Cecil joins Ava and some angels for a nice lunch.
Cecil Hobbes, an ex-PE teacher disgraced and looked down on in his hometown, has a new partner: Sir Valorous King, a knight of the realm, once a child of prophecy, and Cecil’s stalker.
A few months into their relationship, Cecil finally convinces Valorous to see a therapist, on the condition that Cecil attend one himself.
Cecil wasn’t sure what to expect when he headed up the hill and toward the address Ava had given him on a beautifully written formal invitation card – someone else must have written it out, because the handwriting was both pretty and legible.
Twice in the few months of knowing her, he’s brought Ruby around to the angel’s house, which she shares with a few siblings. It was one of those detached cottages on the edge of a public park called Mystery Lodge, and it was cosy and old-fashioned inside, the furniture arranged around a big stone hearth instead of a television or a coffee table, and Ruby fucking loved lying before the crackling fire like a new rug, melting into the big iron stove, as Cecil and Ava chatted over tea.
Even more, she enjoyed the big garden Ava liked to sit out in, liked sniffing the various herbs and flowers – Ava knew all their old names in Latin and Middle English, but the names hadn’t surprised Cecil as much as how old-fashioned the garden was. It felt like the sort of garden you’d find in an abbey or a nunnery, not that Cecil was any fucking expert.
It was an odd little friendship that he’d stumbled into, very fucking different to having pints with Coshel or with prospects in the arena, let alone friendships he’d had in the past with ex-army mates or the occasional grudging singular drink he’d agree to get with other teachers for someone’s birthday or retirement.
Ava didn’t imbibe alcohol. Her bird-like physiology was barely able to tolerate it, and her diet consisted mostly of fruits and nuts and grains, which Valorous had said was pretty standard for a good forty percent of angels. Most of the ones that had wings, he said, also had lighter bones and a different order of organs than the angels who were more similar inside to humans.
Even the tea that Cecil and Ava drank together wasn’t made with tea leaves – it was brewed with flowers and leaves she picked herself, nettles or hibiscus, or other plants he wouldn’t know.
They chatted about all kinds of things, and Cecil somehow forgot each time between meeting her that she wasn’t the pretty young girl she so resembled – he would always brace himself to feel awkward or insecure, to feel like a creepy old bastard carrying on a strangely inappropriate friendship with a teenager.
Cecil has fucked younger men his life through and never worried about appearing predatory or lecherous, but it was different with a young girl, especially one who was so frail and slim and small of frame. Even a little bloke like Cecil might look threatening in contrast.
It was never actually like that, of course.
As soon as he ever sat down with her, placid and effortlessly ancient as her energy was, his anxieties about what outsiders must think about their dynamic bubbled away like so much mist. They talked easily and fluidly, and while Ava didn’t always understand his references or him hers, it was because of their cultural differences as much as the gap between their ages, and when it was about their age gap, it was because she’d been born a few centuries before his dad was born.
Cecil talked about growing up poor and as the youngest of his brothers, about the odd jobs he’d do after school and the stupid shite he and his friends would get up to, dredging shit out of the canal or trespassing in abandoned buildings or dodging the ticket guard to ride the train for free; he talked about the landscapes he saw and the people he met as a soldier; he talked about teaching and pedagogy, his best and worst students across decades of teaching, of what schools did right and wrong, about philosophy, politics, poetry.
Ava talked about the world around her when she Fell, the astonishing beauty of the English and Scottish countrysides shed been blessed to see, about trees and grasses and mushrooms and flowers and algaes and corals; she talked about feeling called to the structure and order of the nunnery, the stone of the abbey and the strict scheduling of prayers and duties a contrast with the wild abandon of the countryside; she talked about ministering to the sick, soothing fevered brows or setting broken bones or helping new mothers through pregnancy, childbirth, nursing; she talked about spending a long time on one hospital or others doing needlework or weaving at a loom, or churning butter or carding wool, and then beginning to walk in the sun again.
They actually had more in common than not, Cecil thought, despite being different ages, genders, species; they liked the same things in the world around them, enjoyed the same sort of peace, and shared the same sorts of fears and old pains.
The fancy invite card was not bringing him to Mystery Lodge – like Ava had complained to him when they’d first started talking, it was on the corner of a public park but with tower apartments and other buildings all around it. The park was the last vestige of what had previously been mostly farms and a long-since demolished church, one that Ava said they’d pieced apart in the eighteen hundreds.
Cecil thought he’d be going to a home at first, but as he walked up the meandering path from the bus stop, he saw that it was a restaurant, and when he held out his invite to the maître d’, a plump woman in a green skirt suit, she lead him through to a great big Victorian-style greenhouse, the sort you’d find in a botanical gardens.
