sister, and read murder in his eyes.
And Lukas, hearing Vladik talk about trouble and grief, thinks instantly of Miloslav saying he knows why you're here. He thinks, he's playing me and now it's rage rising inside him; he's as angry as he ever was to think the exact same thought of Vladislav's sister, half a year ago.
But it passes -- he can't be certain. He doesn't know that Vladislav really knows why he's here. He doesn't know that Vladislav is lying, or that Miloslav was telling the truth, or that both were not mistaking his intent for another. He doesn't know how many other Garou have come complaining to Vladislav over the years, that Danicka was useless, that Danicka was craven, that Danicka was a sobbing, pleading mess at the first sign of a Crinos, that she's weak, that she's worthless to the tribe, that she's pathetic.
He doesn't know what Vladislav might have done to her, each and every time. It turns his stomach to think of what he might have done to her last night, knowing Lukas was coming.
It's harder for Lukas to hold onto his reserve, his control, his calm. He fights for it now; the shake of his head has something a little in common with a twist of the neck, an animal craning and flexing, as though tugging against a leash.
"No, rhya, be assured that had your sister had caused me more trouble than I could handle, I would have contacted you without delay. That was not why I came to New York."
The pause is barely there, perceptibly perhaps only to himself. Then he draws a breath, and there's a cadence of ritual when he speaks again.
"Rhya, I am Lukáš Wyrmbreaker, Fostern Ahroun of the Shadow Lords, Alpha of the Unbroken Circle. I was mentored by Istok Promised-Rain; I descend from the line of Kazimir Blood-Burning-Dawn, the Black Lion of the Carpathians, scourge of the undead. The Sept of the Maelstrom knows my honor; the spirits my wisdom, and the Wyrm my glory. With respect, I have come to formally challenge your claim to Daniela Musil of the Shadow Lords, called Danička.
"I want her for myself."
Briefly, he wonders if the tree is listening; who it will repeat this story to; when. If it'll be strung together with the other one --
Vsadím se já může vyšplhat až k vrcholu!
Lukášek, přestaň, ty jsi rozumí! Ty víš Danička moci nelze vylézt že vysoká.
Pane Musil, pojďte rychle! Danička padl!
Do you think it remembers me?
I want her for myself.
I want her.
-- as if fifteen intervening years did not matter, an eyeblink in the lifespan of an oak tree.
"As my mate," he finishes, quietly.
[Danicka Musil] He knows beyond a shadow a doubt now that Vladislav is as good of a liar as Danicka, if not better. If he did not know that the Theurge kept his sister's skin in untouched perfection by healing her back from the bloody brink time and time again, would he have any idea that the man standing with him now under the oak tree was anything but what he seems? Even Lukas can't know that for sure. He can hope that he would see through it, as he occasionally saw through Danicka. He can hope that being suspicious, wary, and careful would keep him from deciding to believe what everyone else does about the Adren.
That he is kind. That he's balanced. That he is protective of his sister despite the fact that she's not exactly the most useful, or the strongest, or desirable.
What there's no way of knowing unless Vladislav calls him on something is whether or not he can read people as well as Danicka can. Certainly he can sense the tension in Lukas's bearing, the flickers of Rage, but this is the son of an Ahroun standing with an Ahroun. Perhaps he chalks it up to that, because he does not say a word about what he may or may not see. In that, it seems he has something else in common with the sister he resembles so much in appearance.
No, says Lukas, this is not about Danicka causing him -- well, too much -- trouble. Rhya, says Lukas, and tells him his name, tells him who he was trained by, the line he descends from, his reputation in Chicago, but tells him nothing of who he is or why he is here. With respect, Lukas says
he wants her.
The furrow to Vladik's brown tightens deeply and suddenly, an expression somewhere between pain and confusion, and then smooths. He is silent for a moment, looking as though he is struggling to contain something, as though he is struggling, simply, to process what he's just heard. Finally, though, he takes a deep breath, sighing as he exhales.
There's an eyeblink of memory, of ferocity that he didn't see again for fifteen or more years, of a certain strength and dominance that belied the skinny arms, the inability to climb, the skittishness at the raising of his father's voice:
Ty nevíš nic o tom, co mohu moci dělat, Anežka!
"As your mate," Vladislav repeats slowly. There's a new stiffness to him, a distance; he's not here talking to a comrade any longer, he's talking to someone who wants to take Danicka.
Completely.
Very nearly irrevocably.
"Wyrmbreaker," he says, with concerned patience, "how well do you think you know my sister?"
[Danicka Musil] [Vladik: Manipulation + Subterfuge]
Dice Rolled: (7d10) 1, 4, 6, 6, 6, 7, 7, 10, 10, 10 (Success x 7 at target 6) Re-rolls: 3
[Lukas: Perception + Empathy (Lie)]
Dice Rolled: (4d10) 10, 7, 4, 4 (Success x 2 at target 6)
[Lukas: Perception + Empathy (Overall)]
Dice Rolled: (4d10) 9, 10, 9, 8 (Success x 4 at target 6)
(When Vladik's brow furrows and clears, it is, to Lukas, exactly what it seems to be: a moment of surprise, of confusion, and a brief flare of pain and concern. There is no lie here, as far as the younger Shadow Lord can tell. It is convincing enough that it could even inspire sympathy, or answering confusion. From the brief look, it seems that Vladik genuinely cannot fathom what he just heard.
But there is an underlying hum of something else: that sense that it's easy for him to put that image across because it's partly true: he can't understand why Lukas is here wanting Danicka. His seeming 'concern' for how well Lukas knows Danicka is distant and cold, at best. He seems like he's about to let Lukas down easy. Not in terms of the challenge, but about who Danicka really is.)
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas watches Vladislav for a moment. Those eyes are so clear, so keen, so fierce -- the eyes of a winter wolf, of a bird of prey. They can see at once the best tactics, the best route, the best plan of action in battle.
They don't even begin to scratch the surface of Vladislav's deceit.
