Chapter Twelve Abel
Do not seek to control the ebb and flow of magic. Adapt to the environment, as my silverwolves do.
—Lesson in creation magic from Noctu to the Immortals
Translated from The Tale of Stars (L’Histoire des étoiles), Part I: The Book of Origins
Chapter Twelve
Abel
The trip to Jardincourt should take four days, but to my frustration, it lasts a full week.
Claire managed to secure us passage on that fisherman’s boat with a rather melodramatic story about getting home in time for our supposed mother’s funeral.
According to her, pretending we were siblings created the illusion that the old man had a chance with her.
I was shocked when he dropped us off an hour downriver.
Nice to know I’m not the only one who’s easy pickings.
From there, Claire pickpocketed our way to full stomachs and clean clothes.
We hopped towns in a zigzag to the west until we had enough coin for a carriage to take us the rest of the way.
Not much movement toward saving Madame Afi just yet, but keeping Claire around was definitely the right choice to get my feet back under me.
The carriage hits a bump in the road and jostles our private cabin. The driver outside the indigo cover cracks his whip at the two horses. We rock in our seats as the hoofbeats hasten.
“Not terribly smooth with his signals. Poor horses,” Claire mutters in her seat across from me, crossed arms tight. I have a feeling she hasn’t criticized him directly because we were short a few coins.
I glance up from Hanna’s notes. “You look nice, by the way,” I say, hoping to distract her.
“Well, aren’t you forward today?” Claire pinches the top of my papers as if to pluck them away. “What’s the occasion, Monsieur Abel? Finally graduating from hunting dragons to hunting women?”
I brush her hand aside and nod to Lucy curled in her lap. Claire tied a white ribbon around her neck, to match the ribbon securing the ponytail draped over her shoulder.
“I’m talking to Lucy,” I say.
Truthfully, I’m not. Claire insisted we buy new clothes before we reach Jardincourt to decrease the odds we’ll be recognized by attackers who might be trailing us.
I packed my uniform away in favor of a navy waistcoat and charcoal trousers.
Claire picked them out. She insisted we’d blend in with Jardincourt’s fashion-minded atmosphere.
A good strategy, but perhaps not the way she intended. I won’t blend in so much as she’ll draw eyes away from me. She sure draws mine.
She wears a ruby-red dress and a cinch embroidered with black vines.
The low cut accentuates the full length of her scar, as if she wants it on display.
Bold of her. Most victims hide dragon-made scars for religious reasons—churchgoers consider close calls with dragons to be a warning from Diu.
Claire owns her bad behavior, I’ll give her that.
She leans back and rubs Lucy’s shamelessly upturned belly. “Some boys don’t know beauty when they see it, do they, ma Luciole? Not even the handsome ones.”
Third rule of dragon hunting: Anticipate the target’s patterns and counter accordingly.
“Oh, I do know beauty. I just don’t entertain it while I’m working.”
She blinks at me. I look back at Hanna’s notes and pretend to read.
Observing her flirting over the past few days has revealed a sort of rhythm to her quips.
Her recipients always end up on the defensive.
I wasn’t really trying to adopt her tactic—I just figured I’d counter the pattern and see what happens. I didn’t expect to silence her.
Leave it to the slayer’s handbook.
Silently, she turns her attention to Lucy. A self-satisfied smile settles onto her lips. Great. New territory. I need to figure out whatever that response means, lest I find myself conned in some way.
The driver drawls over the clomping hooves. “ ’Bout fifteen minutes to Jardincourt. Where should I let you off?”
Claire parts the curtains for a look outside.
The rolling hills level out into an easy decline, which allows a view over the cityscape.
Upscale homes and storefronts made of marble and brass press against each other, clustered for the dense population, a million strong.
Cobblestone draws a grid of busy streets.
The sharp, gilded corners of the star-shaped étoile Palace dominate the city center.
Bells toll the time—noon—through the sunslit city.
Claire’s childlike awe makes me snort.
“Excited for the big city?” I ask.
She composes herself. Wordlessly, she turns a stoic stare back to Lucy. Is she embarrassed?
“Monsieur?” the driver calls. “Where to?”
“The Central Gendarmerie Station, please.”
There’s a pause, as if he’s wondering why we’d want to go there as opposed to Jardincourt’s finer establishments. “Very well.”
The carriage rumbles onward. The closer we get to the city, the less prepared I feel. These clothes feel less like a disguise and more like the wrong uniform.