The glass ceilings were high over their heads with hanging walkways leading between baskets and troughs of more flowers, and there were fucking domed towers that had spiralling ivy and thorns all the way up to the stops. Ornate steel framing held up all the glass panels, and there were trellises of flowers, of fruits, a thousand fucking shades of green and other colours too, blues and purples and pinks and reds and oranges, and—
“Fuck me,” he muttered, and then said, “Um, sorry,” to the woman leading him in, but she just laughed.
There were birds. There were butterflies and bees around some of the flowers, but flitting between the curling trees at the edges and corners of the place, and cutting through the centre of the greenhouse, there were little tits and finches, and a kingfisher flitted right ahead of his face to dive into a big white stone fountain at the far side of the greenhouse.
It was very warm under the glass, despite the winter chill setting in outdoors, and he shrugged off his coat, relieved to be free of it as soon as it was held at his side.
On the stone tile was a long garden table, around which were fifteen or so people – Ava was curled up in a high-backed wicker chair in the middle of the table’s horizontal length, a crocheted blanket in her lap, and she smiled toward Cecil as he entered, waving at him with a shimmering doll-like hand.
Cecil didn’t need to be told to know that basically everyone present but him was an angel. He recognised Aluel and Faizah Majok, and it took him a moment, but he recognised Manute Majok too.
Valorous had said he wore a glamour over his face, and now and then he brought it up in conversation, wondering what was underneath it. He wasn’t wearing it now: over his cheeks were many patterned scars, rough and textured, lines on his cheeks and over his brow. They would draw stares in most of Lashton, Cecil guessed, scarified marks like that, but now he saw them raised and shining on Majok’s dark skin, it was as though up to now there had been a vital piece of his features missing, as though the man looked abruptly whole and complete in Cecil’s eyes where Cecil had before now been looking at him with one eye covered.
He felt really quite honoured, his breath catching oddly in his throat, as he met Manute’s eye and nodded to him, received a friendly nod back, and then he felt somehow disgusted with himself, and had to fight the urge to turn tail and run right home.
It felt wrong, that he was being trusted with this, when he was just one of Manute Majok’s patients, not his friend, not even a fellow angel, that even though Ava had invited him and Manute probably knew about it, that he was somehow here illicitly, that it was wrong for him to have been let in.
“Will you sit here, Cecil?” Ava asked. A handsome woman in her forties vacated the seat beside Ava to leave it free for him, and he braced himself for stares and mutters as he made his way over, but none came.
With more confidence than he felt, Cecil asked, “Should I, uh, be wishing you a happy birthday? Fall day?”
Ava laughed her wispy, papery laugh. There was a dog in her lap, a brown-eyed papillon who leapt eagerly into Cecil’s lap as soon as it became available, making him laugh as he scrubbed his hands over the furry little beast’s dappled brown fur.
“No occasion, we just have a lunch like this a few times a year. This is Tommy, he’s very needy. Can you tell?”
“No, he comes off as a cool customer,” Cecil said as Tommy eagerly shoved his little nose up against Cecil’s chin, making him laugh before he got Tommy to sit down on his knees again, rubbing his chin as he furiously wagged his feather duster of a tail. “There are worse things a dog can be than needy. He’s not yours?”
“No, he belongs to Holland,” Ava said, nodding to a bulking man with arms as thick around as Cecil’s thighs, white blond with very light eyelashes. Funny, sitting at a table like this, how he looked human at first glance, and yet as soon as Cecil looked at him longer, it was clear how inhuman he was. He couldn’t name the reasons why, if pressed, but it was overwhelmingly obvious.
“Tommy is very soft, and very darling, but he requires more vigorous intellectual stimulation than I think I could stand to provide.” She wrinkled her nose, making the silver scales on her face shift and move, and then added in a soft voice, with an apologetic downward glance, “and his bark is very ugly.”
Cecil laughed.
“You prefer Ruby’s bark?”
Ava nodded. “Tommy’s is so… sharp.”
Cecil said, “Down,” to Tommy, and he immediately obeyed, looking eagerly up at Cecil with his eyes big and brown, chocolate freckles scattered across his white muzzle to match his brown button nose. “Sit!”
Tommy sat, and suddenly he was almost preternaturally fucking skill, unblinking, his gaze fixed on Cecil’s face, his tail ramrod straight behind him on the ground.
“Up,” Cecil said, gesturing, and Tommy stood up on two legs, then pressed his paws to Cecil’s hand when Cecil offered his palm, even before Cecil tried to say high-five or paw. “Spin?” Still standing up on two legs, Tommy eagerly span around, and Cecil chuckled. “Okay, very impressive! Down. Good man, down again. Can you roll over?”