A moment; then Lukas replies, evenly, "Well enough to want her. I know about her weakness. It doesn't diminish her bloodline. But there's something else you think I should know, Rhya, I will listen."
[Danicka Musil] "I'm not talking about... that," Vladislav says, and for the first time Lukas can see that he is not dealing with an abusive brother, a talented Theurge, but a monster like himself, one bristling with his own rage, especially under the full moon. He does not bristle outwardly but his voice flattens as Lukas informs him that he knows of Danicka's weakness.
"She can be difficult in other ways," he goes on. "She's quite willful, sometimes to the point of defiance. Which is mind-numbing because as soon as you rise to it, she falls apart in terror." He sounds tired, as though putting up with Danicka all these years has drained him. But honor refuses him the right to simply lie, to tell Lukas that she'll be no trouble. To watch another Shadow Lord walk away with what he sees as a... burden.
"Our mother was of your moon." He pauses, takes a breath. "I'll admit that an Ahroun would be the last mate I would choose for her myself. She can be frustrating, and I have no desire to hand my mother's daughter over to be brutalized when --" not if, "-- you lose control."
Vladik levels his voice. "I'm sorry, Wyrmbreaker, to question your strength of will, but she's gone this long without being broken for her failings. I would like to keep it that way."
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] It is, of course, precisely that strength of will that keeps Lukas from bursting into some unacceptably violent form in the Musils' backyard, under their oak tree, and roaring that Vladislav is a hypocrite, Vladislav is a liar, Vladislav does not deserve to ward Danicka, and Vladislav should go die in a fucking fire.
He doesn't, of course. Whether through his upbringing or his mentor's teachings or simply the natural and unavoidable maturation of his personality, Wyrmbreaker is no longer the small, noisy boy who used to hang upside down off the uppermost branches of the oak. That boy no longer exists, and the Ahroun that stands beneath the tree now is quiet, considered, careful to a goddamn fault.
Every step he's taken tonight, every word he's spoken, every approach he's chosen and every demeanor he's worn has been as conscious -- and sometimes as difficult -- a show as his masks of human graces.
The younger Lord's jaw flexes for a second. It's unavoidable. He hopes it's mistakeable for the piqué of a Garou, an Ahroun, a son of Thunder denied what he wants.
Demands.
Then, rather courteously, he asks, "Are you denying my challenge then, Rhya?"
[Danicka Musil] "Ne."
The word is carefully chosen, carefully spoken, and Vladislav intones it slowly, almost soothingly. He slips his hands out of his pockets as Lukas's temper rises, watching the Ahroun steadily.
"I am concerned for her because she is difficult to control. And I am concerned for what she will do to your name if you take her as your mate."
I'm only looking out for you both.
"Let's go inside," he says, nodding at the back porch. "Dinner should be prepared. My mate is taking my half-sister and the children out so that the rest of us can have a quiet meal together. I would like to see how you are with her."
Vladik gestures to the steps. "After you, Wyrmbreaker."
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] "With respect, Heals-by-Pain-rhya," Lukas replies, rather steadily, "if your sister's safety is your concern, then that is your right and your prerogative. But let me worry about my own honor."
Dinner is mentioned. Lukas looks toward the house for a moment, keeping his own counsel. Then he turns back, nods.
"I remember your father's an excellent cook," he comments -- it's a deliberate stepping-down of tension, back into the casual, meaningless politenesses of the social visit this most certainly is not.
He precedes Vladik to the porch, but at the back door, stands aside for the Adren to enter first. And he taps the door shut behind him.
[Danicka Musil] Vladislav casts Lukas a glance as he informs him he'll watch over his own honor. There's no rancor in it. There's not much Rage, as though whatever wrath the Theurge has is somehow absorbed by the corona of the Ahroun's. He watches Lukas in profile as he looks back at the house. And curtains do move upstairs, but he's not looking upward. He doesn't look at whoever has looked out.
There's no argument about who goes first, who enters first. They walk inside, one after the other, into a smallish kitchen at the back of a house that feels small and warm by virtue of its furnishings and decor; it is not that small of a house. Even so, with both Miloslav and his oldest daughter and four of her children living here together it has to be somewhat crowded upstairs.
Miloslav is pulling a rack of lamb out of the oven. The potatoes smell like rosemary and garlic. There are glasses for vodka, glasses for water, and several bowls of vegetables. There is a bowl of clementines, vivid orange and dimpled. There are footsteps pounding down the steps in the other room.
Vladislav walks past him, and Miloslav moves closer to the counter to get out of the way. He does not look at either Shadow Lord. Vladik walks out through the arch and around the corner. There are six chairs at the dining room table, though only four place settings. He walks to the head of the table, his back to the wall, the place of honor, and pulls out his chair. There are two chairs to his left, one chair to his right.
He does not indicate where Lukas is to sit.
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Lukas takes the chair to Vladik's right. There's no hesitation about this; no uncertainty. There are two Garou under this roof tonight. Fullfledged Garou, anyway. Vladislav is one. Lukas is the other.
And for better or worse, he doesn't pretend that he's entirely unaffected by the conversation under the oak tree. He lets Vladislav see some of his impatience; some of his irritation that this is half-resolved, dangling. That his challenge was met with neither refusal nor acceptance but this rather unorthodox -- though some might say deserved -- waiting.
Vladik wants to see them together. He wants to see how they interact. Ostensibly, he wants to see that Danicka will be safe with Lukas.
He wants them to perform like trained fucking monkeys.
Or maybe that's not it. Lukas can't fathom Vladislav at all. He cannot read the brother any more than he can read the sister. He loves the brother a whole lot less than he does the sister. He trusts him almost not at all.
So: he pulls the chair out, drops into it. There's a certain loose-limbed certainty to his motions. An Ahroun, after all: master of the physical, master of his body. Lukas does not sprawl, but nor does he sit perfectly upright. He occupies his space with ease, and assurance, and confidence, while footsteps pound down the stairs and Vladik's half-sister and mate take the children out so that all that remains is
Danicka.
