2 Ymiden 722
Early Hours Before Sunrise
It felt like Sabrina had just returned to Etzos after a season. Forty trials on a farm had been a humbling experience. While it offered a nice reprieve from the bustle of city life and an isolated safe haven, the prostitute turned dancer found that manual labor wasn't really her preference. The farmer's young boys were far more capable than she was with any tool and exceeded her at every chore. She supposed they had more tutelage than she did and plenty of practice to go with it. It wasn't like she was required to do any of its likeness growing up in the Augiery.
The tense, homely vacation had ended though. Maxine had healed and the heat of angry Dorricks had subsided out of the immediate area of the Rusalka's destructive tantrum. More importantly, Sabrina imagined that her ever obstinate, perpetually angry companion was much more suited for another round if they did run into trouble. The Old Farmer kicked them out and Max seemed relieved for it. As much as Sabrina secretly cherished the isolation with a tarnished object of her affection, a part of her did long for the familiarity of the underground brothel she practically ruled like a queen.
Her return came with swift reassertions of her importance, skill, and power in the business. The handful of ambitious whores who thought they could take her place as a headliner had been dealt with. Her homecoming performance, even solo, was fresh and lively enough to set a fire in the managers' eyes like each one before. Their immense satisfaction squashed all whispers of a coupe. Sabrina was back and sitting back in her proverbial throne felt good.
"Lovely costume choice, Zena," she sung as she passed the girl in the hallway on her retreat from the main club room. "I always knew red was your color, lovey. I'm glad you stopped listening to Jennifer." Zena beamed with a bright smile that widened Sabrina's in kind. It was a good trial and everyone was feeling the potential to make plenty of coin within the next couple nights. Sabrina flipped her hair and started to shrug the straps of
her outfit off her shoulders as she entered her bedroom. The door closed swiftly behind her.
As always, shoes came off first. She neatly slipped them off and returned them to their row with the rest of her collection. Next she yanked the tie out of her hair and dropped it on her night stand. Her supple frame slid down into the chair in front of her vanity mirror. She was reaching for a hair brush when her eyes caught a shadow in the reflection in front of her. She froze. So quiet was the stranger's entrance she never even heard the door open and close again.
"Shit," Sabrina exclaimed as she glared at the dark silhouette in the mirror. "You about scared me to damned death, Max." She knew the woman's shadow anywhere by now. Even if the woman herself was a frustrating mystery. She picked up the brush and started to comb her hair. Three strokes in she started to slow the task. Usually the Rusalka, pain in the ass as she was, would've made some slick quip or suggestive comment by now. Instead the shadow remained frozen in the flickering candlelight.
"Maxine?" Sabrina put the brush down and slowly turned in her seat. Eyes on her companion now, her blood ran cold. "What's wrong?"
Maxine's eyes were wild and red with bloodshot. Her shoulders were rising and falling with each quickened, excited breath. Her hair was a mess, and the tight fists at her sides were marred with fresh, opened wounds on her knuckles. Sabrina slowly stood up. In the other woman's face she could see a strangled, loosely bridled flurry of emotion in her twisted expression. She could smell the alcohol in the air.
"When you told me about your mother?" Maxine started, voice shaky with noosed emotion. "Who did you mean?"
"Max, I---"
"You know that I know, Sabrina. I've killed people with tattoos like yours. I know what you are, and you've seen me too." The Rusalka turned the lock on the door but otherwise neither retreated on moved closer to the Naerikk. "You know I'm maybe the only other person in Etzos who accepts your ties, and no one can hear us. Tell me."
"My birth mother is in the Augiery," Sabrina admitted softly. "We all recognize the Shadow Mother. She is our creator."
"Audrae."
"Yes. Audrae."
As Maxine stared at the dancer she noticed a glassiness coming to Sabrina's eyes. The subtle reflection of light on welled tears came next. Watching this change, the Rusalka took a protesting step backward and shook her head. She reached her hands up through her hair and turned her gaze toward the ceiling, willing gravity to force the wetness that suddenly came to her own eyes to keep from spilling. Her ragged inhale surprised her and she turned from the dancer while her mask briefly slipped. Then she turned back on her heels and took a few sharp steps closer to the Naerikk.