Tommy rolled over onto his back and did two full rotations before eagerly looking to Cecil again, and Cecil laughed, scratching under the dog’s ear.
“He keeps you busy, huh?” he asked across the table, and Holland grinned at him.
“He normally runs with the sheep dogs. Runs circles around them, too – does twice the miles they do.” Holland had a thick Scots accent, and when he clucked his tongue now, Tommy immediately turned away from Cecil and hopped back to his owner, hopping up onto Holland’s knees instead, and at a quiet instruction, he settled down in his lap, although Cecil could see his little ears twitching, listening for any hint of action or excitement.
Cecil was still smiling as he looked back to Ava, who had an expression Cecil was now rather familiar with on her porcelain-silver features: her lips were pressed together and she was trying not to smile, and more importantly, trying not to roll her eyes, because she did not particularly care for this dog, but she wasn’t going to say so now.
“Thanks for the invite,” Cecil said, and she smiled at him,
“As it gets colder, I’m less inclined to meet you in the park,” she said. “I hate the snow.”
“Your garden will survive, right?”
“It’s warded and enchanted, not just the walls, but the soil as well, I have a tile grid underneath to keep the soil enriched. I can’t keep the world trapped in late spring, where I like it, but my garden, I can.”
Cecil nodded his head, and when someone comes over with a bottle of wine, he’s surprised at how fucking fancy a red it is – then again, when half your table can’t even drink the wine, he supposes it’s easier to shell out for the pricier bottles. There are loads of small plates on the table, and the thing is, Cecil wouldn’t know what half of it was, because just fucking looking at it, he can see that a lot of it is old-style English and Welsh dishes, medieval dishes.
“Valorous cooks like this,” he said, and Ava’s eyebrows raise, her lips shifting into a surprised smile.
“Yes?”
A lot of it was different stewed meats and custards and poached fruits, but the pies he recognised. “That’s, uh, these are heathen cakes, right?”
“Yes.”
He pulled a bowl a little closer to him, and spooned a little of it onto the empty plate at the setting in front of him. He could smell saffron, and some kind of leaf that tasted citrusy, but he knew wasn’t actually from a lemon or an orange tree – Valorous had pointed it out to him on walks before.
“Frumenty,” she said. “You’ve had it before?”
“I have,” Cecil admitted, taking a mouthful and not even really having to chew on the porridge, just sort of holding it in his mouth and feeling the texture of it before he did chew on it, swallowed. “He, um… He’s very particular about how he cooks, about textures and appearances. I try not to think about it too much, because we eat well, when he cooks, but I don’t like to think about how he learned. He’ll roast something for six fucking hours, and then present it like how it’s probably presented at a royal table – on a bed of perfectly stacked vegetables, all cut to the same size, the same shape, colour-coordinated, all with herbs and mushrooms and roots he forages for. It’s ingrained in him by now. Second nature.”
Ava’s smile faded a little, the blanket pulled up a little over her legs to cover her hands as well, and she nodded her head.
“Many fae peoples eat the same things we’ve eaten for centuries,” she said. “Similar strains of wheat, certain fruits, mushrooms, that just… They don’t exist for most of the world like they used to. They take too long to grow, or agrarian technologies have moved past them. People think of medieval flavours as having been simple, or they imagine us all eating flavourless gruel day after day. It frustrates me, sometimes, the assumptions people make.”
“Makes sense.”
“Is he very fae?” she asked, and Cecil blinked at her.
“Valorous?”
Until now, they’d—
Not avoided talking about him, exactly. That wasn’t true at all: Cecil had mentioned that Valorous was away, said offhand where he’d been, what he was up to, or mentioned things he’d gotten up to at home, his systems.
But he realised that Ava had never asked a question about him, about what he was like.
“The way he dresses,” Ava said softly. “Always in fae weaves, the clothes he wears, and he wears fae dyes. Fae boots, always fae boots. And the way that he moves, the way that he…” She shrugged her shoulders, her lips pressing together almost guiltily before she said, “I asked Dot, and she wouldn’t tell me a thing about him. He’s her patient, after all.”
“He’s not as fae as he looks,” Cecil said. “He, um… I don’t know what he is, really. All that time abroad, in fae realms. He’s been blending in with different people all his life, following different orders. I don’t know what he is – I don’t think he does either.”
Ava nodded her head, stroking her hair back behind one ear with a thumb. She was wearing a dark band to hold back the most of it and halfway veil it – it was thin, sheer fabric, transparent in the way a bandana wouldn’t be.
“Is he settling back in alright?” she asked, and Cecil nodded slowly.