(Whose name Lukas has barely dared to say for fear of how much it would betray him: the way he says her name. The way he's always said her name.)
and her brother, and her father, and Lukas.
[Danicka Musil] It was easier with Milo. Milo Maevsky didn't want Danicka, didn't even know her. He had no interest in her, and when Lukas wanted to challenge for her it was... a formality. And the Fostern Theurge had entered into a challenge he had almost no chance of winning, regardless of rank, not against an Ahroun. Vladislav is not rolling up his sleeves and informing Lukas that it's as simple as that: come at him, beat him, leave him a bloody heap on the ground, and walk away with full rights to Danicka. Walk away with a mate.
Dinner's scent seeps into the dining room, and then the noise of footsteps coming down the stairs and across the living room floor. A multitude of voices erupt into Czech, and he can hear hers, he can hear her out there, smell her, feel her in the mix of people whose scent marks them as her blood kin. There's a softness to her voice that he's never heard before, steady with authoritative calm but gentled at the edges. She's talking to her nieces and nephews. The closest he's ever come to that is when she holds him
after
and strokes his hair. But that's not really speaking. It's the calm that's familiar, the centeredness, the warmth.
Then they come in to pay their respects, to have actual introductions to the visitor, however brief those introductions are. It's Milos first, rapidly dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and a jacket, his hair still askew and dirt still under his fingernails, as though washing it away would remove some of his sanctity. He comes in the room with Renata, and they both say goodnight to their uncle in turn. Milos's bright eyes glance over at Lukas as Renata is kissing Vladik on the cheek, and he's too young still to hide the suspicion in his eyes, the wariness. The younger children are on their way in with their mother as the teenagers are headed out, Irena holding the hand of a boy who is probably about six and clearly not happy about this entire affair.
He's the darkest of the lot, his hair a light brown rather than a dark blonde, and he's got tawny hazel eyes with only the barest hints of blue-green. He looks cranky as hell about being dragged into the formal dining room to say goodnight to Vladislav and get anywhere near this jackass who is So Important that they all have to go get pizza or gyros or whatever it is Emilie is taking them out for. It's bad enough he even has to be in this country. He is called Emanuel, Emánek, and when he fights too much with braided Irena's hand, his mother takes it.
Sarka is tall, long-limbed, and thin. Her eyes are big and round, almost bulging, which must be where all of her children get their prominent eyes. She is starkly bald, and does not bother to cover her scalp with a scarf or wig. She is not beautiful, but her breeding -- the breeding of her children -- outclasses Danicka's and Vladislav's. Nearly fifty, she looks far older. Her hands are large for a woman's, and he can sense the strength in them. She puts one hand on Emanuel's shoulder as Irena is firmly shaking her uncle's hand, and it is only the youngest of the four who will not touch him.
He peers at Lukas instead, trying to get out from under his mother's hand.
It's all in Czech, the goodnights and goodbyes and encouragements to behave and enjoy the city and that he'll see them next weekend. The rotation seems orchestrated, partly so the dining room will not get overcrowded, partly so one set of children can be forced into shoes and jackets without the other two wandering around. They are all... energetic. It buzzes in the air. It prickles the skin. It's a constant stream of some enigmatic power to all of them, as though they'll never be exhausted. And it's familiar. It's not what he feels with Danicka, because... simply, she's no longer a child. But it's familiar all the same, as though this is the waking day to the drowsy night implied by her presence.
He catches a glimpse of her through the arch, going into the kitchen to help her father as Emanuel is telling Vladislav that he does not want to go out to dinner, he wants to stay here. They are going to get stared at, he insists. Sarka looks mortified for a moment, and Vladik raises an eyebrow, but Emanuel keeps going, snapping that they need to learn English if they have to stay here, and English sounds stupid. Like cows, he claims.
Moo...! he moans insistently, vehemently back at Vladik, with Sarka's firm hands on his shoulders steering him out of the room after Irena. She looks back at Lukas as she leaves and just gives him a nod. Emilie skirts in, and if the cancer patient that just left looks thin, if Danicka is still a bit underweight, Emilie makes one wonder when she ate last. She's pale, freckled, and her hair is a mix of auburn and gold, long and straight to her waist.
Vladik looks irritable by now. The children being... children. Emanuel quite bluntly misbehaving, making animal noises in and out of the room, Irena refusing to bend like her sister and embrace him, Milos looking at Lukas again and again, Renata suppressing a wince when she kissed his cheek, Sarka not even saying a word to him. Emilie seems to sense it. She inclines her head to Lukas as she circles the table to go to her mate's side.
"Be careful," he says, reaching out for her hand. She gives it over instantly, almost too quickly, and smiles down at him, a little nervously.
"I will," she promises. No assurance that she always is. Or that she needn't be. Her accent isn't that of a native New Yorker; her breeding is extraordinarily thin. She does not look afraid of Vladislav. She looks... like some part of her must be genuinely happy. To not have to think anymore. To be asked only, if always, to submit. It's easier.
It's all brief, and ultimately a swirl of six different people in and out of the dining room has very little impact. Emilie isn't there long, and there's very little revealed about her or the rest of the family before she goes. Soon enough it's just the two Shadow Lords again, and then it's the sound of goodbyes in the kitchen, far more enthusiastic, and Emanuel mooing again and grousing about learning English.
"Naučíte," Danicka is saying levelly to him, as the zipper of a coat goes up. "Není to těžké."
Miloslav comes into the dining room with the lamb. He makes several trips, and he does it wordlessly, setting down platters and bowls of food like a butler as the gaggle of women and children gets escorted to and out the door. The last few dishes are brought in by both father and daughter, including the vodka, the clementines, the bread. It is an enormous meal.
Danicka does not look at him. She is dressed in a knee-length gray skirt and a slim-fitting green sweater. Like many of the ones she owns it's a v neck, but she's wearing a lace-edged camisole where usually he's seen her bare underneath them. The skirt, too, is longer than many of her other ones. Her hair is down, but pulled off of her face with two small silver-colored barettes on either side, and he's never seen her hair like that. Miloslav sits at Vladislav's left. Danicka does not sit but goes to Vladislav's side and...
