L
Last call in Cornwall apparently meant the same thing as last call in Indiana, which meant Fen was the only one still sober enough to notice the barman stacking stools with the weary finality of a man who had watched six strangers turn his corner booth into a small, loud nation. She gathered the empty glasses anyway — an old habit, the kind that lived in the hands — and followed the others out into the salt wind, her new shirt crackling where she'd knotted it at her hip. Marcus was already ahead of her, cradling four bottles against his chest like a man carrying a christening, and Mike had two sacks of crisps swinging from one fist. She watched the Order's most feared guests stagger up the hill toward the B&B, and somewhere behind her ribs a small, disloyal voice said: they're just people. They've always just been people.
In the courtyard, stone benches ringed a low table, and the sea kept up its long grey argument below the wall. Fen stood at the edge with her shirt in both hands, waiting for someone to tell her where the analyst sat, until Aria — who had conjured a pair of wooden boards from nowhere and set them on the gravel with a clatter — patted the bench and said, "You're on my team, analyst." Mike, halfway through opening a bottle with his teeth, stopped and pointed at the boards. "That's cornhole."
"It is not cornhole," Aria said, with the wounded dignity of a woman about to lose an argument. "It's — it's a lawn game. It's bags."
"It's cornhole."
"I will turn you into a cornhole." She said it flatly, and Fen laughed before she could stop herself, and then Dani was pressing a bottle into her hand and pulling her down onto the bench, and the night folded around her like a coat someone had been holding open the whole time, and Fen let it.
Mike pointed two fingers at Marcus, then at the far board. "You're with me."
"I have never thrown a bag in my life," Marcus said, setting the bottles down with the care of a man disarming something. He was already rolling his sleeves, though — that was the tell.
"You'll learn," Mike said. "Aria's got the analyst."
Aria looked up from where she'd crouched to brush gravel off the board's face, and something crossed her expression too fast for Fen to read. "I've got the analyst," she agreed, and patted the bench beside her again, and Fen sat, because her legs had apparently already decided and hadn't bothered to consult her. The bottle in her hand was cold and her shirt was knotted crooked and Sera had said the top floor was hers, and none of it felt like a mistake.
"Right," Aria said, turning one board so its hole faced the sea. "Rules. Each team has one person stand at each board, then the people on each side take turns throwing all of their bags. Three points in the hole, one point on the wood, you only add the net points of the winning side for each round, first team to twenty-one wins. Oh, and if you go over twenty-one you bust back to thirteen."
"Why thirteen," Fen said.
"Because the game hates you." Aria handed her a bag — canvas, heavy with something that shifted like sand — and Fen weighed it in her palm and understood immediately that she would be terrible at this.
Across the courtyard, Dani had produced a Jenga tower from somewhere. Fen had watched the woman carry exactly one bag up the hill and it had not been a bag of Jenga, which meant the tower had come out of a coat pocket or the ground itself or a place Fen had decided, tonight, not to ask about. Dani set it on the low table in front of Sera with a small wooden thump.
"You brought Jenga," Sera said. "To Wales."
"I brought Jenga to Tintagel," Dani said, "which is a completely different thing."
Fen had thrown three bags in her life, and the third one was still in the air when she understood the shape of the whole night: she was going to be bad at this in front of people who did not care that she was bad at it, and that was somehow worse than being judged. Her first bag hit the gravel short and skidded. Her second clipped the board's edge and spun off into the dark, and she heard the soft thump of it landing somewhere a dog would find it in the morning. She looked at Aria, braced for the analyst's customary note — subject displays poor proprioception under social observation — and got instead a sorceress with her hands on her hips, squinting at the far board like the board had insulted her family.
"That's fine," Aria said. "That's a warm-up. Nobody's counting the warm-up."
"You're counting the warm-up."
"I'm counting everything, but out loud I'm being gracious." Aria took her own first bag, wound up with the full theatrical commitment of a woman who had once been a man who had watched too much ESPN, and threw it directly in front of the board, where it bounced up with a thump and landed on the wood. She stared at it. Across the courtyard, Mike made a sound like a door opening slowly. "That counts," Aria said.
"That absolutely does not count," Mike said, without looking up from the bag he was already palming. "A bounce is dead. Board's dead, ground's dead, everything but the hole is dead."
"It touched the wood."
