The Majestic
69 Autumn 217
Ethan
Inside the Majestic, a man of average height and appearance stands in the garishly furnished lobby. A simple mask of a rooster sits atop his head, holding back a mane of blonde hair from his face. He is dressed in cheap but festive clothing, clutching a left hand wrapped in a bloodied bandage.
“She’ll be down in a minute,” Madam Lovelace told the man.
The last time Ethan had seen this woman he was also wearing a mask. Then, he’d collected a large stash of coins from the men he’d murdered, effectively taking a ‘fee’ for his services and ‘selling’ the establishment to the savvy little woman. This time, he had paid her three silver to fetch their physician.
Lovelace gave him an accepting nod and moved off to tend to affairs more related to her traditional business. Since Vanja had become a resident, many had called on her services - a sprained ankle here, a broken arm there. Not all of them paid. By offering the silver, Ethan became an acceptable guest in Lovelace’s eyes.
A short time later Vanja came walking down the stairs. She recognized Ethan immediately. His costume was not intended to fool her, only to make it more difficult to match Ethan’s face with hers. It was likely to be an unnecessary precaution but he was saved by such precautions more than he was hurt by them.
“I had a bit of an accident.” he said to her as she approached. “A friend of mine said a physician worked out of here and would accept coin for treatment.”
Vanja
Vanja studies the injured man for just a moment, taking in his appearance. It’s Ethan. His current costume is far less elaborate than the last time - just a mask swept over newly-blond hair - but Vanja knows that his own face is disguise enough in a place where he’s unknown. She looks at the bloodied bandage covering his hand, and she’s certain that’s part of the disguise too. Just an excuse to speak with her. She can’t think why he would be here, and she’s too tired to ask. It had been a long, discouraging night, and she hadn’t yet slept.
Vanja nods to him, gestures for him to follow her. She leads him to her makeshift physician’s room - a small space on the first floor, next to the kitchen. The room had been a pantry once, with iceboxes set below the floor, filled with some of Northgate’s year-round snow. A narrow cot is against the wall furthest from the door - the rest of the walls lined with cabinets, still mostly empty. The window above the cot is covered by a thick curtain, the room instead illuminated by the sharp iridescence of gas lamps. The center of the room is dominated by a large butcher-block table, clean but marked by a few dark stains.
Ethan
Ethan unwraps his hand to reveal a minor cut. The type which can bleed a lot at first but rarely need mending beyond a clean cloth, pressure, and a little bit of time. A bloody scratch, really.
“Foolish accident. Cutting myself the way I did…” he looks around the room. “A nice clinic you have here. Private…” He says, although it is intended more as a question begging for confirmation rather than a statement.
Vanja
“Still,” says Vanja, “that kind of little thing can fester. You could lose a hand if you’re not more careful.”
She gestures for him to sit, if he likes, but it’s physician’s habit. She knows that Ethan isn’t here for some minor cut.
Vanja checks the door, and bars it just in case - she’s learned her lesson about locked doors twice over now, and it’s not a mistake she intends to repeat. Once the door is shut, she turns back to Ethan, arms folded over her chest.
“The girls’ rooms are upstairs. Unless you’re screaming from amputation, no one should hear anything. What did you really need?”
Ethan
“There was a lot going on the other night. More than anything I anticipated. A pleasant surprise, for once…”
“Still, it dawned on me only later. You said you knew Roux. Said something about a fight club…?” His face appears relaxed. There is no tension and his voice or body. Everything appears calm.
He seems to be studying Vanja’s face. Perhaps looking to read a lie if one was offered? Perhaps something else…
Vanja
Vanja laughs, busying herself at one of the cabinets, preparing a square of clean linen. It had seemed like chance upon chance last night. The scant handful of people she’d met in the city all appearing at the meeting. And others, old friends of Ethan and Bax’s reuniting by the flow of fate.
“That was a surprise, but then so was all of it - it seems like you’ve built yourself quite a collection of powerful friends.”
“Not the least of it was seeing Roux there, though, and with that foreign girl, Astarael,” She shrugs, climbing a small step stool to reach an upper cabinet. From the top of the stool, she glances at Ethan, trying to read his reasoning for the question, “You don’t have to worry about anything there, though - there’s no bad feelings between Roux and me, or anything - the fights are just for fun. For sport.”
Ethan
“I see… Tell me about them.”
Vanja
Vanja gestures at her own face, where there are a few greenish bruises collected from the past few nights. She’d gone after the meeting, and not bothered to heal the resulting minor injuries. For most of Autumn’s Turn she would be masked anyway.
“You go. You fight? Usually until one of you is unconscious, but you can quit before then, too.” She shrugs, “No weapons or anything, so it’s not like I’d get too badly hurt. And your friend, Roux, won’t fight me anyway, even though I’ve asked.”
She looks Ethan up and down, “I don’t think it’s your sort of thing.”
Ethan
He smiles. “That’s a fair assessment. I don’t think I would fare well, getting knocked unconscious a few times each week…”
“But I assume you always win your fights…”
Vanja
“No? Of course not,” says Vanja. “But they’re ready enough for that thing at Pin’s. No one gets thrown out into the street or robbed or anything. It’s not all above board, but there’s a place where you can go til you’re ready to leave. You can sober up there, too.”
She turns back to Ethan, stepping down from the stool, having finally found the bottle of alcohol. “And what does it matter to you, anyway? You know I can heal myself up properly after, and the only other person getting hurt is whoever I’m fighting.”