..begins filling his plate. She serves him without a word being exchanged, without a gesture being given, and with the motions of long habit. Miloslav does not stand up and walk around the table to do so, but he reaches over and lifts Lukas's plate, beginning to fill it from various platters.
"I apologize for the chaos," Vladislav says to Lukas, as though nothing strange is going on. "The tribe acted very quickly to get our half-sister and the children over to the states, and they're still acclimating. I'm sure you remember what that was like."
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] (subt: KEEP YOUR COOL. WP burnt. Let's not botch.)
Dice Rolled:[ 5 d10 ] 1, 2, 3, 6, 8 (Success x 2 at target 6) [WP]
[Danicka Musil] [Perception + Empathy]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 10 (Success x 5 at target 6) Re-rolls: 2
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Children and women stream in and out of the kitchen. The dining room. The house. Lukas watches them curiously, uninvestedly. They all look alike. They all look nothing alike. They'll grow up to be warriors and mystics; breeding stock; all-but-servants. For all he knows, someday one of them might come to him to challenge for the hand of his sister. For all he knows, none of them will survive past their eighteenth birthday.
He doesn't speak to any of them. He doesn't deign to notice their quirks and fallibilities; the boy that's mooing, the girl that stares.
The only exception is when Sarka and Emilie pass through. The mother of Garou; the mate of a Garou. For these women, Lukas pushes back his chair and stands, formally, falling into a trained and effortless pattern of behavior that's pretty courtesy but not true respect. He remains standing as they pass through, tall, self-possessed. He inclines his head to Sarka as she leaves. And he sits when they are gone.
When Danicka enters, helping her father carry dinner to the table, Lukas stands again. Smoothly; unhurriedly.
The difference is he speaks her name. It comes coolly, as uninvestedly as his regard of the children, but it also comes as involuntarily as a heartbeat, a breath.
"Danička," he says quietly; her name, nothing more.
She goes to serve her brother. He sits. He watches her move, her slender hands on the serving-spoons, her graceful fingers. He thinks of her picking food off his plate, eating meat out of his meal, sharing it thoughtlessly, intimately, as though they had known one another all their lives. As though she had a right to what was his. After a moment, he looks away.
Her father, meanwhile, fills his plate and he allows it, turning his attention to the Theurge who speaks to him. "Actually," Lukas says, and if he could lie better than he does, if he could control himself better than this, he might not say this at all, "I don't."
A beat; then his mouth quirks, a faint and wry smile.
"Too young."
[Danicka Musil] Sarka, of all of them, is the only one who seems to really take note of Lukas at all. They all see him. The children are simultaneously afraid of him and curious about him, whether he notices them or not. Emilie does not look at anyone or anything but Vladik. Sarka, however, quirks a brow at him when he rises to his feet, as though to say
Oh, really?
but she's gone a moment or two later, glancing back at him before going out with her half-brother's mate, with her children who -- in at least one case -- have begun to adore a man her instincts and Emilie's anxiety tell her is more of a monster than her twin, more of a monster than her father's second mate, more of a monster than the blackhaired one sitting at the table.
His standing makes Emilie start slightly. His standing makes Vladislav glance over and up at him, but he doesn't quirk a brow like Sarka. He doesn't seem to react at all, other than simply... noticing.
Because he stands, and because he says her name, Danicka does glance over at him when she enters. Her eyes flick to his, then down to his cheek, his chin, then back to what she's doing. She doesn't say his name. Just:
"Hello," quietly, before she begins serving Vladislav. She looks at him again as he says that he doesn't remember adjusting to being in America after living in Czechoslovakia. The look is brief, though longer than her last one. Despite his wry smile there's a beat where she just looks at him, looks past the top of her brother's head at him, but not his eyes. If he meets her eyes Vladik will know they're looking at each other, and he's supposed to be focused on the Theurge. So she resumes what she's doing, opening the vodka and filling first her brother's tumbler, then picking up a thin pewter pitcher and filling his water glass.
Miloslav does the same for Lukas. The single female in the room goes to her chair finally and seats herself. Miloslav begins filling his own plate. Danicka does not reach for the food, or the vodka, or the water until her father has served himself, and when she does, her motions are so unobtrusive and Vladislav's conversation is so constant that if it were anyone other than Lukas they would not notice that she waits, and they would not notice when she begins filling her plate.
The conversation has nothing to do with anything. He talks about the immigrants their father worked with. He asks about the Sept of Stark Falls. He mentions a few things, here and there, about Shadow Lords they both know personally or by reputation. It's all very polite. It has nothing to do with why Lukas is here. Whenever either glass gets low, Miloslav or Danicka stop what they are doing and move to fill it again. It's automatic. There's no long, hard stares, no snapped fingers. Just smooth, subtle motions from the two kinfolk, whether they are serving brother or guest.
"Danka," Vladik says eventually, somewhere near the latter half of the meal, "do you know why Wyrmbreaker is here?"
She glances up, not at Lukas but to her brother, though her eyes never touch his. There's a pause where she seems to be considering the question, then she glances at Lukas. There's wariness in her eyes, a preparation to get hit by... him, of all people. She looks back to her brother and with a tone of some confession: "He did not tell me he was coming for this. But I thought it might be it."
Vladik looks at his father. "Lukáš wants to take Daniela as his mate."
Miloslav, too, glances at the Ahroun briefly before turning back to his son. "Mmm," he says, a small and noncommital noise of acknowledgement. Consideration. He looks back down at his plate.
"I've told him I'm not sure a Garou of his moon is the right match for you," the Theurge goes on, presumably directing his words at his sister though he is, at the moment, plucking a clementine off his plate and beginning to peel it. "Though he says your frailties don't detract from your bloodline." He looks over at her. Danicka immediately looks down. Her hands are in her lap. Her brother's tone is gentle. His voice is soft. "Do you think you could bear being under him? Breeding with him?"