"It touched the wood after it touched the ground, which is the definition of not counting." He threw — a flat, unhurried arc, the kind that came from a childhood spent in a driveway — and the bag slid up the board and dropped through the hole without a sound, and Marcus said "oh, that's how it works" in the tone of a man who had just watched a theorem get proved. Fen found herself nodding along with Mike before she'd decided to, and Aria caught her doing it and narrowed her eyes.
Fen watched Aria's face do the math — the four points sitting on the board, the net scoring, the long road to twenty-one — and then Aria turned to her with the grave expression of a general handing over the last horse. "You're up. Marcus is on the far board, and he's about to learn something about himself." Fen looked across the courtyard at Marcus Skowronski, Archmage, who was holding a cornhole bag the way a man held a firstborn child, his sleeve already rolled to the elbow like this was going to be a matter of technique. He threw. The bag cleared the board entirely, sailed past the far wall, and dropped into the dark somewhere above the sea, and Marcus said, "Ah," as though the sea had taken it on purpose. Fen felt the laugh come up her throat before she could file it, and she let it out, and Aria heard it and grinned at her like a co-conspirator.
"Okay," Fen said, weighing the canvas in her palm, and something in her chest went quiet and specific the way it did when a dataset finally resolved — the board was fourteen feet, the hole was six inches, the wind was off the sea and steady, and she had watched Mike throw exactly one bag and already knew the arc. She stepped to the line, planted her feet, and threw. The bag left her hand flat and low and true, hit the wood two inches short of the hole, and slid in without a sound. She heard herself say "oh" — small, surprised, the sound of a thing going right. Aria's mouth opened. On the far board, Marcus was still staring at the sea where his bag had gone.
"That's two," Fen said, and picked up her second bag, and did not look at anyone, because if she looked at anyone she would lose the thread. She threw it. It went in again. Mike, across the courtyard, stopped mid-sip with the bottle at his mouth and said nothing at all, which from Mike was the loudest possible verdict. Aria turned to look at him, then back at Fen, then back at Mike, and said, very quietly, "I've got the analyst."
Fen watched the round turn, and the round turned mean. Mike and Marcus had clawed their way from nothing to twenty — one point at a time, the boring way, the way that worked — while she and Aria had stalled at eighteen on a bounce that Aria still insisted had touched wood first. Now Aria stood at the line with her last bag, the scoreboard a chalk scrawl on the flat of a stone, and Mike's four points sitting fat and smug on the far board: two in the hole, two on the wood, a whole round's worth of his patience.
Aria threw. The bag arced high and lazy and came down right on top of Mike's two-on-the-wood — smack, both of them gone, knocked clean off the board and into the gravel with a sound like a dropped plate. Fen blinked. The board was empty. Mike's four points were dust. Aria turned around with an expression Fen could only describe as a cat that had learned to open a door. "Net two," she said. "Twenty to eighteen." Mike stared at his own bag lying in the gravel like a body. Across the courtyard, Dani's Jenga tower went down with a clatter and nobody looked at it.
Mike didn't say anything. He just walked to the line, rolled the last bag in his hand once, twice, and Fen understood from the set of his shoulders that he was aiming at the wood now, not the hole — twenty points was a cliff, and one more in the hole would bust Team Guys all the way back to thirteen. He threw. The bag hit the board short and flat, a clean one-point landing, and Fen was already breathing out when it kept going — sliding, impossibly slow, uphill against every law of a bag on a slanted board, creeping toward the hole like something being pushed. It dropped in. Fen's mouth fell open. She looked at Aria. Aria's hands were down at her sides, fingers curled, and one small muscle in her jaw was jumping, and Fen knew — the way you know a dataset's been tampered with, the way the numbers just don't sum — that the bag had not slid itself.
"You cheated," Mike said, flat, the bottle hanging from his fingers.
Aria turned from the board with the unhurried grace of someone who had already won the argument in her head. "I don't recall a rule against magic." She flicked her fingers at the board, and the bag that had no business sliding uphill sat in the hole like it had been born there. "You said board's dead, ground's dead, everything but the hole is dead. It's in the hole, Michael."
