Archive of Our Own ^beta

This is the worst story I know about daemons. And it’s true. Long ago enough that no one bothers counting back that far, there was this great big monster, a giant—it had horns, or great septads of teeth, or claws as sharp as swords, that kind of thing—and it finds this village in the middle of nowhere in a place not on any map, and the monster decides great, this place is going to be lunch.

The village sends men to fight it off, and it’s not like they’ve got great warriors or fighters or nothing, so that ends with most of them dead. They ask their lord or king or whatever they have, and soldiers come, and they all get themselves killed too. Next they try a hocus, who takes their money and gets squashed same as the rest.

So you’d think the village is rightly fucked. But there’s this girl who lives there, and she sees that the men and the soldiers and the hocuses just aren’t strong enough. She figures that nothing is strong enough. But instead of giving up or running away or doing anything smart—you ever notice how the big heroes in stories are always doing stupid shit, even if they’re clever about it? Instead of any of that, she sneaks out of her village one night and creeps up on the monster. Doesn’t try to slit its throat or nothing. She does something clever, and goes for the monster’s daemon.

See, her own daemon hasn’t settled yet. So she tells him to take on the form of the monster’s daemon—sometimes it’s a wolf and sometimes a wolverine and sometimes a bobcat—and she leaves him there instead. And that wouldn’t work on most people, or even most monsters, I figure, but sometimes it’s like that with you and your daemon. I’d know right away if you took Kass away from me, but like anything else, the bond can get stretched the wrong way and never heal quite right. Like how it happened with my leg.

So that stupid clever little girl, she grabs the monster’s daemon and runs and runs, off toward the village’s well, and even as the monster wakes up and starts to think its own daemon doesn’t seem quite right, she’s dropping the real one down into the dark. And by the time she hears it hit the bottom, that monster is alive but all gone, lost the way you get when your daemon’s torn too far from you.

When the little girl goes back to collect her own daemon, he won’t go with her. He won’t forgive her for leaving him, or for killing that other daemon, or any of it. He curls up around the monster that isn’t a monster or really nothing at all no more and hisses at her until she goes away. It was too hard to kill the monster and too hard to do nothing, so she’d gone and done something worse.

So the girl becomes another kind of monster, or maybe just the same kind. Every time this story gets told the arguments start up—if you’ve got a daemon, that makes you human, don’t it? So maybe the monster was really a rival lord, or some asshole robber baron, or my guess was he was probably actually a hocus. Not like you need big sharp teeth to be a monster. I know that if anyone does.

-

Then there’s the second worst story I know about daemons, which wasn’t ever going to be a real story, because I wasn’t ever going to tell it. Except while we were in Troia I still kept running it around in my head just that way, like I was going to put it all in order for someone else.

I’d been doing that ever since Felix told me about what Malkar had done to him, along of it got me thinking about all the things you could do to a person that you could never take back. Killing them or raping them or hurting their daemon. And even though I was Mildmay the Fox and there were septads of people who were dead because I’d killed them, instead what all that reminded me of was the shit I’d had to do to get Felix to Troia.

For a while things hadn’t been so bad. Well, that was a fucking lie, the whole journey had been fucked from start to finish. But what I meant was, for a while things hadn’t been so bad with Aurora. Felix’s daemon was a real big mink, long and tall just like him, with eyes like tiny jewels and rich dark fur. Mostly back then she just followed Felix meek as you please, or hung off him like a sad limp rag, like she’d already been skinned. Which hadn’t made me feel good or nothing, but what could I do? And a part of me was glad, because at least me and Kass didn’t have to worry about her wandering off the way we did with Felix.

Then we’d built that maze in Nera, and we had a problem. Because even once I’d wrestled Felix to the ground and sat on him to keep him from walking off after his crying people, Aurora didn’t go down with him. Her little ears and nose went up, her tail all fluffed out, and she took off in the direction Felix had been trying to go, toward the heart of the maze. Right toward death.