"Vládík!" Miloslav says sharply, half from offense, half from shock.
The Theurge's eyes pin his father for a moment. Miloslav does not instantly quail, but he does not speak again. Danicka, however:
"I would try," she says quietly, looking from plate to brother only after the words are out of her mouth.
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] The meal proceeds. The conversation is polite. Lukas listens to Vladik discuss the immigrants his father worked with with the same uninvested curiosity he paid the children. He answers questions about Stark Falls: they are well. A pack of cubs recently passed their Rite of Passage. Promised-Rain may take another fosterling; his fifth or sixth now, but only his second after Lukas. They recently lost their Wyrmfoe.
(Promised-Rain thought perhaps Lukas would consider a move back to New York -- the state, if not the city. He declined. This part, he leaves out. It is not Valdislav's business.)
They recently gained a new Master of the Rite after Jakob Star-Felling-Sickle defeated Gilda Stormcaller. And yes, Bites-Iron-Asunder still lives, wilier than ever, half-respected, half-notorious.
And Lukas eats. Heartily. Not ravenously; not uncontrolledly, the way he once ate kolaches -- but with a young man's appetite, and with his usual love of lamb. The roast diminishes. Rib after rib is delivered to his plate by Miloslav, and rib after rib disappears down his throat.
Potatoes, too. And wine. And potato vodka -- though these things he partakes more carefully, restraining himself from true drunkenness.
He has just finished telling them -- which is to say, telling Vladislav, who is the only one of the table who is at all participating in conversation besides Wyrmbreaker himself -- some passing anecdote about the other Fostern Shadow Lord of Chicago, the one who held guardianship of Danicka before Lukas, when Vladik returns the conversation to the subject first broached under the oak in the backyard. And Lukas falls quiet, but his eyes do not rest on his plate. Instead, they fall onto Vladislav and hold, cool, the meaning and his thoughts hooded. Vladik's eyes flick between his sister and his father. His mouth moves. He speaks of things that are deeply personal to Lukas, deeply private, and Lukas is quietly angry to hear him broach the subject so offhandedly; silently seething to hear him speak of what was spoken under the oak as though he were not even there.
And then Vladislav says, Do you think you could bear being under him?
Lukas's anger is a white flash, a white-hot flame burning itself to ash. Burning out. Turning cold.
Breeding with him?
Wyrmbreaker's eyes flicker to Miloslav. Then they settle on Danicka; hold for a beat. Then they return to Vladislav. Without looking at his plate, he spears another piece of potato. Eats it. And waits to see what more Vladik will say; patient now.
[Danicka Musil] Lukas knows that Danicka is stronger than she was when he first saw her in SmartBar, stronger than she was when she first took him to bed, stronger by far than she was when she was clinging to the railing of the porch out back and watching him as though the lock of her eyes could keep him from falling off a branch and breaking his neck against the hard ground softened only by the thick grass of summer.
All the same: she serves her brother with her head bowed, but her hair not in her face. She's dressed more demurely than she's usually dressed, and Danicka doesn't even usually dress revealingly. Yet it's still feminine. It still follows her silhouette. The fact that she is beautiful is somehow, bewilderingly, accentuated by the modesty. It makes her look more like a woman who does not know that she is lovely, which is inexplicably appealing.
And yet, because it's Danicka, and he knows that she is aware of how people see her, of how attractive she is, of how to use it, it rings false to him. Her subservience rings false. Most of all, her embarrassed, uncertain answer when she tells her brother that she would try to tolerate someone like Lukas mounting her like nothing more than a rutting beast
is a lie. It's all a lie. And it is keeping her safe. It is giving Vladik what he wants:
A sister who does not know that she's beautiful, or better: hates that she's beautiful because it is one of the only things that makes her appealing. It reduces her to this.
A sister who is afraid of the Ahroun across the table, who cannot even face him. Who needs Vladislav because no one else wants her, because no one else is as weak as she is, because she would be a burden to them.
A sister who wants to stay with him, under his hand and eye, rather than be given over to someone like Lukas.
And she shudders at the flare of Lukas's temper, quiet as it is. She rounds her shoulders, stares at her plate, and she does not look back at Lukas. Nor does Vladislav. He is looking at Danicka, pausing a moment as she confesses that she would 'try' to withstand Lukas's rage in order to... well. Be his mate. His brows draw together slightly for a second, for two, then clear. His voice is level.
Whatever he says, it's in the one language Danicka and Lukas do not share. It's a question. There's an emphasis on one of the words, a tone of some doubt.
She looks at Lukas for only the second or third time tonight after Vladik speaks. Miloslav is tense when they speak Russian, but he keeps eating, he stays out of it, he does not attempt again to guard the privacy of his daughter. She looks back at Vladik and nods, slowly at first as though she means to only nod once, then twice more, quick bobs of her head. He clenches his jaw and something flickers in his eyes that hasn't been there before. It passes, and he looks back to their guest.
Of honor.
"I see no reason to keep my sister from you, Wyrmbreaker. You claim tolerance of her frailties; I have no wish to see proof of your fitness as a Shadow Lord, an Ahroun, or a Fostern. I do, however," he goes on, "demand proof of your fitness as a mate. And as part of that proof is seeing what you think makes you prepared for what mateship brings, I leave it to you to decide how you'll show me that.
"And if you can't," Vladislav says, picking up his napkin and placing it atop his plate, pushing his chair back, "we can discuss price." He stands, leaving his chair out. "You have twenty-four hours." He begins to walk towards the archway.
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] (on vladik!)
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 1, 1, 10 (Failure at target 6)
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] (on danicka!)
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 4, 7, 7, 7 (Success x 3 at target 6)
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] (SHADOW LORDS DO NOT FUCKING FAIL.)
