I read this going 👀👀👀 👁️👄👁️ and then remembered I have three brothers and tend to assume boys brawl for any and all reasons at a certain age:
‘We have to go home,’ whispered Fitzwilliam, feeling a little panicked. ‘George, don’t you remember our history lessons? It’s not safe to stay here, really it’s not.’
‘Safe enough,’ said George. ‘Plenty of people have managed it.’
‘Plenty of magicians. Adults, who had spells and swords and that sort of thing. Fairies steal ch — fairies steal people whose daemons haven’t settled. You know that. We’ll be turned into slaves.’ He wasn’t quite sure on that point, having some vague notion that the human captives of fairies were treated rather differently than those people usually called slaves in the present day, but he had snuck The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano out of the library the previous winter without asking either of his parents’ permission. At the time, he had felt a sort of fascinated horror at what he had read, and had afterwards been rather anxious to know the present state of the law, which he had quizzed his great-uncle Sir John about over dinner as obliquely as he could manage. Now he could not help but vividly recall all that had been described therein.
‘You can go home, if you like,’ said George. ‘But I don’t see why you need to be in such a hurry about it. We’ve been cooped up for days and weeks, and now we’re finally able to get out and take some air you want to rush home again so you can sit about making yourself glum with proper propriety, but you can do that any time. You might as well come out and be jolly for a bit. Besides, it’s not like anyone will miss us for a few hours. It’s all over, practically everyone’s gone home. It’s not as if she can tell, Fitz —‘
He got no further than that, because Fitzwilliam threw himself bodily at George at this and carried them both to the ground, and then sat up and punched George quite as hard as he could manage, which didn’t feel hard enough because George didn’t scream, only bucked and tried to punch him back while Fitzwilliam hit him again. He’d grown six inches that year, and neither he nor George were yet used to it, but the gangling height gave him a new advantage and George was too furious to hit him anywhere within reach. Emilia swooped at them as a magpie, so close she ruffled his hair, and Inès hissed like a pent-up kettle, leaping and flickering from cat to stoat to porcupine and back again, until she caught the other daemon, then Emilia became a snake with the speed of a thought and twisted away, lunging again at him, not feinting until the very last, so he almost thought she would touch him and flinched away, but then Inès at last got a proper hold and became a long-furred tiger quite as ferocious as his mama’s had been, her huge paw pressing down on Emilia’s snarling mongrel bitch neck. George choked under him, although whether because of the pressure exerted on his daemon’s throat or the blood streaming from his nose was not especially clear, and Fitzwilliam abruptly staggered up and away, Inès leaping heavily back to twist around his legs in a constant whirlpool of comfort.
George got up too, more slowly, and tried to wipe his face, his fingers hovering in a not-quite-touching sort of way as if he could not stand even that slight contact. Emilia, rat-formed and piebald, began to delicately lick away the blood on his upper lip. He was crying, in the defiant sort of way of a boy who doesn’t want to seem hurt, and, when Fitzwilliam went to wipe his own nose on the back of his glove out of physical sympathy, he realised that he was crying as well.
‘Am not.’ It was a stupid insult. Fitzwilliam could recite the dates in the family bible by heart.
‘Might as well be. Airs and graces when you’re no better than anyone else, just brawling like some gyptian kid. You’re an arrogant, stupid, stuck-up bastard with a dead mother —‘
‘Don’t tell me what to do! I ought to thrash you to teach you a lesson, but some of us were raised better than that. I’m going to go and see what proper hospitality is like, and you can do whatever the hell it is you want, only leave me alone.’
He stormed away. Fitzwilliam hesitated, and then went to follow him, but Inès darted in front of him, a porcupine again with huge spines that wavered unpredictably in his face. He glared at her back, wanting to kick her. ‘You look stupid. Like a thorn bush.’
‘Good,’ she declared, just as mulishly. ‘I like being a thorn bush.’
Fitzwilliam stomped off a few steps and sat down with his arms about his knees. After a while, she came and sat beside him, a little distant so he wouldn’t be pricked.
‘You don’t have to be a thorn bush to me,’ he muttered, burying his face in his arms.
She chirruped, butted her soft face against him, and when he looked again she had become…something else, a lean sort of cat he thought he knew but couldn’t remember the name of, winding about him to sit with sinuous grace at his side in fore-and-back fashion, her long tail twitching by his hip. She still looked like a thorn bush, a little, but the wavering ruff on her back was fur, rather than spines, and there were black tear-tracks on her face. She licked his face with a savage sandpaper tongue, and stared about them.
She shrugged, the movement massively exaggerated by her present form. ‘No. But I suppose I could…climb a tree. Look around.’
It seemed as good an idea as any.
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