There’s a sharp smell of medical alcohol from the square of linen, “Brace yourself.”
Ethan
He holds up his hand to stop her. “The magic healing instead, if you would. I’ve never actually seen it performed by you…”
As he waits he asks yet another question about the club. “Are there a lot of pretty girls that go there to fight…?”
Vanja
Vanja narrows her eyes. She wouldn’t normally waste River magic on a cut this minor, not even for herself, but it’s late enough in the day, and even when the Aurora isn’t visible, the River still replenishes the pool of energy she draws on for her healing.
Maybe it was a test - asking her to prove her value to Ethan’s army of powerful magic-users.
“Fine,” she says, she takes his hand, and traces a shape into it. A thin ribbon of green light flows from her fingertip into the skin around the wound, the riverlight pulling the skin together neater, more cleanly than any stitch of thread or catgut. The seam glows for an instant, light seeping through the skin as it knits together. Then it’s gone.
“And no. No other ‘pretty girls’,” she says, mocking his tone, “It’s mostly men at Pin’s, but they don’t give me any trouble.”
Ethan
Ethan looks at his hand, the skin good as new. The injury vanishing as though it never existed.
Magic is a hell of a thing…
“Thank you,” he utters quietly. “So, let me see if I have this correct… A few times a week, an unusually pretty girl goes toe-to-toe against a sad lot of desperate men — men who have almost nothing left to lose — often fighting until she (or the man) is knocked unconscious.
“Is that your idea of laying low…?”
Vanja
Vanja purses her lips. It had been a trap. Of course. He’d never been worried about her safety - he was concerned she’d become a threat to his friends.
She had been reckless, that was true enough, but she couldn’t see why it mattered at all. The only person she was endangering was herself.
“Did you have this same conversation with Roux, then?” Her voice is low, tinged with venom, “Or not, because he’s your friend?” She laughs drily, humorlessly.
“Or because he’s a man? I notice none of your other contacts are set up in safe houses that double as brothels.” She turns away, hiding the color rising in her face, burning with self-conscious frustration. She starts to tidy the room out of habit, but there’s little to do.
“Or maybe this is the sort of dressing down you reserve for your…new recruits. Not those in the inner circle.”
Her voice is rising now, words flowing with less caution. She looks back at Ethan, “Is that why you and your old friends stayed after the rest of us left? To talk about which of us, of the new ones, were likely to become problems?”
Ethan
Ethan looks at her calmly.
“No,” he says. “Danica left Northgate two years ago with two of our friends. Both were killed on the journey. She was telling us how they died… privately.”
There is no hint of malice or frustration in his voice. He speaks honestly and directly, his eyes focused intently on her own. The directness of the gaze and calmness of his voice hold a depth of control, each as steady as his hands had been on the day he murdered lieutenant Peters in the alley.
“As for Roux… if any of us have a difficult conversation with him, his participation in street brawls and underground fights is unlikely to be the most important topic we discuss.”
Vanja
“That’s a hard thing,” says Vanja, softly, “About your friends. I’m sorry for it.”
She studies Ethan, still unable to get a read on him, “And for Roux.” she adds. If what Ethan says is true, then Roux had deeper troubles than she realized.
Vanja lets out a breath, before finally answering Ethan’s original question, “No. I suppose it’s not laying low. The fights. But I have to do something. To stay active. To stay strong and loose. I’m suffocating here, in this…perfumed prison. Just waiting for…what,” she laughs, “A note? And then weeks later, you show up in disguise? As a joke? But then at least there’s an end goal - and then I think, fine. Once we have this meeting, once I meet this group, it’ll give me something… there will be some plan.”
“But there isn’t. A reunion of old friends is a good thing, and I’m glad for it, for all of you, especially now, knowing what you all have been through…”
Vanja shrugs again, letting her shoulders round, her head fall. She’s burned through her anger, through the anxious energy and adrenaline she’s been carrying since the night before and now she’s exhausted.
“I want to help you all,” she says, “I do. It’s just so hard to see where I could fit into this greater plot to… retake the city? Push the Swans out of Jorung? There are what, ten of us? To take down tens of thousands?” She shakes her head, “At least at Pin’s that’s a fight I know I can win.”
Ethan
“Our biggest strength right now is that the army we’re fighting doesn’t know what’s coming. They don’t know what all we can do. And they don’t know that we are coordinating to cause them problems.”
“You want to know why I’m here? Why I came to you?”
He looks at her, his expression vaguely impatient.
“It was to underscore this point: once we are known, we lose our greatest asset. And then it really does become a fight of ten against ten thousand.”
He smiles slightly, rotating his left hand to admire his now pristine palm. “You know, I must be clumsy.” He says slyly. “I had the exact same cut on this other hand just last week.” He holds up the palm of his other hand, a small scab in the process of its work.
“Sonofabitch is still healing…”
“But this one,” He looks at his right hand that was bleeding minutes before. “Can’t even tell it was ever cut at all…”
He drops his hands and lowers his smile. Moving towards the door, he pauses before opening it.
“You know, it’s weird,” he snaps his fingers. “There’s this pretty girl who comes to the fights each week. Real good fighter - holds her own against men twice her size. It’s strange though… I’ve seen her take straight shots to ribs - heard’em crack from a solid blow. I’ve watched her face get crushed against the floor till she went limp… yet, she’s always back the next time good as new, pretty as can be! Most men are laid up for weeks but her…? It’s almost like… magic.”
“Seems like the kind of thing that might get noticed, don’t ya think?”
He leaves.
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