I knew how much I couldn’t let Felix walk that maze, but the idea of his daemon going was even worse. Frankly, it was fucking terrifying. I didn’t know what that would do to Felix, except it didn’t take even half a brain to know he wouldn’t survive it.

Kass was tearing after her before either of us thought of it. Aurora was moving fast, a sinuous blur, and she was a hunter too, but she weren’t no fox. Kass pounced and had her jaws around Aurora’s throat faster than I could blink.

Felix had been tense and miserable and silently furious beneath me right until Kass got his daemon between her teeth. Then he just lost it. I mean, powers and saints, I didn’t blame him. Somehow he found some fight still left at the bottom of the well. He rolled me over, got me half off of him, and yanked a hand free from my grip so he could bang it against my chest and say in that gutter voice he’d been hiding, over and over like it was killing him: “Let her go, let her go, don’t you fucking touch her, let her go!” The look on his face was something I’d pay good gorgons to never have to see again.

And the whole time, Aurora was quivering in Kass’s jaws, holding herself still and terrified, and everything about it felt like it did when I had a knife to someone’s throat. Except it was Felix’s life that I was getting ready to crush. My half-crazy brother who didn’t have no one but me to protect him.

Felix never calmed down after that. Not until the ghosts or what Felix thought were ghosts or whatever were gone, and then he went all limp and empty, his skew eyes vacant and hardly alive, just how I’d pictured him if we’d let Aurora leave him behind.

So that had been fucked, but the shit it took to get Felix to the shore of Troia after the Morskaiakrov sank and the curse on me woke up was a septad times worse. Because it was bad enough managing with me clinging to the hatch cover and Felix clinging to me and Aurora barely clinging to him. We were so close to shore and my leg was this close to giving out, and that was when Aurora lost the grip she had on Felix’s arm. He jolted the moment she slipped off, and that made it worse, and it was dead obvious the waves were going to sweep her away, and then it wouldn’t matter if I got Felix to the sand, because she’d be gone.

I reached out into the pitch dark and probably only got ahold of her by sheer bone-rattling luck. And I had to do it, but I wasn’t nice about it. I couldn’t be. There was no room in me anywhere to be nice about anything. I grabbed her tight, and Felix flailed even worse against me then, like he was trying to get away instead of holding on so tight I could barely swim, and we’d almost died and he was about to kill us again. I could barely breathe and I couldn’t keep a lid on my temper. I just purely could not. I shouted at her, at both of them, all the rest of the way of us scrambling for shore. And no, I didn’t let her go the whole time. I didn’t get her settled back to where Felix could hold her, because I didn’t trust neither of them to be inside their heads.

Then I told Felix if he didn’t get his useless ass to land I’d hold Aurora under and let her drown.

I needed him to get his head up out of the well and listen to me, so I said it, and I didn’t let go of Aurora, so the threat was real. And I didn’t care, right then, how much it hurt or how much they hated it. I’d gone into that clean cold place where I had something to do, so I did it. When we hit sand I tossed Aurora onto the beach like so much luggage, and turned away when she scrambled desperately into Felix’s arms.

I thought about that a lot after Felix told me what had been going on in his head since Nera. That he’d thought I was his old Keeper, threatening to put Aurora in the Sim this time instead of him.

Couldn’t undo a death or a rape or Kass’s teeth around Aurora’s throat, my hand tight in her fur. Could say sorry all you wanted, til you were blue in the face, but it was done. Couldn’t do nothing about it. So what the fuck was there?

Kass was pacing by my feet when I had the thought. I could see the way she went tense, her ears perking up, all of her pointing in my direction. The real focused way she got when we were planning a job.

“Sorry,” I said. Could’ve told her I didn’t mean it, but she’d know it for a lie.

She hopped up into my lap and curled up there. “Don’t mind.”

I put my fingers in her fur, where it got thick and warm around her neck, and scratched her the way she liked. Then we both sat and thought for awhile what it would feel like if it was Felix’s fingers there instead.

-

I didn’t actually think much about it again til indictions later. After Gideon left, and Felix hit me, and we were speaking again but barely. Mostly to argue. Seemed like that was all we’d done since we’d settled back into the Mirador. This time he’d stormed out of the suite in a snit instead of ordering me out of his sight. Which still left me to wait for him like a dog.