Mike looked at her for a long second. Then he grinned — the slow, unwilling grin of a man who had spent twenty-eight years losing to this exact expression — and shook his head, and said nothing, which was its own surrender. Fen watched the whole exchange from the bench with her empty bottle and her crooked shirt and a feeling she could not file: a game of skill was a game of skill. That was the entire point. If somebody could just move the bag, then the scoreboard was a story someone was telling, not a measurement, and she had spent the last hour caring about a number that had never been real. She looked at Mike, who had clearly known and clearly not minded, and at Aria, who had cheated with her hands at her sides and her face perfectly still, and understood that she was the only person at this table who had been playing to win. "That's — that's not how games work," she said, out loud, before she could stop herself.
Aria turned, and for a moment the sorceress's face went soft at the edges, the way it did when she was about to explain something that mattered more than it sounded. "Fen," she said, “He calls it cornhole he already disrespected the game." Across the courtyard, Dani's rebuilt Jenga tower went down again, and Sera said something that made her laugh, and Mike was already fishing a fresh bottle out of Marcus's arms — and Fen sat there with the bag still warm in her palm, thinking that she had spent her whole life trusting the rules, and had just watched the person she was supposed to be studying break one for the fun of it.
Fen drifted toward the low table the way she did everything — sideways, watching first — and found the Jenga tower already four courses high and leaning like a drunk trying to look sober. Dani sat cross-legged on the stone bench with her chin in one hand, studying the blocks the way a surgeon studied a chart, and Fen understood in about three seconds that Dani was not playing to win. Dani was playing to keep: every block she touched came from the safe middle, the fat stacked center where nothing hung over anything, and she slid each one free with two fingers and no drama at all, setting it on top with a little click that said still standing, still mine. Fen watched her take three in a row without the tower so much as breathing.
Sera, by contrast, went straight for the edges. She plucked the outer blocks — the ones with nothing under them but air and the promise of gravity — and she did it fast, flicking them free with her thumbnail like she was dealing cards, and every time one came loose she laughed low in her throat and stacked it crooked on the crown, higher, thinner, worse. The tower had gone from four courses to nine in the time it took Fen to finish one bottle, and it was leaning now in a way that made Fen's spine hurt to look at, and Sera was sitting back with her arm hooked over the bench, grinning at it like a woman admiring a fire she'd set on purpose. "It's not going to hold," Fen said.
"That's the point," Sera said, and reached for another edge block, and Fen caught herself leaning forward with her hands half-raised, the analyst's reflex firing before her brain could veto it — she wanted to say the load-bearing math, the center of mass, the fact that Sera was building something designed to fall and calling it a game. Dani slid another middle block free, set it down, and said nothing, and the two of them kept going, safe and reckless, safe and reckless, and Fen sat between them with the wooden click of it in her teeth and did not yet know which one she was.
Sera plucked another edge block free — flick, click, up she went — and the tower leaned an inch toward the sea and did not fall, and Fen watched Dani's face do the small math of a woman recalculating a whole board. Dani slid a middle block out, set it down, and finally said it, not to Sera, flat across the table to Fen like handing over a key. "She's trying to make me lose."
Fen looked at the tower, then at Dani. "By — how."
"By taking every safe middle piece off the board." Dani tapped the empty gap where the fat center blocks had been, the whole structural spine of the thing gone, nothing left but the thin outer courses and Sera's crooked crown. "It's not a game anymore, it's a dare. She can't play cautiously. She'd rather blow the whole thing up than sit still and let it stand."
Sera didn't even look up from the block in her fingers. "Of course I want to make you lose," she said, and flicked it free, and the tower swayed and held. "That's literally the game, Danielle."
Sera's block came free with a click and she set it on the crown without looking, and Fen was still working out whether to say the load-bearing thing out loud when a weight landed across her shoulders and a storm of silver hair blew into her face, and she inhaled perfume and wine and sea salt all at once and went very still, the way she did when something arrived faster than she could categorize it.
"Fen," Aria said, into her ear, close, conspiratorial, the violet of her eyes bright enough that Fen could see them even at this angle, "listen to me. Sera is very serious about this." A giggle came up out of her, uninvited, the kind that belonged to a woman three glasses past dignity, and she squeezed Fen's shoulder once and let go and straightened, and the glitter letters across her chest caught the firelight and read, unmistakably, PRIMARY SOURCE. Fen looked at them, and then at the woman wearing them, and something in her chest did the quiet, specific thing — the way a dataset resolved. The words were true. They were really, really, unapologetically true, and she was sitting in the middle of the proof.