"No," Max pointed a finger sharply at the dancer. "I don't accept this. This isn't right!"
She couldn't hold back the tidal wave forever. The Rusalka reached for the coat hanger resting beside the door and wrenched it with all her might down to the floor. Coats spilled and wood splintered upon wood. Sabrina flinched at the sound and the violence of it but said nothing. She tried to blink the tears from her eyes while the more explosive of their pair paced, processing a reality the dancer had known for some time.
Max wanted to hide in her denial but this knowledge of Audrae's fate had come straight from the lips of Chrien, a message conveyed to her after waking from a dream. Her greatest Immortal matron would never lead her astray with anything but the truth.
"She's the Immortal of Deception! Lies! I would fucking know!" Max's ire was snarled. "Tell me this is another one of her games, 'Brina. Tell me the truth: this is a big fucking illusion again. Another performance or some kind of elaborate plot."
"I wish it was," Sabrina murmured morosely. "I was sent word straight from the Augiery. The city is a mess over it."
"You don't fucking get it," Max slurred her fury louder than before. "She can't be dead. She just can't. Her and I, we weren't done!"
"Shhhh..."
"How could this happen?"
"Try to keep your voice down before someone hears us."
"How is this possible?"
"Shadow Mother was always seven steps ahead of anyone else on any board of her interest," Sabrina lamented quietly. "She must've missed something. Something, or someone, she didn't account for. That is why I am certain the one who murdered her is unworthy. A real threat I'm sure she would've been watching closely, planning for them. Someone slipped through the cracks. There is no understanding it."
"What is being done about this?" Max stormed into Sabrina's space now, frame quivering with vengeful thirst. "Why are your people not riding the fucking night sky and avenging her? Why the fuck isn't there a war being waged over this? Someone has to fucking die, do they not?"
"Max..."
"Just give me a fucking name." She swayed in place, lip curled fiercely. "That's all I need. A fucking name. I'll do it myself. I'll kill that motherfucker!"
"Her death cannot go unanswered. You think your thoughts aren't in the minds of every living Naerikk in Idalos? We loved her."
"If I had known this..."
Maxine stumbled backward. When her drunken heels hit the fallen coat hanger she fell against the edge of Sabrina's bed. She didn't care to right herself. She let gravity carry her down the side of the furniture until she was seated on the ground with her back propped up against it. She drew her knees in toward her chest and dropped her head back against the mattress. Bewildered by the storm of emotion that had entered her room and the unearthing of her own sorrow, Sabrina followed to kneel before the Rusalka on the floor.
"I had been talking about her too that trial," Maxine explained, boisterousness quieting to nearly a whisper.
"How do you mean?" Sabrina asked with a tilt to her head, eyes narrowing as she recalled their conversation a season ago. Max responded by bowing her forehead to touch her knees. One of her hands parted her hair and Sabrina's eyes widened. The Naerikk sprung forward and shoved the shielding locks away from Maxine's scalp. Her fingers longingly traced the edges of Audrae's mark when she discovered it etched into her companion's flesh.
"You bear the mark of the Dark One." There was a level of awe in the dancer's observation if not some twinge of jealousy. She planted a reverent kiss on the mark, the place her slain Immortal Queen had touched with her own hand the servant she left behind in this world. "Your grief and mine are the same..."
"All this time for arcs I thought she abandoned me." Max lifted her head up and found that gravity no longer served her. The stupid tears spilled over the full wells in her bloodshot, tense eyes. "Since Saun I thought that's why I couldn't feel her presence anymore. Now I find out that this is why? I was doing so much of this..." Maxine gestured to her disheveled, alcohol and drug-infused self. "...That I had no idea some bastard somewhere out there was killing her." She stomped one of her feet on the floor and jammed the heels of her hands towards her eyes to rub the water away. "I was probably piss drunk in some tavern or limp in some alleyway with a fucking needle in my arm. Fuck!"
