On the train to Camelot that afternoon, Cecil paged through the last job packet Coshel had sent ahead of them, so it was waiting in Valorous’ train carriage when they got on. It was printed on paper, not on parchment like the one he’d gotten from Einsamal, although it was a cheaper stock than the one from Virtue. The paper felt strangely familiar in his hands, smelt familiar too, even though it was just fucking paper, even though it wasn’t like the Lluoedd Arfog and their compatriots had a monopoly on some special kind of paper.

Valorous was lying back on the bunk, his eyes half-closed, looking like he was dozing, but the foot hanging off the bunk’s side was rocking in lazy rhythm with the click of passing tracks beneath them.

He hadn’t even glanced at the envelope when he’d come into the carriage, had just kicked off his boots and dropped his jacket before dropping back onto the bunk, which was all Cecil needed to tell him that Valorous already knew exactly what was inside it. Still, he’d been surprised when he opened it up and paged past the little sticky note that said, “Maybe this one. Val could give you a few pointers. C.”

Cecil wasn’t the only man looking through job packets of late, although Valorous didn’t get old-fashioned packets like this from the post office or the administrator of one business or other – he got much slimmer, fancier ones with personalised invitations. He’d been looking through one last night, leaning the pages on Ruby’s back as she snored against his thigh.

“Enforcement,” Cecil had read over his shoulder. “You’d be alright at that, wouldn’t you?”

“That’s what my dad was,” Valorous had answered, his expression dull and distant. “An enforcer.”

Then he’d passed the packet to Cecil to put on the fire, and that had been the end of that.

Looking at his own packet now, Cecil’s immediate instinct was that he wouldn’t have the fucking experience to teach at a place like Sons of Cumhaill – for fuck’s sake, he was the first man to say it had been a downgrade when Valorous came to Idloes Sant instead of where he’d come from – but when he looked down the list of openings, he saw that they weren’t just looking for a new Alchemy Master or looking to fill teaching posts for Politics, Economy, and Literature. At the bottom of the list of teaching posts was a call for a drills assistant.

Paging through the packet for the rundown of the school’s hierarchy and the departmental organisation, he tracked down the little flowcharts – there were weapons drills modules covered under their Tactics and Strategy syllabus, but the drills assistant was listed as a member of the Health & Fitness department, not ones for Sports or Weapons and Warfare.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, looking at the next page, where all the current staff were listed – they tried for a staff-student ratio of 1:5, and the one-hundred-and-fifty teaching and assistant staff didn’t even include everybody. How many more staffed the infirmary, the dormitories, did the cleaning, did the cooking, the admin?

Valorous hadn’t looked up at Cecil muttering under his breath, but he titled his head just slightly toward him when Cecil asked, “Would you want to come abroad with me, if I left Loegr to get a job?”

Valorous’ expression didn’t change, and his rhythm didn’t falter. “Would we bring Ruby?”

“’Course. You’d have to be with her, though. She’s okay at being alone for a lot of the day ‘cause she sleeps, but it’d be different, if I was working full-time instead of part-time.”

“I could handle that,” Valorous said. Then, with nary a flicker in his expression, let alone a change in the neutrality of his tone, he added, “Sons of Cumhaill is in the middle of nowhere, you know. You’d not get to avoid people like you used to at Sant Idloes.”

“It’s on an island, right?”

“Only sometimes, when the moon is full. The castle’s been there a long time, it’s about six, seven-hundred years old? There’s been a good bit of coastal erosion, the concentrated magical flow made it worse, and they let it, let the saltmarshes expand. If the tides are high and there’s a storm, it can be an island, but mostly, it’s accessible. Not always by car, though, sometimes you have to make it on foot.”

Cecil wondered if this was better or worse, it only being an island some of the time. The bit on lodgings mentioned that there were options available both in the castle proper and on the mainland, and he’d wondered at the lack of detail on it, how often they ferried back and forth between the castle and the mainland, but it made more sense, if it wasn’t predictable. “What is it that stops car travel, floods?”

Valorous shakes his head. “The magical fields. Where it’s situated, the castle, depending on tidal flow, star alignment, the magical flow can change a lot – part of the extreme coastal erosion, but it also affects the nearby forestry, the overlap with fae dimensions, portals, not in the castle proper and within the walls, they’re insulated, but out on the grounds and on the flats and in the marshes. Makes your teeth itch, how thick it is, some days, slides over your skin, catches in your hair. The tallest tower in the castle, they keep a telescope there and some pretty complex astronomical equipment, but they use it for heavy-duty magical channelling work too, for festival days, eclipses, shit like that.”

“Not the students, I’m guessing.”

“Nah, not the Sons of Cumhaill. Students would only be if they sent them up from a university – people like Cicero doing Rite and Ritual, but they’d be Albannach.”