"She's not serious," Dani said, sliding another middle block free. "She's drunk."
"I'm both," Sera said, and flicked the next edge block loose, and the tower leaned out over the table like a thing deciding whether to trust the air.
Aria straightened, took a breath, and blew at the tower. It was a stage blow — chin down, cheeks round, the whole face of a woman committing to an obvious lie — and the tower came apart anyway. Nine courses of Sera's crooked crown walked off the table like a drunk stepping into traffic, blocks rapping the stone, one of them rolling all the way to Fen's boot, and Sera was already laughing with her whole throat, arm hooked over the bench back, and Dani had both hands over her mouth and a grin leaking out around them, and Fen was on her feet with her palms out because that tower had been standing, it had been load-bearing and real and now it was gravel.
"You —" Fen said. "That was a game. That was an actual game and you just —" She stopped, because Aria was looking at her with her head tipped and no apology anywhere in her face, and neither was anyone else. Sera was still laughing. Dani had started gathering blocks into a pile like this was how every game ended, like the falling was the part she'd come for. Fen looked down at the block against her boot, then at the three of them, and felt the outrage go out of her the way a held breath goes out — because nobody at this table had lost anything, and nobody was going to.
"I'm both serious and drunk," Sera said again, wiping her eye with the heel of her hand. Aria dropped onto the bench beside Fen, shoulder against hers, warm and unbothered, and said, "It was leaning," and Fen picked up the block and set it on the pile with the others, and did not say the thing about rules, because the rules had apparently never been the point.
Fen took the whole courtyard in the way she took in a room — one pass, left to right, the way you read a page before you read it. Aria was the flood, all right: up off the bench before Fen had finished setting down the Jenga block, drifting to Marcus's elbow to heckle his next throw, drifting back to refill Mike's bottle from a jug she'd conjured out of nothing, touching every person in the yard once and leaving each of them warmer than she found them, silver hair catching the firelight like something with its own weather. Sera and Dani had not moved. Sera still had her arm hooked over the bench back, laughing at something only she knew, and Dani was stacking the fallen blocks into a neat tower beside her, patient as a woman filing paperwork, and neither of them had looked up in ten minutes, and neither of them needed to. Fen had watched two dozen analysts work a crisis and none of them had ever been this calm with a game falling down around them. It was the same calm, she realized — the calm of people who had already decided what mattered and were simply waiting for the rest of the room to catch up.
Mike and Marcus were easy, and that was the part that stuck. Marcus, who had shattered her assumptions about archmages in a single evening, was telling Mike a story with both hands, and Mike was laughing — actually laughing, head back, the sound rolling off the low stone wall — and neither of them was performing. They were just two men glad to be in the same yard. Fen had spent three days cataloguing these people as assets: the Champion, the Archmage, the dragon, the deva, the elf who had bent a ward to its knees. The Order had a name for what they were, and it was Order — ranks, tests, the word *dignity* said in a hallway like a prayer. Fen looked around the courtyard again and found no ranks in it. She found Aria stealing a crisp off Mike's plate and Mike letting her, found Sera refilling Dani's glass without being asked, found four people orbiting one another like they'd been doing it for years and had simply forgotten to stop. The Order was a thing you joined. This was a thing that had already happened to them, and they'd stopped noticing. Fen set her empty bottle on the stone and thought, with the small disloyal clarity that had been following her all night: *this is not order. This is an undisciplined mess.*
"You're doing it again," Dani said, without looking up from her blocks. "The cataloguing."
Fen didn't answer right away. She was still doing it — of course she was, that was the whole job, that was the only thing she'd ever been good at, watching a room until it resolved into a shape — and the shape was coming in now, clear as a chart. Aria was the flood, yes, but the flood had a logic to it: she moved toward whoever looked thinnest and left them fuller, and she did it without counting, the way you breathe. Sera and Dani were the cold water. Nothing rattled them. Sera had watched a tower she built herself come apart and laughed like it was the best part of her night, and Dani had stacked the wreckage into something neat because the wreckage was hers to keep. Fen had spent three days in a hall where the oldest men alive measured themselves against a ward and called the result dignity, and here were four people who had bent a chamber to its knees and were now arguing about whether a bag had touched wood first.