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 3, 6, 8, 10 (Success x 2 at target 7)
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker]
Dice Rolled:[ 6 d10 ] 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9 (Success x 2 at target 6)
[Danicka Musil] [Assholery + Bullshit]
Dice Rolled:[ 7 d10 ] 1, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 7, 10, 10, 10 (Success x 4 at target 6) Re-rolls: 3
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] When brother and sister converse in their mother's tongue, Lukas looks at them; one, then the other. He's still looking at Danicka when Vladislav begins to speak to him. He continues looking at her, watching her, not caring if this is inexcusably rude, not caring if his masks of social graces have fallen quite to shambles, while the Theurge lays out his terms. Something like terms, anyway.
Then wood grates on wood. Vladislav rises to his feet, and he's leaving now. Lukas blinks once, gently, and looks at the uneaten food on his plate. They form a pattern, bones and meat, potatoes, vegetables. He reads them the way diviners read entrails torn from the sacrificial ram.
"I will not need twenty-four hours," Lukas says, so soon after Vladik finishes that he very nearly cuts the Adren off. His voice is quiet; his tone level and civil and very nearly soft.
Very nearly is not soft.
"And," he continues, "I will not pay a price for Danička as though she were chattel."
Lukas raises his eyes, then, and looks toward Vladislav. His stare is absolutely direct; it is not aggressive, but it will be a facedown if Vladik makes it one.
"I have respected your rank and your territory thus far, Heals-by-Pain-rhya. I have come to you in good faith to ask for the hand of your sister, as honor demands I should. I have allowed you to delay the conclusion of my challenge and, indeed, even its acceptance. I have allowed you to condescend to me, and to insult my ability to control my Rage when it is was the first thing I learned. I have allowed you to ask utterly inappropriate questions of my future mate under her father's roof, at her father's table, before her father's eyes.
"I have done this because you are my elder. You were Fostern when I was cub. You are Adren now, and I am Fostern. You have earned both your rank and your good name in the Nation. Whatever else, you are a mighty Theurge, and your worth to Thunder will only grow.
"But you are not so far above me, Rhya, that you are utterly exempt from the laws of honorable challenge. And I will not allow you to turn this into some sort of puppet trial where you set your terms as you please and exact your price as you wish.
"One more time, I'll play by your rules. I'll tell you what makes me fit as a mate to your sister. But if you remain unsatisfied, we'll seek the Master of the Challenge of the Sept of the Green."
A beat.
"Will you sit and listen?"
[Danicka Musil] The stare does not turn into a facedown. That is, perhaps, the most important thing. Vladislav regards Lukas with cool certainty there, neither needing nor attempting to assert his dominance. He remains standing, does not leave the room. He stands at the corner of the table, between his seat and his father's. His father, who looks so old, who is not shaking but neither eating, who poured Lukas's vodka with a steady, calloused hand that once carved miniscule finches and dahlias into the doors of a cabinet that will be here long after he is dead, that somehow survived every brutality of his mate and son throughout the years.
Danicka is trembling, though, when Lukas informs Vladislav that he has respected his rank and territory so far. She takes a deep breath, slowly, and stops herself. The shaking subsides. Not that anyone is looking at her. And thank god for that.
Vladik tips his head to the side when Lukas tells him what he's allowed. He flicks a brow upward at father's roof, father's table, father's eyes. Something is cold and dead inside his own. He does not sit down. He leans onto the table, setting down first one hand and then the other, palms flat, and there's something utterly savage about the way his shoulders curl, the way his head lowers, the way his voice is underwritten by a soft growl.
"Tohle je moje střechou. To je můj tabulka. Tohle je moje území. A to jsou mé blízké."
Every time he speaks a word of possession, the snarl in his voice rolls, the edges of his teeth all but scrape against one another. His rage unfurls around him with the words.
"You are lucky I did not bring her back here when I smelled you all over her in June."
Danicka flinches.
"You are lucky I have tried to pretend ignorance of the fact that you've made a whore out of her, for the sake of her happiness. You are lucky I am making this as easy on you as I am. I could deny the challenge completely. I could send you on an impossible quest so that when you come back to claim her she is old, and dry, and useless to you. But she wants you," he says, with another spike of pure, blatant rage at the words.
"So you will not speak to me so in my own house. If you want her, you will tell me why I should give her up."
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 1, 7, 7, 10 (Success x 2 at target 6)
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] It would be easy to mistake Lukas's averted eyes as some sign of weakness, or submission. When the Adren leans into the table, when he snarls, when every last scrap of pleasant veneer is gone from this conversation and all the empty conversational niceties, all the skin-deep smiles and all the civilities have burnt away to ash
and they are exactly what they are: two males fighting over one female
the Fostern looks away, and across the table, and fixes his eyes on the woman he wants.
And loves. That's important.
He watches her for a long time. Reading people has never been easy for Lukas. It does not come naturally to him, a reflex, the way it does to Danicka. It takes him time to look into her, to sift through the layers, to read what is true beneath what is not.
All the while rage rises off of him like heat, beats off of him like a solar wind, buffeting all in its path until all in its path lies pale and wan and shattered.
What he sees in her makes him close his eyes for a moment. Then he looks at the brother, whose eyes are soft blue, whose jaw is the same as the sister's and the mother's, whose nature is twisted almost beyond what Lukas can understand ... but not quite.
(Mine. Mine. My. Moje.)
"Because," Lukas replies quietly, "I love her."
Perhaps Vladislav does not know how close to violence the wolf before him came. Perhaps he doesn't realize what a monstrous foe Wyrmbreaker is: strong and fast and enduring, true, but more so than that: deadly intelligent, with a cold, tactical mind and no compunctions whatsoever about doing what is necessary. Perhaps he doesn't know the razor's edge the Ahroun rides even now, or how the moon calls to him, or worse -- how his own cunning calls to him, how all his intelligence and all his ferocity begs to be bent to the cause of brutality and dominance not because he cannot control himself, not even because he wants Vladislav dead, but because he wants victory at any cost.
Lukas is an honest man, but he does not always tell the truth.
