Eagles and Swans

“Ruth." Ruthenia broke her gaze away from plate. When her eyes met his, Tanio lowered his sandwich. "Could I ask you something?” 

Her eyes darted away again. “What?”

“Are you lonely?” he said.

Ruthenia groaned, propping her chin up on her elbows. “With you bugging me day and night? I couldn't possibly be.”

“No, in school I mean. You don't seem to have a lot of company there, other than that nice birdkeeper girl.”

It took her a moment to process the question, and another to feel the ache in her throat.  “Doesn’t matter,” she replied, casting her gaze to the side.

"Could I do anything for you?"

“It doesn’t matter,” she repeated.

“Sorry, I’m not good at this,” he muttered hastily. “But I just want to know. I know we don't talk about it much, but I would love to help. I’d hate to be a bad guardian.”

Ruthenia rolled her eyes. “You don't have to be my guardian,” she said, staring at her own plate. “I'm here to work for you. You don’t have to do everything the contract says, it’s not as if I'd ever sue you for it.”

“But I want to. As your legal guardian, it would be most morally reprehensible of me not to help solve—”

“Stop trying to replace them!” she burst out, then recoiled, surprised at herself, and even more, that her eyes were wet.

“I'm...I’m not,” Tanio said, trailing off. His face was taut with some emotion she had never seen before, and could not place, through the rippling refractions of her tears.

Ruthenia felt like everything might fall out of her. She curled her hands into fists and drew her limbs closer to hold it in. “You don't have to fix anything! I don’t want you to care,” she said, lower lip quivering. “I know you want to. I'm trying to be grateful. I'm trying to like this. But it never feels—the same—”

A tide of sadness and anger choked her. Titanio Calied was invisible. She took a huge bite out of her sandwich with numbing determination, drowning her thoughts in the preoccupations of homework and school and the work to come—everything that didn’t, that couldn’t, remind her of the life before. That life before the first gunshot.

When she left, Ruthenia stood for a while at Tanio’s front door, face to face with the dark. The cold wind blasted her face, carrying the scent of rain.

She walked slowly across the slippery planks of the swaying bridge, a step and then another, each one harder than the last. She stopped in the middle, the wind ruffling her hair and clothes as she swung aimlessly in the rain. It wet her face and her toes, and by the time she reached her door, her shirt was heavy with rain.

---

The next morning came at the end of a series of dreams about the ground shaking and turning into water. Three loud knocks shoved Ruthenia right out of her dreams, and she woke up sliding off her hammock.

She winced as her side thumped against the floorboards, feeling the bruises from the disastrous flight class throb again.

“Who...who’s there,” Ruthenia mumbled, nursing a bruise on her knee as her eyelids unglued themselves from each other. She dragged herself out of her old hammock—another loud knock startled her to her feet.

Pulling the front door open, she found herself staring at the face of Titanio Calied.

“Good morning, Ruth!” he chirped.

“What?” she muttered, rubbing her bleary eyes as the morning breeze gushed into the room. All across the sky behind him, the storm clouds were thickening.

“A delivery for you,” he said, extending his right hand, upon which sat a small package wrapped in dark paper, barely larger than his palm, its wrapping sealed with red stamped wax. “It’s from the house of the Arcane royal family. What exactly have you been up to, Ruthenia?”

At once, every ounce of Ruthenia’s morning grogginess had evaporated.

“Thanks, Tanio,” she said hastily, snatching the package off his palmtop. “I can’t tell you what it is, but thank you.”

Before he got another word in, she dashed back to her desk, heart pounding in her head. She heard the man quietly shut the door behind her.

Ruthenia flung her stationery drawer open in a rattling of rulers and pens, rummaging about in it until she found her hands on her paper knife. Laying the package on the table under the light of her window, she slid the sheath off the blade, watching her reflection gleam in it. 

She stood the package up, gingerly, so that the red wax seal faced upward, a drop of blood. “Alright, then, let's see what the matter is,” she whispered, sliding the tip of her knife under its edge.

The paper wrapping came easily undone. She crumpled the sheet into a ball and flung it into the teetering stack of paper sheaves in the corner of her desk. She had unwrapped a tiny black box, a folded note resting atop it.

Ruthenia unfolded the slip of paper to find a note inside, inscribed in the beautiful cursive of someone who must have spent years learning it, lines evenly-spaced and perfectly-indented.

Ruthenia Cendina,

Thank you, firstly, for rendering your services to the Luzerno family, and secondly, for bearing the burden of the risk in accepting this assignment despite not knowing what it entailed.

Enclosed here is the item of critical importance. I ask that you treat it with impeccable care. If you were to open the box, you would find a watch inside. This watch is my mother’s heart.

"Your what?" Ruthenia let the sheet flutter onto her tabletop. She had only ever heard stories about this procedure, only ever scoffed at its impossibility.

Weaving one's life into a mechanical device wasn't possible.

I do not lie; I have no reason to. She had it made five years ago, but recently it has not been working the way it should. She has begun to ail, and our fears are at their greatest height now. I implore you to do whatever you can to save her, and that you not tell a single soul of what you have seen or done here.

Even if you do not believe that this watch is her heart, it would please me for you to repair it anyway, in return for a hundred and fifty aurs and my eternal gratitude. I had no desire to make the transaction as complicated as I did, but I hope you now understand.

Please write me personally when you are finished, so I may send a courier to fetch it, carrying your reward. Use the code given below.

Aleigh Luzerno

Arcane Prince of Astra

"I'm not a watch repairer, you idiot!" The shock wrung the words out of her.

Ruthenia stared spent a minute staring at the symbol, tracing its loops dumbly with her eyes. She had expected an unreasonably difficult job. But she had not expected to be confided in. 

