Theo got home at one in the morning.
The townhome was quiet, kids all in bed, but Silvie was still awake, reading in an armchair, though she was already dressed for bed. Most of his siblings were a good two decades younger, but Sylvie was his sole older sibling.
“Bad night?” he asked.
Sylvie smiled, though her face was tight with pain.
“Not so bad. I was just thinking I’d try to sleep again soon.”
“I’ll put on some tea for us,” he said. She was lying, trying to keep him from worrying. She’d had a lot of nights like this, where she’d sit up alone trying not to worry anyone.
“Zemmy delivered a file for you,” she said once the water was boiling. “What is it you don’t want them seeing at the office? You don’t usually call him so early in a case.”
Zelimir knew to be careful with deliveries, but he also knew Theo told Sylvie just about everything. She probably knew more about the city’s secret dealings than the officials Theo wrote his reports to.
He checked the doorways for little eavesdroppers. His younger siblings knew what he did for work, but he was careful to keep them from the details of his cases. (Which, of course, only made the little monsters more curious.) The older kids could listen in without giggling, but even Rose hadn’t realized Theo could see the gaps in the light when they stood by the door. Thankfully, it appeared they really were in bed.
“It’s not for a case. I asked him to dig into the new hire. I’ve got access to the Dalgerran files, but she’s spent most of her life in Avairne. They’ll have more information.”
“I don’t think it’s right, digging into her past behind her back like this just because she’s Avairnian,” Sylvie said, fixing him with a steady gaze.
“It’s not because she’s Avairnian. It’s because she’s a trained soldier who killed her last superior. Look, honestly, I don’t think James seems like the bad sort, but that doesn’t mean she’s not a danger to the team. I owe it to them to do my due diligence. I researched Cam too, remember?”
“You had a good reason to research Cam.”
“I have a good reason to research James!” he retorted, pulling out the file and starting to undo the seal. “Besides the killing, there’s literal years missing between her becoming a wanted woman and her arriving at our border.”
“Did you ask her about them?” Sylvie asked, calmly flipping a page of her book. Theo had never met somebody who could make apathy look so absolutely scathing.
“Ah yes, ‘Mrs. James, welcome to the team. Do you mind taking a break from investigating a young man’s murder so I can grill you about what was probably a traumatic time in your life?’ Great idea, Sylv.”
“So digging through her history behind her back is better?”
“Yes,” he said, flipping through the files.
Most of them were exactly what he expected, crime reports that mentioned James as an investigator. He skimmed each one anyway. Despite her objections, Sylvie peered over his shoulder. She hadn’t learned Vayish in school, but it was similar enough to Gevaran to help her get the jist of things.
“Is that her? She looks like she’s Rose’s age.”
“Younger. The headline says she’s twelve.”
James’ face was still serious, but it was round and unscarred, framed by two tight braids bursting with curls. She looked a bit tense, but the headline above her offered a possible reason why.
LOCAL HEROES: HOW TWELVE YEAR OLD CLARISSE JAMES HELPED SOLVE HER AUNT’S MURDER
On the other side was a photo of James standing beside two women. The woman on her left, captioned as ‘Thessaly Ivers’, looked a good deal like James did now. She had long hair and a blanket obviously placed to hide atrophied legs, but she had the same sharp face and honed muscles.
The woman on her right, Cecilia Ivers, was their opposite. She smiled brilliantly at the camera, dressed in an expensive gown that showed off a slim waist and generous curves. While the other two looked like they came from any other family photo, Cecilia looked like she came from the pages of a magazine.
There was no writer listed, but that appeared to be normal for Avairnian papers. He began to work through the article, translating the important parts for Sylvie as he read.
The James family is no stranger to heroism. Oscar James, Clarisse’s father, is well known for his fearless patriotism. When a boarding school was destabilized by a Geveran bombing, Oscar, currently off duty from his post as a battlefield medic, rushed in to help. Though bystanders warned him his continual trips back into the wreckage would kill him as well, Oscar James made five separate trips in, freeing over thirty children before he was crushed. It was only after his death that his marriage to popular singer Cecilia Ivers became known to the public. Cecilia was two months pregnant with their daughter.
Cecilia Ivers met Oscar James while performing free concerts for troops, risking her own life on the front lines to provide hope and entertainment to those who serve. She’s often spoken of her admiration for her older sister, Thessaly Ivers. Thessaly served as a protective caster for a priest until she was paralyzed taking a bullet for her charge.