"I'm not cataloguing," Fen said, and heard how it sounded, and did not take it back. "I'm — " She looked around the courtyard one more time. Mike had his bottle against his knee and his head tipped toward Marcus's story. Aria had drifted back to the bench and dropped onto it beside Sera, who didn't shift to make room and didn't need to. Dani set the last block on her little tower and looked up at last, and her eyes were the calmest thing in the yard. "It's just — the Order is a name for a thing. Ranks, tests, the word *dignity* said like a prayer in a hallway. And this isn't that." She picked up the block at her boot and turned it over in her fingers. "This is — nobody here is holding rank. You're all just — orbiting. Like you forgot to stop."
Dani's mouth curved, small and private, the way it did when she'd been caught being right about something she hadn't said out loud. "Codependent chaos," she said. "That's what you're thinking."
"That's not — " Fen started, and then stopped, because it was exactly what she was thinking, and Dani had read it off her face the way Fen read numbers off a page. Sera laughed, low, without moving her arm off the bench back. Across the yard, Aria looked up at the sound and grinned at the three of them like she'd heard the whole thing from twenty feet away, and Fen understood, with a small disloyal click somewhere behind her ribs, that she probably had.
Two o'clock came the way two o'clock always came in her life — sideways, unnoticed, already there. Fen's jaw had gone slack somewhere around the fourth refill and the moon was sinking low behind the B&B's chimney, and the goblet in her hand was the problem. She stared at it. Tulip-shaped. Crystal. Heavy in a way that suggested a stem she'd been pinching for an hour without deciding to. Fizzy pink wine, and it tasted — she took another sip to check, because a good analyst verifies — it tasted like someone had dissolved a strawberry in sunlight and poured it over ice. She had not brought a cup. She had brought a bottle of ale, hours ago, and that bottle was somewhere in the gravel with Mike's dead cornhole bag. "Where did I get this," she said, to nobody, and Aria — who was not looking at her, who was looking at the sea — said, "You had it."
That was the entire answer, and it was somehow sufficient, because the courtyard had gone soft at the edges and the fire in the low brazier had burned down to a red heartbeat and Sera was watching her from the bench with her arm still hooked over the back, and Fen realized she had been swaying. Just slightly. Just enough. "You're done," Sera said, and it wasn't a question, and it wasn't unkind. She stood, and the motion had a finality to it that Fen recognized from the inside — the way you stood when a night was over and you had decided it. "Come on. Top floor's yours and mine. Everyone else, same idea — I'm not carrying any of you up that hill twice." She said it to the whole courtyard, the way she said everything, and Fen noticed she did not wait to see whether anyone listened. She just put a hand flat between Fen's shoulder blades — warm, steady, a door being closed behind her — and turned her toward the stone steps, and Fen's boots went with her because her legs had stopped consulting her an hour ago, and behind them Mike said something to Marcus that ended in a laugh, and Aria said, "Night, analyst," and Fen did not turn around, because turning around would have meant admitting how much she wanted to.
The stone steps were narrow and cold and climbed in a slow spiral that Fen counted without meaning to — eleven, twelve, thirteen — because counting was the last thing her brain could still do reliably, and because Sera's hand had not left the small of her back, which made the counting feel like something to hold onto. The B&B's upper hall smelled of old oak and salt and something faintly floral, lavender maybe, sitting under both like a held note. Fen's shoulder found the wall once and Sera steered her off it without a word, the pressure of her palm exactly enough and no more, and Fen understood — the way she understood things at two in the morning, sideways and certain — that she was being handled by someone who had done this before and had never once made it feel like a chore.
"This one's ours," Sera said, and pushed a door that swung on a hinge older than the building's wiring, and the room opened up low and whitewashed with a sloping ceiling that cut the far wall at a slant. Two narrow beds, a washstand, a window gone black with sea. Sera crossed to it and shoved the sash up with the heel of her hand, and the wind came in off the water and hit Fen's face like a flat palm, cold and clean and exactly what she needed. "Boots," Sera said, without turning around, and Fen sat down on the edge of the nearest bed and worked at the laces with fingers that had gone thick and stupid, and got the first one off and dropped it and stared at the second like it owed her money. Sera came back across the room, crouched, and did it for her — one quick pull, the boot gone, set beside its brother with the toes even — and Fen watched the top of her head, the auburn gone almost black in the low light, and did not say anything, because there was nothing in her that could be trusted to come out as a whole sentence. Sera stood, took the goblet from Fen's hand — Fen had not noticed she was still holding it — and set it on the washstand, and then pulled the quilt back and patted the mattress once, twice, the way you'd call a dog you actually liked.