Lukas believes in unity and the greater cause, but he is not a peaceful man. The monster Danicka takes into her bed is every bit as savage as the one that beat her within an inch of her life, over and over and over. The only difference is
(he loves her.)
he tries to direct his rage in the name of the war. He tries to remember the greater cause. He tries to stay his hand when only selfishness drives him.
It's not the war, or the greater cause, that keeps him from coming up out of his chair and turning this room into an abattoir. It has nothing to do with that, and everything to do with the blonde across the table that he is no longer looking at, and what has happened before in this house.
"Because I can make her happy. Because I want to keep her safe. Because I would never, ever hurt her willingly, deliberately, and maliciously.
"Because I would protect her as well as my imperfections and fallibilities allow. From her enemies, and mine, and from myself.
"Because I am protecting her as we speak from the sight of her brother and her lover tearing one another asunder.
"Kdyby ona se rozumí cokoli pro vás vůbec, pomozte mi."
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 4, 4, 5, 7 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[Danicka Musil] What neither Shadow Lord knows -- what neither of them can see, or risk noticing at the moment for fear of losing all control, all footing -- is the way Miloslav does not look at Danicka but reaches down, shifts aside the tablecloth, and covers her hand with his own. They both have warm hands. For all their rage, all the strength, all their fervor, Laura and Vladik never really had that same warmth. Maybe their hearts didn't beat strong enough. Maybe their hearts just didn't beat. Maybe they were the sky and the mountains and the stream, and their kin were the earth
and the cookfire
and the oak.
When he looks at her, Lukas can see how pale Danicka is underneath that summer-gold glow she's had since May, since perhaps before. Since what she wanted most came, and it was spring, and he told her he couldn't think when she peeled off her rainsoaked dress like that and kept talking in complete sentences as though she didn't know that his instincts were all but vibrating inside him, like they are now. And though what he wanted to do then and what he wanted to do just now are utterly different expressions, the instinct itself is essentially the same, and unnameable.
If this were simply two males fighting over a female, both wanting the same rights to her, it might be different. She might not look so pale, might not look like she's fighting to hold onto consciousness. She might, like some women would, take pleasure in it. Might preen. Might do any number of things. She might not look like she is genuinely, utterly terrified at what they might do to each other. She might not look like she did when she was small, and Jaroslav would shout, and she would bolt to the closet under the stairs or run under this table to hide
even though she knew hiding would do no good.
He looks at Danicka, and Vladik clenches his jaw against a growl of challenge. Their eyes meet again, after Lukas's close, and open, with deliberate slowness and careful control. There is no telling what would happen if even one of them lost that control right now. Vladislav's entire pack can be here in moments if he calls them. Lukas can savage any number of foes to bloody wrecks or corpses in the amount of time it takes them to realize he's even changed his shape. Neither of them is weak. Neither of them is uninvested.
The table creaks under Vladislav's hands as they clutch at the tablecloth, the wood, because
I love her.
Moje.
There is a difference.
At his challenge for rank he was questioned about restraint, and the reasons for it. At his challenge, he told Curata the Grim Heart of letting Mjollnir's Heart live when he had every right to kill him, and one of the reasons he had that right was everything Sam did to Danicka, every disobedience, every not-so-subtle threat, every time he thought about seeing her climb into his then-packmate's lap and tip his head back with the force of her kiss. At his challenge he talked about when and why he would hold back. Her name never came up. Her brother, and what he would do if he looked him in the eye, wasn't mentioned.
And now he knows.
Danicka doesn't look at him, can't look at him or Vladislav because she does not want to watch this. She does not want to see Lukas kill her brother. Whether he sees it or not. Whether he understands how much of her lying has to do with the man looming at the head of the table, bent over the corner, all but snarling in his own rage. Whether or not he could ever wrap his mind around the tangle of fear and loyalty, the knot of family, the impossibility of reconciling her feeling for the boy who wrapped his arms around her in the closet under the stairs and hushed her with her feeling for the man who sat on her bed in June and held the clothes she'd worn at the Times Square W to his nose, scenting Lukas, scenting that entire night on her, and
sending her back to Chicago afterwards, without a mark on her.
She does not think she could ever explain, or excuse, all the years of lying to protect her brother, despite everything. Because of everything. She does not think she could ever bear for Lukas to know that she is, at this moment, afraid that he might kill the strongest link to her past that she has, take something from her she cannot regain, even if it is not a past she likes to remember or something she wants to have. He asked her once how she reconciled herself with herself. She answered with something flippant, something about consistency. Perhaps she said I don't when the real truth was
I can't.
Her hand moves under her father's, and he holds it tighter, makes her be still. She stills. And Lukas tells Vladislav why he should give Danicka to him. Why he deserves her. What makes him fit to be not just a mate but her mate. As though that's what it's about: as though her fitness does not enter into it, so long as she's reproductively viable and his concern about his reputation has been dismissed. As though it isn't about Vladislav hating, intensely, the very thing he's been trying to make happen on his own terms for so many years.
And what makes him deserve her, what makes him fit: happiness. Safety. Protection. And love.
That's important.
He told her once -- warned her -- that he would not simply lose his temper and strike her. That if his hand flew across her face as it had Andrea's, as it had any number of other kinswomen's faces, it would be a choice. It would be discipline. Punishment. It would not be an accident. It would deliberate. He's never taken it back, until now. Danicka looks up when he says that part, but it can't last. She closes her eyes and takes a breath, looks at her plate, looks at the rind of a clementine sitting on the china.
Vladislav does not react there. He reacts when Lukas says from myself. Some of the snarl goes out, and something flickers in his eyes that Lukas does not know him well enough to perfectly interpret. All he knows is:
My brother and I were consistently underweight as infants because my mother insisted on nursing us. We couldn't stand to be held, we wouldn't feed, and she wouldn't give up. I've told you that the first time I saw her in crinos I was three years old. She threw my father through a wall while Vládík ran me to go hide. He held his hand over my mouth to keep me from screaming, so she wouldn't find us. I thought she was killing my father. He was eight.
he was raised by Night Warder, too. And privileged because of it. And elevated in the home because of it. And he is still thin because of it, and he is twisted because of it, and warped beyond comprehension because of it. It is not the flash of a broken little boy that Lukas sees then. Just a moment, a memory, an understanding.