“It says on-site staff can have pets,” Cecil said, although he felt sceptical of that. He didn’t like the idea of living in a castle with nearly a thousand kids under the age of fourteen in it no matter what the fucking staff-student ratio was, especially not if most of those kids were formally trained in arms and weaponry, even without thinking of Ruby living there as well.

“They can,” Valorous said. “Virginia Lye, she’s Maths and Economics, she keeps hellhounds. He retired five years back, but Bridges, the old Enchantment Master, he had a big fucking dog when I was there. It was a Great Dane, I think, or some kind of mastiff. It was a long time ago, but mostly I remember it being twice as tall as I was.”

Cecil scanned down the page of requirements for the drills assistant post, felt there was something uncanny about how the boxes were being ticked against his experience – at least a decade’s teaching experience in a magical institution, training in at least two forms of close arms, a physical fitness requirement, military experience a plus. He’d have to take a primer course in Scots Gaelic, but the castle grounds had translation charms in place – they had their limitations, but they would cover most any instruction he might have to give in the course of drills, or even most of the classes he might assist in, and enough of the students and faculty would speak English to bridge the gap.

“I don’t think I ever asked you,” he said slowly, tapping a pencil against the papers in front of him, “did you like it there? Sons of Cumhaill?”

Valorous opened his eyes, and he turned his cheek on the pillow of the narrow bunk, looking over at Cecil seriously. His lips were pressed loosely together, but he didn’t seem pissed off at the question. It was another one of those times, Cecil guessed, where someone asked him a question it had never occurred to the lad to ask himself, and he had to cast back through his head to find the answer.

“I loved it,” Valorous said. “My favourite was sword drills, I really liked the drillmaster at the time – her name was Mer, I think, she was cold, stony. She used to put her hands on my body to correct my form, her hands were always really warm with magic, and she would slide her hand down my actual muscles and readjust them, my back and belly, my thighs, my…” His eyes went a bit distant, and Cecil watched the careful part of his lips, imagined he could actually see the colour draining out of Valorous’ face. “I was, um,” he said faintly, “I would have been six.”

“You okay? You want to stop talking about it?”

“No,” said Valorous. “No, um, it’s okay. Maybe it’s just because it was different, then, because my dad was alive, because I was a kid, because nothing seemed complicated yet, I don’t know. But I remember being really, really happy there. Every day at school was routine, and timetabled, and I knew what was going to happen, and I knew what people wanted from me. What the right things to do were to succeed, and get high marks, and people’s approval. No politics. No grief. My mother didn’t want me, but I didn’t really care – it wasn’t that that wasn’t like, hurtful, I guess, just that it didn’t matter. My life was full up enough without her. I understood the other kids, and they understood me, and I understood the teachers, and I wasn’t a problem. No one treated me like a problem. I didn’t know what it was like to be a problem, until, um… Until after.” He looked down at his hands, stroking a thumb down one of the lines on his palm.

It was after a little bit of pause that he went on, “You know, what I did to Billy Trotter, shooting him in the back of the head like I did, even that was simple. That was me doing what I was supposed to do, and I think if I’d gone back to Sons of Cumhaill, everybody would have said so. But I didn’t. I came down here, and suddenly, what I’d done was complicated, and fucked-up, because people down here aren’t military and they’re not mythical either, they’re just people. And I was a kid. And it’s a different context. ‘Cause what I did in the context of a military man was that I saw the threat, saw what he’d done, and took quick, responsive action – eliminated that threat where if I’d called for help, or tried to run, I would have been at more risk. I was just using the tools and the training I’d been given.

“But in the context of Lashton, in the context of my family, what I did was different. People don’t think of kids as having training or that kind of thought at that age, at nine. At nine, I was meant to be a kid, and people around here don’t really understand a kid that’s not… childish. That’s not a child. To people here I was born a criminal, son of an enforcer, and all they saw was a kid so fucked up that at nine years old he was ready to do his first murder.”

“S’fucked up, when you think of it like that,” said Cecil in an easy going, good-natured tone, and Valorous smiled wanly at him.

“Yeah,” he said.

“You were still a child, though,” Cecil said. “You were a trained child, mature, tactical, but you were still a child. Sons of Cumhaill never treated you like a man, did they? Like an adult?”

Valorous’ smile widened, and was a bit sadder, too. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that’s why it was good, I think. Killing Trotter, it wouldn’t have stopped me being a kid up there, to my teachers, to the other kids. Down here, it was… complicated. People couldn’t see me as a kid anymore, or didn’t want to, or I was a kid, but not the kind other kids wanted to be around, or that their parents wanted to be around.”

“Yeah,” said Cecil. “Sorry you didn’t go back.”