Sera didn't move toward the other bed. She stood over the one she'd opened, hand still on the turned-back quilt, and looked at Fen with the particular patience of a woman who had already read the room and was waiting for Fen to catch up to the verdict. "Lie down before you fall over," she said, and it wasn't a suggestion, and Fen — who had spent her whole life obeying the person holding the clearest data — lay back against the pillow and let the room tilt and then settle, the ceiling slanting low and white above her, the wind moving the curtain in and out like slow breathing. Somewhere down the hill a door banged and a man's laugh carried up off the water and was gone.
"You don't have to do the thing," Fen said, to the ceiling, because it was easier than to the face. "The — carrying me up. I'm not a box you have to get to the top of the stairs."
"I know what you are." Sera pulled the quilt up over Fen's knees, unhurried, tucking it the way you'd tuck a thing you intended to keep. "You're the analyst who spent three days watching us instead of taking notes, and drank my wine like it was a puzzle, and told Dani to her face that we're a mess."
Something caught in her chest — a hiccup or a laugh, she couldn't tell which, and it came out as both, a small wet snort of a giggle that she pressed into the pillow with her whole face. The room was doing that slow carousel thing when she closed her eyes, which was fine, which was nice, except the quilt was suddenly a kiln. Her legs were cooking under it. She lay there a second longer, cataloguing the specific wrongness — socks damp, thighs hot, the denim gone stiff and heavy across her knees — and then made the executive decision, the way she made every decision tonight, sideways and late and correct: she was hot, and the pants had to go.
She did it under the covers, because she was a professional. A wriggle, a heel dug into the mattress, a shove — the jeans fought her at the hips and then surrendered all at once, and she worked them down her legs and kicked them out from under the hem of the quilt, where they landed on the floorboards with a soft denim flump. The relief was immediate and total, cool air moving up her bare shins, and she let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding and said, to the slanted white ceiling, "Thank you." Not to God. To the pants, mostly. To the air. To the night in general, which had been kind.
She turned her head on the pillow, and that was when she noticed Sera was already standing at the foot of the other bed — shoes off, pants off, folded or dropped somewhere Fen hadn't tracked, just an oversized t-shirt hanging off one shoulder and a pair of socks, hip cocked against the bedpost like she'd been waiting there for the length of a commercial break. Fen's brain, running at maybe a third of its usual clock speed, did the arithmetic and came up short: she had spent the last four minutes fighting one pair of jeans, and Sera had undressed an entire human being in the time it took Fen to get comfortable. "You're fast," Fen said, and it came out admiring, which it was.
"I've had practice," Sera said, and reached for the lamp, and her mouth did the thing again — small, private, entirely for Fen. "Good night, analyst." The light went off. The room went soft and grey, and Fen heard the other bed creak as Sera settled into it, heard the quilt pull up, heard the sea keep up its long grey argument below the window.
Fen lay in the dark with her bare legs cool under the covers and her heart doing something slow and stupid and glad, and she thought, with the last clear thought she had all night:
The laugh came up out of her before she could stop it — a loose, wet, hiccuping thing that she buried in the pillow, and the pillow smelled of lavender and someone else's soap and she didn't mind, she didn't mind at all. Bare legs, cool sheets, the sea doing its long grey thing below the sill, and her own body finally, finally not fighting anything. She lay there grinning at the dark like an idiot and decided, with the enormous gravity of a woman three glasses past dignity, that she was happy. Actually happy. It had been a while since she'd checked.
The room had stopped carousel-ing, which was a shame, because she'd been enjoying it, and the quilt had gone from kiln to exactly right, and somewhere down the hill a gull complained about the hour and got no answer. Fen turned her face into the pillow, found the cool patch, and let the last thing she'd been holding — the pen, the report, the shape of the room she'd been cataloguing all week — go loose in her hands like a kite string she'd finally decided to drop. She was, she noted with the last clear thought she had all night, very asleep.