So I had plenty of time to sit and think about what a fucking mess it all was. I thought about what Felix had said that night up on the Crown of Nails. That shared blood ain’t worth nothing if we couldn’t share nothing else, words or magic or sex, along of how those were the only things that were real to him. And I thought about what I’d seen the night he’d hit me, behind the pure rage in his eyes, the lost kid who needed something he couldn’t take. And I thought a lot about the well, and what else might be lurking down there that he tried to pretend wasn’t there.

How did you get a guy like Felix to just fucking talk to you? That was a riddle for one of them sphinxes from the stories, but I already knew the answer. You didn’t. You had to get clever and do something else. I’d never been clever, not like anyone who’d be in a story with a sphinx, but you didn’t have to be even half-bright to know there was something deeper than words and deeper than sex. She was sitting at my feet, chin balanced on her paws.

Kass tilted her ear at me, the clipped one. “Sure you don’t want to just fuck him and be done with it? Might be easier.”

I never could tell if she was joking. I rubbed my face. “You still don’t mind?” I asked.

Her tail flicked dismissively. “It’s Felix,” she said. And that was just the bitch of it, ain’t it? That really was an answer.

So we waited for Felix to come back. My cheek had scabbed over by then, though Felix was still doing everything he could not to look me in the face, the way usually only everyone else did. It was the same when he swept back into the suite, glancing at me and then letting his gaze bounce right off, like a stone skipped across the Sim and into the dark.

Both him and Aurora were polished to a high shine, Aurora draped lazily across his shoulders. It amused both of them to put her there like a stole, her face peaking out of Felix’s untamed mane of hair, her tail falling lazily down his arm.

I always hated it when she got like that. Like she was expecting anyone who looked at her—and at Felix—to be pricing them both out in their head.

Felix might not want to look at me, but Aurora did, with her sharp gleaming eyes. They were spooky in an entirely different way than his.

“Felix.”

He didn’t even twitch. Aurora looked away again, tucking her face in under his chin. I levered myself up with Jashuki and said his name again.

“What?” he asked, voice sharper than any knife I’d ever held.

Thing was, I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to say. That I wanted to give him a gift, or penance, or something else neither of us had any words for? He’d laugh at me.

So I just said, “How much longer are you gonna keep doing this?”

“‘Going to’,” Felix snapped, and didn’t even come near to answering or even looking at the question, which I should’ve fucking expected.

“I’m serious. We gonna do this dance til we both die?”

“I don’t think you’re quite up to dancing these days, darling,” he said, and he really didn’t want to be having this conversation, and I knew that’s why he said it, but that didn’t make me like it any better. Kass stood up, her hackles raised.

“Look, we could both keep pretending before Gideon left. Now we both know it’s just me, I’m all you’ve got, so maybe start fucking acting like it!”

I thought he was going to hit me again. Actually, he was going to for real. Raised his hand and everything, rings glinting, but then Kass stepped in front of me, growling, fur all bristled out. Felix could’ve laughed at her. She weren’t so big. Could’ve stepped around her and hit me anyway. Could’ve kicked her aside like so much trash, too. But he froze. Aurora curled tighter around his neck, her ears laid back flat. She’d scrunched in on herself the way she did sometimes, the way that made you forget how big she really was. Like a little kid trying to make themselves small so’s no one would notice them enough to hurt them.

Then she sprung. “You idiot,” she said, and I’m not even sure which of us she meant, and she flowed off Felix’s shoulder and down his arm all graceful and quick like she did. And when she made to leap off him, he caught her by the tail in a white-knuckled grip, faster than I’d ever seen him move.

Then no one was moving. Not a bit.

I knew Felix and Aurora didn’t always get on so well. Back when he’d been crazy, he’d clung to her like she was the only thing he was sure of, but things had changed since he’d put his head back together, since we’d been in the Mirador. He lashed out at her same as he did to anyone, and sometimes decads would pass and I’d never hear them speak to each other.