“No,” said Valorous, and laughed now. There was a bitterness in it, and Cecil tilted his head, looking at the lad critically. It was amazing, how the lad’s eyes could harden the way they could, how they could go so cool and frosty – of course, this was less the angry ice, and a bit more of the bleak midwinter. “That’s the thing, that’s why it’s funny, it’s… I was really happy there. But I’d still have left. I’d have left at eleven, or I’d have left at fourteen, and either way, I would have been what they’d made me into, and what the rest of the world doesn’t want a kid to be. What a kid isn’t fucking supposed to be.”

It was like feeling a stone sink inside him, a sort of fucking falling feeling from his heart right down to his guts, and Cecil’s eyes stung a bit – more like remembered tears than the ability to actually fucking cry them, but it struck him in the moment, how close they were in the carriage, how close they were.

“Does that make sense?” Valorous asked, the smile slowly melting away, his face more serious now. Cecil watched his throat bob as he swallowed.

“Yeah,” said Cecil again, feeling a kind of pinch in his chest at how much fucking sense it made. He wished he was the romantic sort in the moment, strangely enough, wished that what was between them was more of a romance rather than whatever the fuck it was. What would a romantic man do, in this moment? Reach for Valorous, touch him, hold his hand, kiss his forehead, kiss his mouth? “You’ve been reading them books of mine, eh? Recovery and that?”

“A little, but it only just clicked now. ‘Cause you asked.”

“Good lad,” Cecil almost whispered, couldn’t quite manage more volume behind the words.

Valorous nodded, then closed his eyes and laid back on the bunk. “You don’t need to take a job if you don’t want,” the lad said, absurdly casual about it. “I’ve got money enough for both of us.”

“It’s not the money,” Cecil murmured. “The gym’s grating, that’s all. Slow, quiet. And apart from that, it’s the lack of… I dunno. I’m not impacting anybody’s life in that shitty little basement, not changing anything, not making anything better for them. I might improve somebody’s form a bit, fix their mood, but most of what I’m doing in the course of the day is cleaning up and doing maintenance, and it doesn’t satisfy me like real training does. Or tire me out.”

“I could pay you for your services from today, next time.”

“Hobbes Removal & Co.?”

Valorous frowned, not opening his eyes. “Who’s the Co.? Me?”

Cecil laughed. “Could try your cousin’s lad Spencer.”

“You’d have to fight him for him,” Valorous muttered, and Cecil laughed.

They’d gone over a lot of the lad’s flat in the last month or so, mostly taking apart and removing furniture – the dining room and two of the bedrooms had been stripped to nothing, and another of the bedrooms they’d changed over to bedroom storage for the assorted crap he was keeping.

Last week, some bloke Cecil had never met before, a cousin of Valorous’ called Avaricious, had come in to have a look at everything they were getting rid of, valuing it all with a view to selling it off. Avaricious Snape was not a Lashton man – he was a little fella in his early fifties, a posh, delicate little man, compact and well-groomed and particular about things, but according to Valorous, his father was a pawnbroker, and the old man still ran his original shop today, albeit whilst carting around an oxygen tank for his emphysema.

Cecil had quietly done his best to avoid Snape himself – Valorous had said he was on the legitimate rather than illegitimate side of the family business, but that didn’t make him any less fucking off-putting, severe and quiet and dangerous in his way – and spent most of the day hauling furniture back and forth with Snape’s muscle, Spencer, and his drivers, putting some stuff into a van and the rest into a lorry.

Snape managed nightclubs and restaurants, and was taking some of the furniture and ornaments to decorate those, and selling off the rest of the crap to appropriate people.

“How are you related to him, Snape? Heinous is your uncle, Noble’s your aunt, that’s pretty straight-forward. And Indistinguishable is their cousin, so he’s your second cousin first removed—”

“First cousin, once removed,” Valorous corrected.

“Right. And I’ve taught a lot of your other cousins – some of them actual cousins, others… whatever the fuck. Snape, he’s not an uncle?”

“No, I just call him that. So Aunt Noble, she’s the daughter of Dauntless King and Jonathan Huck. Dauntless was the daughter of Belinda Carlson and Valiant King. Valiant’s brother, Verbose, married Anita Renn, and they had a bunch of kids – plus Indefatigable, whose dad is Lucien Pike – and one of those kids was Beautiful King, who married the pawnbroker, Nathaniel Snape. And they had Avaricious. Only the one kid.” It was incredible, how easily he did it – he didn’t open his eyes, but he gestured with his hands as he spoke, and Cecil could almost imagine it, the way he was envisaging it in his head, how easily he visualised it and rattled off the names, tracing them on the air. “It’s just easier to call him Uncle.”

“I should have asked you to draw me a chart,” Cecil muttered, and Valorous sniggered. “Is that how you see it in your head? Just a big fucking family tree?”

“It’s not hard for me,” Valorous said. “I had to learn other people’s family trees, royals, titled people’s, that was a bit harder. But my family’s big, and we’ve got distinctive names. It’s useful, from an ambassador’s perspective.”