“You keep glancing at your helmet,” Claire observes. “Why?”
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s your brother’s skull, no? That’s not nothing.”
“It’s not about the skull. I’m worried about Madame Afi.”
The last time I saw her, we were in Ravinfort.
She’d closed up shop early when I walked through the door with Micah’s severed dragon head.
Silent tears streaked her face while she sat me down with a cup of chamomile tea.
I choked through the story of how he’d turned, the way my parents had reacted, and the shame I felt for failing to slay him on the spot.
Then how hard it was to steel my nerves when I brought his head to the Gendarmerie and pretended that I was glad to have killed him after all—just so I could save my badge, collect the bounty price, and waste the profit grieving in hiding until I had to force myself to rebuild my life.
No questions. No judgment—for me, or for Micah. As I talked, Madame Afi nodded to show she was paying attention and cleaned his skull with the tenderness she would’ve given a stillborn child. As if she hadn’t lost a future apprentice but a son.
“What will you do now?” was all she asked.
“Find a new lead,” I replied. “Then do my job.”
She doesn’t deserve to suffer for my transgressions. Neither does Lyle.
In the Estellio household, where legacy was everything, I didn’t realize the coldness I’d been tolerating until I met the Metekus.
Raising a dragon killer starts with the toys: dulled play daggers, picture books about saving civilians, wooden puzzles in the shape of dragon skeletons. Those very toys littered my childhood bedroom.
Once I turned ten, I was sent off to training camp. Every season, I returned home—bruised, aching, and sometimes bloody—to parents who’d already received my scores on a coil of parchment.
“The Estellios are better than this,” my mother liked to say.
My father preferred to glare until I built up enough shame to hunch. Once I did, he’d scold me for imperfect performance. The point was to build up my nerve. It worked well, over time. In their hands, shame was an effective tool. It drove me to crave their praise like a tinderfox craves flame.
Shame didn’t work on Micah.
By age five, he’d already turned his back on his toys. Defiance, in my parents’ eyes. Mine too, if I was being honest.
Once, when he was six, my father caught him unraveling a tapestry.
The fight ended with Micah sobbing in his bedroom across from mine.
The sound grated on me. I took my moondaggers to the backyard, where practice targets stood on the lawn.
I’d hoped to set a good example where Micah could see me from his window, but all I saw when I glanced at the house was a red-cheeked child who obviously dreaded the future I represented.
He was spoiled. Spoiled. The Estellio family had wealth and esteem, yet Micah thought nothing of the responsibility.
That winter, I fumbled an assisted slaying with my field instructor. The dragon had raked the sleeve of my uniform and opened my forearm. The first person I sought help from was Lyle—and the smith he apprenticed with—to replace a dagger I’d thrown too wide and lost in the snow.
“At least you survived,” he joked, elbow braced on the top of his mop. He tossed me the clean rag he’d tucked into the back of his belt. “Stanch that wound before you bleed out.”
Red drops speckled the half-mopped floor.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“No apologies. Just take care of yourself.”
“Don’t tell my parents.”
“Abel. You need to value your health more than your equipment.”
The moondagger I’d lost was an old one from my father’s weapons cache, but my parents had gifted me this uniform as a training present.
It was made from the hide of their latest kill, tightly sewn with the kind of multilayered stitching that flames couldn’t easily breach.
Only the best outfitters made uniforms that lasted so long.
Yet I’d gone and let the dragon shred through the scales.
I shook from shock of the injury. Fear of judgment, too. “I need my uniform repaired before my parents find out.”
Lyle set the mop aside. “I’ll take you to Ma.”
Madame Afi’s shop served a dual purpose: half outfitter, half smithy.
The forge in the back remained cold, unused without her late husband, but somehow it was warmer than the smithy where Lyle had been apprenticing.
Rolls of dragon hide, thread, and leather packed the shelves.
Mannequins wore incomplete slayer uniforms. In the center sat a dining table, of all things.
The wooden chairs were cushioned, as if prolonged social interactions with customers were the norm for her.
I gingerly removed my overcoat. It tore the sticky, scabbed blood from the gash, painful enough to hitch my breath.
“If there’s any way you can hide the damage—” I started.
Madame Afi tossed the coat at Lyle, then pushed me into the nearest chair. Lyle eyed her with exasperation while she went to retrieve her first aid kit, rattling off the instructions he needed to clean my blood from the scales.