But I’d never seen him hurt her. Not the way that I’d hurt her.

I’d thought, once or twice, about how the way the binding-by-forms wouldn’t let me get too far from Felix ain’t so different from how it worked between a person and their daemon. The kind of leash you couldn’t escape, because it was part of you, stuck like a quill right in your soul. And I thought it again when I saw Felix holding Aurora by her tail like that, much as I really didn’t want to.

“Felix—” I said, and his eyes jumped from her to me, spooky and blazing.

“Shut up,” he said, and he put the force of the obligation d’âme behind it. My mouth snapped closed so hard my teeth clicked. Aurora made a noise and dug in her claws and hopped from his outstretched arm. This time he let her go. She moved fluidly over to Kass, who gave her a little warning growl telling her not to get too close.

Tone like ice, Felix said, “What exactly are you offering, Mildmay?” And he leered at me, all deliberate menace, the ghost of Strych coming out from under his skin. I wasn’t stupid enough to not know he was trying to scare me off. No reason I had to show him that it worked, that my heart was pounding hard in my chest. Great idea, Milly-Fox, now he’s thinking about it. You know he could make you any time he wanted. He’s got you good and muzzled right now. You wouldn’t even be able to tell him—

The obligation d’âme stretched between us real tight, one of the septads of things we never looked at or talked about when we could help it. Right up until he wanted to use it to get his way, and then he threw it in my face.

I had to say something quick, and I couldn’t say nothing at all. Not because I thought he was gonna ravish me or nothing, because he plainly wasn’t. No, he was gonna catch up with himself and feel like a monster and then we’d never get nowhere. Then I’d have just made everything worse.

So it was Kass who spoke into the tense silence. She came up and nudged her nose against the leg of his trousers, and she said, “He’s offering me.” Which ain’t exactly how I would’ve put it, and actually her saying it like that made me think, no way, I take it back, don’t touch her, don’t talk to her, don’t look at her— But Felix hadn’t said I could talk yet. So I couldn’t.

Whatever Felix was expecting, it wasn’t that. He blinked, and it broke apart some of the cold mask of his expression. He stared at me, and then he stared at Kass. Aurora, though, she didn’t seem to react at all.

“Well, Kassandra?”

She tilted her head up at him. “Fair’s fair,” she said.

“As eloquent as Mildmay,” he said, but it didn’t have no bite to it. Then he looked back up at me, as if only now noticing my silence. “Speak,” he said, in a disgusted tone, and my lips unlocked. Course, now I had nothing I wanted to say, but he’d leaned on binding-by-forms again and I had no choice.

I said, “Like the lady said. Fair’s fair. On the way to Troia, I had to touch Aurora, and...”

Aurora scrunched up onto her hind legs. “I told you,” she said, all imperious now. “You had to.”

“That’s not what this is about,” Felix said.

“It’s about how you need something from me,” I said. “And you won’t let me give you anything else.”

Felix’s mouth worked. He kept his eyes lowered, on Kass, so he didn’t have to look at me. “Let’s not kid ourselves,” he said darkly. Along of how he was trying not to say the thing we both knew he did, actually, want from me.

“We can’t keep going on like we’ve been,” I said. “And I’m not gonna offer myself up for the same knife Gideon just got out from under.”

Aurora shuddered when I said that, but Felix didn’t even twitch. “No,” he said absently. He came closer, stepping neatly around Kass to reach out and run his knuckles firmly along my cheek, right over the scabs from his rings. I could feel the hard stones bump up against my skin and tightened my grip around Jashuki.

He looked me in the eyes for a moment. I looked back and just plain didn’t know what I was going to do if he tried to hit me again. Or kiss me.

Kass came around his ankles, winding a little like we’d seen Aurora do. He dropped his hand and knelt real slow. Kass stood her ground, and then my knees buckled and I ended up back in my chair real quick, because Felix’s hand was in her fur, fingers cupped along her jaw, real careful and scared, about the same way he’d just been touching me.