“He’s got a job,” he said.
“Oh, you didn’t mention that the other week,” Ava said, her hair shifting to the side as she tilted her head. “Did he get the offer while he was travelling?”
Cecil shook his head, spearing a few pieces of stewed venison onto his plate, a skewer of some kind of battered chicken with bits of apple, and then taking up a piece of bread and beginning to butter it.
“When he was on his way back and he was meeting us in the pub, he got off outside the LAR. Not for any reason, except for the fact that he’d never been in there before, and they gave him a tour of the place, and, uh… I don’t know, the way he tells it, it seems like he basically insulted the old lady that runs the place, and she gave him a job as a reward.”
Ava laughed, touching a silver nail against her teeth. “That’s— That’s good, animal rescue. That’s nice. Is he doing it because it’s what you do?”
“I think that’s probably a contributing factor, yeah, but, um… He’s gonna take over in some kind of administrative role, basically running their office. It, um… The way he said it, it sounds like it’s not a public-facing role, and that sounds good for him, from what I’ve seen. Being able to do good work in a little office with no one trying to talk to him, or recognising him.”
“I can see the appeal in work like that,” Ava murmured. “Better than trying to get him into the arena with you. What about you, do you think you’re going to take one of those teaching jobs?”
“No,” Cecil said, rubbing over his cheeks. “None of them, but I did think about them seriously, all of them, talked about them with Coshel, uh… I would like to teach again, but I don’t want to move. Before, I was just used to living here, had been here so long I didn’t care for the idea of going anywhere else. Now, I’m…” He swiped his tongue along the inside of his lip. “Well. I’m starting to lay down new roots again. Valorous, Coshel, the house, the dog. I’m making new friends, too.”
“New friends?” Ava asked sardonically. “Or very old ones?”
“You look new,” Cecil said. “Nice and shiny.”
Sniggering, she looked up from what she was eating, fried egg with slices of apple, and then admitted, “I rather like talking with you as well. I’d miss you, if you went off to Scotland to make children jog laps.”
Cecil leaned back in his seat, chewing slowly on a piece of finely battered chicken and then swallowing it. “You ever miss talking to nuns?”
“Yes,” Ava said immediately, like it was a question she’d been waiting for but didn’t know she had been. “Some women still swear in, but it’s not the same, exactly, it’s not… It’s not as though I judge them for their worldliness, nor the church for having evolved and changed with the decades, the centuries. But the sisters I called my friends, and worked alongside, in my youth and the centuries following it, even when targeted the way that I was, they were authorities within their communities, and it showed in the way they thought about themselves, and how others spoke to them, talked to them. Now, a woman who chooses to become a nun is worse, even, than a relic of another time – she’s a curiosity, an oddity. A joke.”
Cecil nodded slowly.
“You miss talking to soldiers,” she said.
“Not exactly,” Cecil muttered.
“You aren’t friends with anyone you served with, still?”
“You still believe in the church,” Cecil said. “In religious life, or the idea of it, or… But I joined the army because it was the only way I could get away from my fucking family and afford it. I never did it out of nationalism, or because I thought it was the right thing to do, or… And I killed people – I killed people like me.
“Other kids who wanted out of wherever they were, and it was the only way they knew how to do it, or because they were told to and didn’t know how to say no, or couldn’t say no. And now, as a grown man, one who went into teaching, who started reading up on it, I can say what my problem is with the army, with soldiers, with all of it, but to the men I served with, it feels like I’m betraying them. Telling them we did it all for nothing.”
“It wasn’t for nothing,” Ava said, and then, rather snidely, “it was for the ego of a king you aren’t loyal to – and a bit of money, here and there. I think largely for the drug trade, given where you were deployed.”
“Thanks, Ava, very comforting.”
“I wasn’t trying to be comforting. I was trying to be funny.”
“Keep trying.”
“I will,” she promised, and Cecil laughed and shoved her chair, making her laugh as well.
“Gonna give me the gossip?” Cecil asked.
“You don’t know anybody here except the Majoks.”
“That’s why I’m asking for gossip.”
Ava smiled, chewing slowly on her egg and apple – such a fucked-up combination – and then said, “I’m really glad you came today. It’s nice having someone at the table that doesn’t see me as either a patient or a victim.”
“Pretty nice sitting at a table where I don’t stand out as a pervert or a criminal,” Cecil admitted, albeit very quietly.
Ava started talking, nodding to angels around the table, talking about them, and as she talked, she wasn’t just sharing information or gossip or jokes – she was saying where people worked, what they shared in common with Cecil, introducing him.
Making more friends for him, he supposed, more connections, more roots.
He really didn’t mind it.
It was nice.
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