From there, the article continued to talk about Cecilia Ivers’ love for her husband and sister, and Clarisse becoming close with her aunt and helping her around the house. He ended up fudging some of the language as he translated for Sylvie. The next few paragraphs were all praise for Cecilia taking on the ‘burden’ of her sister. If somebody talked about him and Sylvie like that, he’d deck them. Worse, plenty of it seemed to come from Cecilia herself, who clearly wished to be praised for ‘selflessly’ helping care for her sister.
The article then went to talk about Cecilia recognizing her daughter’s gift for magic.
I’d hoped she’d be a singer like me, but it seems there’s too much of her father in her. I remember the day we were walking home from the market, and she told me ‘Mommy, there’s a priest coming’. I asked her if she could see them, and she said no, so I asked her how she knew and she said ‘Because they’re making everyone feel a big feeling. Can’t you feel it?’
‘That’s the moment I realized my little girl had a gift.’
“You’re frowning,” Sylvie said. “Worried about her father being a possible motive? Or the shitty stuff you mistranslated in a misguided attempt to spare my feelings?”
“I just don’t like how her sister talks about it.”
“Oh Theo, you must be so burdened by me,” Sylvie said dramatically, managing to swat him on the arm in her tragic swoon. “Why, you’d be married with twenty children by now if not saddled with my misfortune. What a brave, selfless brother you are.”
Theo rolled his eyes and tapped the paragraph he was on.
“It’s this I’m worried about.”
He’d known it was impressive that James had been able to tell what emotions Mr. Handfellow was manipulating. It was hard to make a clear call since her abilities are beyond his usual knowledge, but he hadn’t wanted to assume it wasn’t normal for her skill level.
“It’s rare to naturally develop detection, but I’d expect a child with that gift to recognize the purification a priest projects, not the emotional effects of that purification. And exceptional gifts-”
“Come from exceptional circumstances,” Sylvie finished. She shared his natural sensitivity to facial expressions, though she had intentionally chosen not to hone that skill.
A child with a sick parent would often have impressive medical knowledge. A child near a warzone might develop basic defensive magic with no training. A child who lived in a forest would recognize animal paths and edible plants.
A child exposed to regular mental manipulation might start to sense it.
“And you think it’s the mother?” Sylvie asked. ”Are you sure you aren’t a bit biased against her?”
“The mother would be my bet, but it’s not good to assume. Could be the aunt, the mother’s boyfriend, just about anything, really. Maybe she was reacting to something else entirely. Her relationship with her mother is really none of my business.”
He turned back to the article, talking about Thessaly Ivers’ murder. A robbery gone wrong, they reported. Thessaly had attempted to fight back and been outnumbered. Multiple types of magic had been used, but, despite the same group having hit homes all over the region and taken three lives, the request for a tracer was denied.
There are currently only twenty eight active tracers in all of Avairne, but over three hundred cases requesting a tracer per-day. By the time a tracer was able to come, the casting residue would have long faded.
In Clarisse James' situation, many would have given in to bitterness, but James was not the type to sit and complain. She knew she had the ability to sense magic, and decided, if no tracer was available, she would become one.
“I knew I didn’t have the skills yet, and, by the time I learned, it would be too late, so I went to Auntie’s house and wrote down what I was able to feel, the really big stuff. They went to about one town a month, so the faster I could learn to follow them, the faster I help stop them before they hurt anyone. I tried right away but… I wasn’t very good. The time after that, they killed a man who came home early and fought them too.”
Though James is critical of her progress, it only took four months for her to successfully trace the casting residue back to the casters.
“It was quite a shock,” said a local investigator. “We had a couple of descriptions, but nobody could figure out where they were hiding. There were no clues. We had started to feel hopeless, when this child walks into the office and says she can lead us right to them. We were a bit worried it was a trap, especially when she took us on a two hour hike into the mountains, but there they were, fast asleep.”
“We had to scold her a bit, of course. What she did was amazing, but no child should have gone into that situation alone, let alone gone back.”
The article detailed the capture of the robbers, an event which, thankfully, had not involved twelve year old James.
Though most girls choose to debut at fifteen, many hoped James would choose to sign up to further serve her country as a tracer. James, however, had other plans. When offered a financial reward James asked if she could instead be given permission to start training three years early.
“When my aunt died and I wasn’t there to help her… it was the worst feeling in the world. I am lucky,” she told reporters, “because I had the skills to find them myself, but a lot of people don’t have that. They need help and there aren’t enough people to help. If I can graduate faster, that’s three more years where I can help.”
The rest of the article descended back into rambling about how James represented what every citizen should do. It praised her for recognizing a need and stepping up to help, while subtly implying anybody who complained about their country was simply too lazy to fix it themselves.
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