It’s not like no one else had ever touched Kass before. Keeper used to scruff her when I’d done something stupid, or give her a scratch if she was pleased. But it wasn’t the same, in the way some things weren’t ever the same when you were with someone new: stories or jokes or sex.

Kass’d been right. Felix and I wouldn’t’ve been half this close if I’d just let him fuck me. I’d had his tongue in my mouth, and next to this that’d been nothing. Ain’t no words for what it was like. Bright and loud and somehow also real quiet. Like having another heart forced into my ribcage, so my own had to move aside to let it and they both had to get comfortable that way.

Felix was feeling it same as I was, because he sat back from kneeling the least graceful I’d ever seen him while he was sane, just a totally uncoordinated movement that ended with him on his ass, his long legs splayed out awkwardly. Kass took a few steps forward and let him pet her while she settled into the crook of his knee. He did it badly, not fully lifting his hand up every time he reversed the motion, so half the time he was pushing her fur against the grain. Turned out Kass had a lot more patience than a cat for being petted the wrong way.

His voice was lazy when he spoke, but not in his mocking kind of way. He sounded dazed. “I always wondered—which came first? The fox or the Fox?”

I said, “She settled the night I first killed a man,” and then snapped my mouth shut. I hadn’t meant to say it. I could still remember looking down at Kass and knowing it was done, garotte still hanging from my fingers. Crushing her to my chest later, after I’d seen to Keeper.

“I see,” Felix said, still in that absent sort of way. “So your moniker is in her honor.”

Kass leaned her head against his knee, a sort of catlike nuzzle. “Not my idea,” she said.

“No,” Felix said, with the sudden flash of one of his brilliant smiles, like a fire catching tinder all at once. “It wouldn’t be.”

I realized then that neither of us had been paying much attention to Aurora, because I felt a weight on my boot, and when I looked down there she was, staring up at me.

“What was it you said?” Felix asked, in that way he had when he didn’t actually want anyone to answer. “Ah, yes. Fair’s fair.”

“You don’t have to—” I started to say, along of it didn’t seem fair to Aurora, but she’d already loped up my good leg and climbed up my torso, a fast decisive movement. Then she got her paws on my shoulder and nipped my ear, all delicate-like, like I hadn’t seen her use her teeth for real.

“Don’t be stupid,” she said. So I raised my hand and pressed it up against her back. She was real soft, of course, and warm. Felix’s head had snapped up, and he was staring at the both of us, his spooky eyes wide.

Was a lot like I figured falling down a well would feel like, and it wasn’t a gentle trip, neither. More than anyone I’d ever met, Felix had so much of himself inside, and he let so little of it out. And suddenly I was right in the middle of it, and he couldn’t kick me back out, not now, probably not ever again.

Kass stood up, and nudged at Felix until he got the idea, herding him til he moved to sit with his back to my chair. It reminded me a bit of when I was a kid, and she was a husky or a sheepdog half the time. Even Keeper had figured that she’d be some kind of dog in the end.

After a moment, he leaned his head on my knee, the good one. He had one long leg stretched out and the other curled up, and Kass put herself right back in his lap, and I felt a little jolt between my ribs that meant he’d started to pet her again. He’d found the spot between her ears she liked best.

I ran my knuckles along the top of Aurora’s head, and she sort of wriggled, curling herself around my neck, all close like she did to Felix. Didn’t feel so much like she was a fancy scarf when she did it to me.

Now seemed like as good a time as any to ask. “Hey, Felix. Where'd you go?” After he’d hit me, I meant, but I meant all the other times too. Wherever he ran off to after he fought with Gideon.

Aurora didn’t exactly shift out of my grip, but she tucked herself closer, her face buried in the space under my jaw, her tail tickling my throat. She was still touching me, but I couldn’t touch her so easily, if you see what I mean.

Count it for a miracle, though: Felix didn’t ask me what I meant. He knew, and he didn’t pretend not to. Instead, he said, “I beat a man nearly to death.” Not in the scary way he'd usually say something like that, when he wanted me to back off. Just real matter of fact, because it was the truth.