Sabrina moved to sit beside the mourning Rusalka. She courageously reached a hand toward the woman to softly rub her arm. Maxine jumped at the touch but didn't flee. She left her head in her hands and condemned herself internally when she felt her shoulders shake.
"We have so much left to talk about," Max mourned. "Now we will never speak again." Sabrina leaned over to rest her head on the Rusalka's shoulder. Max lifted her head and sucked in a sharp, shuddering breath. She failed to keep the tears from welling even now. "She never called me a servant. She called me 'daughter.' And that last fucking thing I said to her was 'I am no daughter of yours.'" She wiped another frustrating tear from her face before it could leave a streak down her cheek. "I was angry and I hated her. After all that time at the farm, especially on the 120th? I did a lot of thinking and remembering shit I didn't ever want to think or remember ever again. Then I found out, and I thought and I remembered some more. I thought she set me up and betrayed me. I didn't realize I was fucked from the moment I sat down at that table. I was fucked before that honestly, but as soon as I entertained that other cunt I was finished." Max swallowed hard and leaned her head back on the bed again.
"I think I know now that Audrae tried to help save me from myself. She saw I was in a trap without a clue and she came out of the shadows to sit with me in it. She knew and she tried to open my eyes." She shook her head. "I was too fixed on my own agenda, too preoccupied with being so fucking angry at everyone else and wanting to save the few people I cared about, I couldn't see what was right in front of my eyes. Not even with Audrae poking holes in reality and whispering hints in my ears. She wanted me to find the answers myself but I'm too fucking dense." Max exhaled through her nose. She could feel more saline streaks rolling down her face. "She died knowing I fucking hated her. I can't even take it all back."
"She knew your secrets, Max," Sabrina tried to console her gently. "Even the ones we keep from ourselves. Maybe she knew you wouldn't feel that way forever."
"No," Max offered herself no solace. "I meant the things I said to her. I really did hate her and I never thought I would stop. It doesn't matter. We'll never get to talk about it. I can't apologize, or thank her for saving my life after I was sentenced, or tell her I'm starting to get that she was trying to teach me something that shitty trial even if it felt like betrayal. She's just fucking gone. Someone stole all of that from me."
"I understand now that she was another one on the short list of people who did nothing but try to help me," the Rusalka spoke her revelation aloud slowly. "Audrae was another person who invested in me, looked out for me, and tried to save me from myself. Even when I didn't fucking deserve it. Everyone who had ever undertaken that fool's errand I've betrayed, gotten killed, or has been taken from me. I don't have much left to lose."
"What are you going to do?" Sabrina asked, tilting her head to look up at the woman with the thousand yard stare forward.
"The only thing I know how to do." Max looked down at Sabrina. "I'm going to serve the only Immortal mother I have left, and try to learn the lesson Audrae was trying to teach me. There was a thing I was supposed to do two arcs ago. Someone else on that short list gave me a mission I didn't finish. I'm going to do what I was supposed to do, out here."
"How?"
"I'm going after The Dorricks. I'm going to expose them for what they are and bring them into the light. Tristane will not sit in any seat of power in Etzos. I'm going to destroy them. The right way, as Audrae would want me to."
"You know I hate them as much as you do," Sabrina cautioned. "They're very powerful, influential people in this city, Maxine. Are you sure that's a hive you want to kick?"
"I'm going to smoke them out." Max shrugged and dropped her shoulders. "Besides, what do I have left for them to take from me? They can't hurt me."
"You'll let me help you then." Sabrina's firm expression reminded Maxine she was telling, not asking. "For Audrae. And for me."
Maxine nodded and turned to stare at the wall in front of her again. Sabrina nestled against her, and the two went silent in their mutual despondency. The Rusalka's mind switched back and forth between her grief and rumination over her new, growing obsession. She was starting to understand what she had to do, and what she resigned to be.
Criminal. Murderer. Traitor. Junkie. Anarchist.
In the image, of the perception, of her matrons. Especially the one left to watch.
”Maxine is unworthy. As a person. But you're hardly even a person anymore, are you? More a force of nature. Mine..."
"I’m going to be everything everyone already thinks I am.”