This was infinitely harder.

Shaking her head, she turned to the box, heart thumping. With a thumb on its edge, she lifted the lid a crack as if there were an ancient artifact inside. As it came away, her hand froze, and her breath got stuck in her throat. The watch inside was so bright with diamonds that it wouldn’t be a stretch at all to imagine it was worth more in aurs than the human heart it substituted.

She breathed a curse, lowering the lid back into place and leaning away as if her entire desk were tainted.

Instead she picked up her messenger device and its stylus, and on its glowing blue screen, began to write a message with a brief, neatly-inscribed

Hello,

The singular word glowed in the gleaming surface of her messenger, and she sat staring at it for a while.

It wasn't Tanio’s favourite device, the Thread messenger, considering its creator being was Aena Cerr. She gave the business a bad name, that was what Tanio would tell you. Barely months after a popularity explosion had made it a household item, Aena had sold her message-recording technology to the Astran government for hundreds of thousands of aurs, and now there was no way to be sure if your words were being traced.

Immediately, Tanio had set about disassembling and rebuilding his messenger, and hers, so that the signals were propagated by transmitters through the air rather than on the Threads, leaving no traces on the filograms. There was little they could do for the rest of its users that would not land them in a lawsuit.

Hello, this is Ruthenia. Did I draw the code right?

Scribbling the rest of her message on its glass surface, she twisted the right dial one click clockwise to indicate the destination, Helika City, and watched the message melt into the glass. Glancing at the note lying on her lap, she copied the code to the now-empty display, before depressing a spring-loaded switch at the top of its circular brass frame.

She breathed a sigh, turning to stare at the open box and the watch inside, glittering blue with myriad broken images of the sky through her window. What had she gotten herself into?

Turning once again to the black box, Ruthenia slid the lid off again, and regarded the diamond watch that sat ticking in its velvet nest. Leaning over to hold her ear against it, she found that the ticks were slow and juddering, stopping far too long each time, then ticking twice in rapid succession. Gingerly, she lowered the lid back on it.

She puffed up her cheeks and blew out, covering the box again. "Alright, then."

She stood up and reached for her umbrella, marching to the doorway. A machine was a machine: cogs, axles, ratchets, and a power source to drive the whole thing, like a pulse. But she was no watch expert, and she was not about to risk the life of the Arcane King's mother just because he had not . She could do this; she would simply need some help. At the door she picked up her bag and flung it over her shoulder.

Off across the fields and back to the library it was, a twenty-minute flight that passed quietly amidst her furious pondering. She dove into the gullet of the without taking her umbrella with her, and found herself back with the country's best engineering collection. It wouldn't be the first time she had worked with clockwork, and if all she had to do was set it working right again, then he was certainly not wrong to entrust this job to her.

But this device was truly at the edge of the realm of her expertise. "Eldon," she muttered. She picked up the thickest book in the section, and had it checked out with the librarian. This time, she did not throw the book at him, as tempting as it was.

*

By the time she returned, Ruthenia's screen was glowing blue with a new message.

Yes, it is the correct one.

read the succinct reply, every letter meticulously-inscribed with a familiar sender’s code glowing faintly beneath it.

Within a minute of rummaging through her drawers and the toolboxes on her shelves, Ruthenia had prepared on her desk the three smallest screwdrivers she owned. She pushed her window open, and propped the book up on the stand beside her, flipping to its contents page. She snatched a sheet of felt out of her drawer and unrolled it on her desk.

Lifting the device gently out of its box, she turned it over on the felt and began, ever so carefully, to drive out the screws holding the back cover in place.

The device lay like an animal on the operation table, its every cog clicking and glinting beneath the balance cock, like pulsing organs. They shivered before each tick, then twitched uncannily, teeth clenching against each other.

She sucked in a breath and watched the collection of cogs struggle, as if fighting to breathe. “Almost there,” she whispered. Flicking again through pages of innumerable diagrams, she paused on a series that appeared similar to hers, comparing the details until her finger landed upon the one: a Equere Horologue from the Year of 470.

Licking her lips, Ruthenia unscrewed and displaced the balance cock, flicking it off with her screwdriver. Perhaps not the best-considered move. Naked to her gaze, the labyrinth of mechanical architecture scraped back and forth, the ratchet swinging sluggishly.

That was where she saw it. Right beneath the edge of the balance wheel was lodged a little speck of grit.

No—not grit. It had a skin, abraded in areas. It was a minuscule seed.

"How'd you get in there?" she murmured. All this trouble and strife, for something so tiny.

By now Ruthenia's neck was aching with craning it so much, so she rested it on the table to ease the pain. From here she could see it much better than before, lodged under the metal. She thought upon how she might disassemble the mechanisms without stopping the watch, but she didn't know enough. She knew there was but one way.

She placed her screwdriver on the tabletop, and then reached for her smallest one, its head so tiny it might as well have been a pin from afar. This one, she slid in under the wheel and behind the tiny fleck of grit.

"Good luck to me," she whispered. Then she flicked the tool backward.

The seed sprang out onto her lap. She held her breath. The cogs clicked, and resumed their quiet ticking.

Ruthenia did not breathe again until she had screwed the balance cock back into place. By then, the blood was rushing in her ears, and she could barely even hear her heartbeat.

For a minute she sat there, panting as if she had been a second from death herself, while the buzz of anxiety faded from her limbs. Then she lowered the cover back into position, and began driving the screws back in.

With that, Talia’s heart was sealed, and Ruthenia finally let her shoulders slacken.

Picking up the messenger pen with trembling fingers, she wrote, in shaky letters:

I’ve done it. It’s ready for collection.

Then off she sent the message, before dropping the pen and gasping for breath. That was quite enough for today.