I nodded, my chin brushing up against Aurora’s fur. Felix wasn’t facing me, so he couldn’t see it, but he spoke again like he knew I’d done it. His voice had gone all dreamy. “He wanted it.” His fingers curled, digging into Kass’s ruff. Not too hard. “Well, for a little while.” Then he laughed, one of those barks that let you know nothing’s actually funny. And he tipped his head back, so he could look up at me with his wild mismatched eyes. “Just like the obligation d’âme. You wanted it. For a little while.”

His fingers curved around Kass’s throat. Tight enough that for a moment I couldn’t breathe neither. Very softly, he said, “And this, too.”

I shuddered. And it ain’t that I thought I was the brave girl from that story or Felix was the giant, or that we were nothing other than our own unique kind of fucked. But I still remembered what I’d said to Felix the day I’d asked him to put the obligation d’âme on me. Ain’t we both monsters?

Kass said, “Don’t do that anymore.”

Felix looked down at her. “No?” he asked, voice on the edge of getting real dangerous.

“No,” she said. “We’re here. Just come to us.”

His hands went tight again, and then he let go of Kass real quick, pressing his palms to the floor.

He said, not angry, mostly just real sad, “I’ll hurt you.”

“Nah,” Kass said, totally dismissive.

I could tell Felix was gonna say something else, but then Aurora slithered out from under my chin and said, “Okay.”

He made a noise, raspy, somewhere falling short of a laugh, and when he reached an arm up, Aurora scurried down from my throat to meet him. He cradled her in his arms, and it was all a little like losing my footing on a wall, because suddenly he wasn’t touching Kass and Aurora wasn’t touching me and we were two separate people again.

To Aurora, in a real dreamy tone, he said, “Do you ever wish you were his instead?” If I’d talked like that to Kass she’d’ve told me exactly how stupid I was being. Aurora didn’t say nothing. She burrowed in closer. Almost too quiet to catch, I heard Felix murmur, “Me too.”

“Felix,” I said, along of how I didn’t know what else to say, and he shuddered and gathered Kass up into his arms too. I breathed out long and slow and we both just let him. And for a while I thought about that stupid clever little girl, and all the kinds of monsters there were.

-

That night my dreams were calm. Felix hadn’t warded them or nothing, but every time my mind tried to dip into something I didn’t want to think about—Kolkhis, Ginevra, Strych—something jolted me, like a boat rocking, and I’d sink back into plain darkness.

When I woke up I figured out what the fuck that was about. There was a mink tucked up along my side, cozy as you like, one paw pressed up against my heart, where she could sink her little claws in whenever she pleased.

Didn’t have to look for Kass. Could feel the stretch, not aching but a little sore, like a well used muscle. Like she was about as far away as Felix’s room across the suite. Not tucked in close to him, like Aurora was to me, cause I would’ve been able to feel it.

I was pretty sure I knew just where she was. Curled up right at his feet.

I narrowed my eyes at Aurora, who just peeked up at me with her beady jewel eyes and then snuggled in closer, all like a cat asking for a scratch without being willing to actually ask. Smug as a cat, too.

I should have picked her right up and marched her back over to Felix’s room. But, fuck, what would be the point? Kass was right where she wanted to be. Maybe that was the most fucked up part of it. Because Kass was Kass, but she was me too.

I pet Aurora once, all along her long back. Never was gonna get used to that feeling, like touching a stove that didn’t leave no mark. I tried not to think about how Felix in the other room would know I’d done it.

Aurora said, sounding sleepy, “He never listens to me. Or you.”

“Think he’ll listen to her?”

“He won’t hurt her,” Aurora said. Which wasn’t actually an answer to the question I’d asked. And I wasn’t sure whether it was supposed to be reassurance or a warning or, fuck, a real nice dream.

I thought about Kass, pulled away from me, curled up and watchful. My own fault. But I’d got something in return, hadn’t I? Fair was fair.

Aurora wriggled up to curl up around my neck, heavy and warm, like Felix’s heart itself was the thing holding my leash.