Lukas would protect her from himself. Laura never did the same for them.
He does not seem to be listening at the very end. He is looking at Danicka when Lukas slips into Czech. And when the words have died in the air, when they're nothing more than an echo, Vladislav speaks.
"Daniela."
She looks up and over at him. She does not look afraid of being hit. She looks afraid of being told No.
Her brother straightens up, taking his hands off the table. His next words are in Russian. They are not for Lukas. They are flatly delivered, and the last of the color goes out of her face even as a certain venomous resolve enters her eyes. When he's finished, he moves to his chair again and seats himself, scoots in, and picks up the clementine he'd abandoned. Danicka takes a breath and rises to her feet. Unlike her brother, she pushes in her chair after she stands, and moves to leave the room.
"I want you out of my house," Vladislav says levelly, peeling the bit of fruit with obsessive deliberation. "I'll send her to you within the hour."
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] For a moment, with startling, surreal clarity, Lukas sees the lines that bind present to past to future. He sees the cause and the effect, the relationships of causality, the ties that run from what he said
(protect her ... from myself.)
to what she said
(she wouldn't give up.)
to what Vladislav had to bear as a child, a boy, a cub, a growing, fragile thing that could so very easily be twisted and bent and malformed into...
...well. Into exactly the sort of thing he is today.
Lukas wonders, briefly, who of his Sept of the Green would recognize him as he was a moment ago. He wonders if the man under the oak tree, self-assured, friendly, charming, is all they know of him. He thinks of that man, the way he winked at his nephew, the way he drew those around him to him with his presence and his charisma, and he can see almost no link between him and the animal that leaned snarling at him over the dinner table.
Vladik is not snarling anymore. Lukas is not fighting to find reasons not to explode into violence anymore. They're both calm now, or the closest approximation they can make. It's not the same. This is not calm, Vladik's level voice and minute, arbitrary focus. This is not the charming mask. This is a sort of frayed, flayed, precarious stillness, as unstable and momentary as a storm's eyes.
Lukas: that calm is a little truer, though it's blasted, stripped. He's suddenly exhausted. He looks at Vladislav, but it's just a place to rest his eyes for the moment.
The father holds the daughter's hand.
When she was young, Danicka always ran behind her father.
Lukas looks down at his plate, his mostly-eaten meal, his mostly-drunk wine. He lifts his napkin from his lap. Folds it. Lays it gently, carefully atop his plate, and stands. For a moment it seems he will do as Vladislav says. Commands.
The moment passes.
"Ne." The refusal is gently spoken. "Můj lodní důstojník listy s mnou."
[Danicka Musil] "Musím si sbalit své věci, lásko."
It isn't Vladislav who answers Lukas's refusal. The two males bearing the Musil name are seated, and the man who refuses to go by Kvasnicka and the woman he came here to get for himself are standing. She pauses when he stands up and speaks, starts to look over her shoulder but stops herself before she turns enough to see him, and her voice is just a few steps above a murmur.
Vladislav goes on peeling the clementine, separating the segments with slow, deft movements of his long fingers.
Miloslav leans forward, and his hand moves up a bit as though he would cover his face, but in the end he merely wipes it down his mouth and reaches for the vodka that Lukas brought with him.
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 2, 6, 10, 10 (Success x 3 at target 6)
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker]
Dice Rolled:[ 4 d10 ] 3, 4, 5, 6 (Success x 1 at target 6)
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] Almost nothing tonight has gone the way Lukas envisioned, expected, or could have even planned for. It's merely another drop in the ocean when it's not Vladislav that answers him but Danicka. For a long time after, Lukas's eyes are on the former. When at last they peel away and move to the latter, he draws a short breath that she can see even from across the room.
If she were looking. Which she is not.
Lukas is quiet for a moment, weighing himself against himself. Then he nods -- a faint inclination of his head.
"Počkám na tebe venku."
Hesitation -- the first for a long time; not a pause but an uncertainty. Then he looks at Miloslav. "Dobrou noc, pane Musil," Lukas says, as though he were still five years old, coached to say precisely this by his mother and his older sister. "Děkuji vám za pozvání."
Lukas does not expect a reply. He steps back from the table, pushes in his chair, and walks through rooms, distances, half-remembered memories, to the front door.
[Danicka Musil] She doesn't nod. She walks out of the dining room. And Vladislav looks up and over at him.
"Ona je tvoje," he says flatly, lowly. And Miloslav covers his face finally, his elbow on the table. "Nebudou nadále otázkou mé cti. Pošlu vám její."
Though he spent all that time peeling his bit of fruit, picking it apart, Vladik doesn't take even a single bite. He stares at Lukas in the moment he has between the Shadow Lord's words to Danicka and his turn towards the father. The supposed man of the house, when he never was. When he never will be. Miloslav just nods, his hand falling again, to what Lukas says. And Vladik all but growls:
"Chci tě pryč, Wyrmbreaker. Vypadni z mý území."
He can hear footsteps overhead. Soft ones.
[Lukas Wyrmbreaker] For a moment, when the word honor leaves Vladislav's mouth, Lukas sees nothing but red, hears nothing but the empty, mindless roaring of his own rage.
It passes. He bids Danicka's father goodnight and starts toward the door. He doesn't answer Vladik. He has no intention of doing as told, but he doesn't answer because some illogical part of him thinks he will avoid conflict like this, the way an ostrich buries its head in sand. But then the Theurge speaks again, and Lukas's departure slows; stops.
His back turned, his voice low, he answers.
"Netlačte mě, Vladislav. Já vím, co ty volat čest a ochranu. Počkám venku."
celebration.
9 years ago