I nodded.
“The helpful. You should know that when you perish, Rose will be the next Thorburn heir.”
“Wait, what? Really?”
“Really, Mr. Thorburn. It’s fated.”
6.10
I stopped, and Isadora was content to let the words sink in.
I glanced inside. Inside the vacant apartment, Alexis and Ty were drawing on the floor in chalk. Deadly serious. Rose appeared here and there, her distorted reflection appearing in the door of the oven and the glass light fixture. She was no doubt giving directions, and I was pretty sure she had a book held in her hands.
Evan was simply watching from his perch. Maybe talking – it was hard to tell when he opened his beak.
Rose appeared in the window beside me, and the angle allowed her to get a clear view of Isadora.
I met her eyes and indicated she should go back with a little jerk of my head.
A frown creased Rose’s face, but she left. I saw her rejoin the others.
She must have said something, because they all tensed a bit. I held up a hand, telling them to stay back.
Isadora, in the midst of this, stood there, calm and regal. Her chin was raised just a touch too high, as if she couldn’t quite shake the guise of the noblewoman, even when she’d long since abandoned it to become the stern college professor. Her dress was fashionable if simple, white, and there weren’t many places where she would have stuck out while wearing it, her coat had a ruff that might have been fur and might have been feathers.
Her breath fogged in the air, which I found somewhat interesting, on a basic level.
But I was focusing on these things to distract myself from reality.
“Fated,” I finally said.
“You are not long for this world. When you are gone, your partner will take your place. Things will reorder themselves in the aftermath, and she will adopt the ties that you have abandoned. Depending on her nature and the internal logic of things, it’s very possible that minor people in your life will become major people in hers, in the transition. It will be disorienting, for her, for those you two know, and for your enemies. There’s a kind of strategy to it. Rose will be able to dispatch whoever killed you in the chaos that follows. In the days, weeks and months that follow, things will reach an equilibrium.”
“Just like that?” I asked, feeling numb.
“As I’ve said, your death at my hands would make for the cleanest ending. The transition would be naturally smooth.”
“I mean, my grandmother did this? So easily?”
“I don’t imagine it was easy. All things have a cost to them.”
“She’s murdering me. And Rose is… what, Rose was made, unknowingly complicit? Set up to take advantage of my passing?”
“It may be that you two already sense it on an instinctual level, that there is only place for one of you in the world.”
“I’m getting really tired of people telling me I’m going to die. Laird at first, then more powerful individuals, and now you, saying it like it’s a certainty.”
“That, too, might be instinctual, the others taking notice.”
I was distracted by the rather dark thoughts of death. I looked up at her. “Hm?”
“Practitioners and Others can see the ways of things, the ties that bind, and just as a mortal might learn to intuit the weather, we learn to intuit other things. Some of us have a background that lends itself to seeing these things, as the farmer’s attention falls on the weather. Some only have a small sense of things, only when the prevailing winds are especially strong.”
“And the prevailing winds are suggesting I’m going to bite it?”
“Yes.”
“I have to ask, then, what’s the point of you coming after me if my death is inevitable?”
“All deaths are inevitable. Even immortal things will perish eventually. Why would you ever murder someone, knowing they’ll die eventually? That’s a rhetorical question, no need for an answer.”
I rubbed my hands together for warmth, then folded them into my armpits. I leaned against the railing of the balcony, facing the others, the city at my back. “I think your point is clear enough.”
“Good. If it helps, I don’t think you’ll need to concern yourself with me until you’ve cleared up your business at the police station. I’m more comfortable leaving you be for this little exercise, given how disruptive the antics were yesterday morning.”
“Antics?”
“We talked about spinning plates. Where a dragon is said to make a bed of gold coin, I find I’m more comfortable on a bed of these metaphorical spinning plates.”
“Everything in balance?” I asked.
“Yes. I’m as sensitive to changes in the balance of things as a common man might be to changes in the light or to noise. I’d struggle to explain this to you as much as I would struggle to explain color to the absolutely blind, but I would say that power touched across a great many individuals and places, like a vast stroke of lightning, followed by a thunderclap forceful enough to shift each of those things from their positions.”