“And from a criminal’s perspective.”

“Avaricious isn’t a criminal, I told you.”

“I know what you told me,” Cecil said. “And that man is cold-fucking-blooded, lad. It doesn’t matter how legit he is, he’s fucking frightening.”

Valorous laughed, swinging his leg a bit more vigorously, and he turned his head again to look at Cecil again. “Whenever my dad brought me down to London, we’d stay with him, with Avaricious. We’d fence, and he showed me some holds and stuff that were easy to do even though I was so short. I used to see him and think, well, maybe when I’m older, I’ll be scary like he is. Maybe it won’t matter if I don’t get any taller, that people’ll find me scary anyway.”

“They do,” said Cecil. “But you don’t freeze a room when you walk in it, not like he does.”

“No,” Valorous agreed. “Not exactly. Courageous has tried to push a few jobs like Avaricious’ my way – not management, like his, but that sort of thing. Legit ones, but only just. Washing money, but you won’t know what’s dirty and what’s not, promise, cross our hearts. I know I don’t have to do what he wanted, but what my dad wanted was for me to do what I wanted. And I don’t know what that is, either, but he didn’t want me in the family business.”

“You want to look at any of these?” Cecil asked, proffering the job packet, and Valorous wrinkled his nose.

There was a jangle over their heads, and Valorous sat forward, pulling his boots on.

“Saved by the bell,” Cecil said, with more spite than he really felt, and Valorous grinned at him with no spite showing in him at all.

* * *

“No, not today,” Cecil had said sternly when Cicero had walked across the arena training grounds to meet them, and taken the stave right out of Cicero’s hands, replacing it with a training stick of about the same weight, one that didn’t channel magic at all. “No magic.”

“No magic?” Cicero repeated, uncomprehending. He looked askance at Valorous, who shrugged his shoulders, and felt the weight of the sword and shield Cecil had tossed to him, feeling how lightweight they were, even for training weaponry.

“How long since you last did hand-to-hand drills?” Cecil asked, raising his eyebrows. “Been watching you flounce about with him in the arena the past few months – you like to keep your distance.”

“I’m a battle mage, Cecil, not a fucking lapdancer,” Cicero said blandly, but Valorous hid his grin at how offended he looked as he focused on putting on an armoured vest and a set of pauldrons and gauntlets – light as anything, just enough to protect his joints if Cicero got a hit in. “How close do you want me to get?”

“It’s not about wanting,” Cecil said. “Ideally, lad, you’re right, you’d be on some nice rocky outcrop, on the top of a fucking mountain, casting down big spells onto the battlefield below. Well, enemy soldiers don’t always get that memo. Put some armoured gloves on.”

“I don’t wear—”

“Wasn’t a fucking request,” Cecil barked as he walked away, and Valorous laughed at the offence on Cicero’s face.

“The fuck is this supposed to be?”

“Asked him to train us today,” Valorous said, grinning, and he remembered the first time he was at Sant Idloes, in a PE class, and Cecil had split him off from the bulk of the class.

“You, King,” he’d barked. He’d been there a week or so, and mostly what he’d felt was boredom, a sense of being weirdly at sea. Maybeetle kept sitting down with him in the evening and asking him questions about his feelings, about his grief, about his dad, about Noble and Jack, about how he was “settling in”. “Not with them. Over there.”

He hadn’t been as thin, back then – Valorous had liked the look of him, in all honesty, had felt a bit more comfortable with Mr Hobbes, in his polo and sweatshirt and his shaggy, messy bun of hair, his well-worn tracksuit bottoms and exercise boots, than he did with a lot of the other teachers, who just seemed weird, seemed too formal or too informal, didn’t seem real. Kept smiling at him.

He'd pointed Valorous away from the other human kids, who were lining up to play football with Garrity, and toward the non-humans instead – two vampires, a big fae girl, Angus Fairchild, who was a big, fat magical boy from Alba himself, had been expelled from a few schools before getting sent to Idloes Sant. He’d really put Valorous through his paces that day, called him names and barked at him when he didn’t think Valorous was trying hard enough, when he felt Valorous was hiding what he was really capable of.

He'd made Valorous climb a rope, made him run one way and then the other, made him do push-ups, pull-ups.

He’d gone back to the dorms that night fucking exhausted, and it had been his first properly good day at Idloes Sant, the first day he’d been properly happy to be there.

Valorous was smiling now, even though Cicero was grumpily leaning on his non-magical stave.

“I do have close combat training,” he said irritably. “He needn’t act as though I don’t know my arse from my elbow.”

“You don’t have close combat training with someone like me, though,” Valorous said. “That’s what’s happening today.”

“Fuck’s sake,” Cicero muttered, and Valorous laughed when his expression went from grumpy to forlorn as Cecil came back their way and shoved a set of armoured gloves into Cicero’s chest.