Chapter 299: Return

Finding time to speak with Alex was not easy. Jadis couldn’t use the excuse of a private mercenary company business meeting every night. That meant that any further language lessons between her and the demon would have to be done inside the tent, preferably during the night when most of the camp was asleep. Fortunately, Jadis could go a long time on little sleep thanks to her trick of letting two of her bodies rest while the third stayed awake. As long as she wasn’t too active, she would be rested enough, especially since she didn’t have to drag around the wagon every day anymore.

Aila’s warning that they keep Alex secret from Noll and the Reavers made sense. Jadis trusted Noll with her life; he had proven himself a stalwart ally and a generous mentor, but he had always been upfront with her from the start. He was in Far Felsen on business, and that business was spying on her for the Second Prince. Anything he learned he would have to report so long as he was on the job. So, if she wanted to keep Alex’s unique nature a secret from the powerful noble, she had to keep the secret from Noll as well. At least until he was done with his contract, at any rate.

Jadis didn’t want Kestil to know about Alex. Well, she didn’t plan on keeping him in the dark forever. While she wasn’t certain about where everything would end, she hoped that she would be able to gain some kind of dispensation for Alex that would grant her a place in public society. Jadis had no illusions that such a position wouldn’t be costly to her personally, but she wanted to at least be able to select who she bargained with. She didn’t know Kestil. She didn’t know what he might ask of her or what he was inclined to do if he saw Alex as an opportunity to gain leverage over her. When she eventually, inevitably, met with the prince, she wanted to do so on even footing, or at least better footing than she currently had under her. To that end, Jadis was willing to bargain for Alex’s freedom with two people. One was Vraekae. Frustratingly annoying as she was, the magistrate was at least a known quantity. The other was High Priest Gerhardt. Jadis didn’t know the man well, but he had always been kind and fair whenever Jadis had met with him. Further, since he was a high priest, he had a good amount of pull both politically and with the general public. If she could get a high priest on her side regarding Alex, Jadis was sure that would go a long way towards getting Alex the safety and autonomy that she wanted for the demon.

All of that hinged, however, on keeping Noll in the dark regarding Alex.

To that end, there were two people that Jadis couldn’t keep out of the loop. Both because their assistance in keeping the secret was needed, and because there really wasn’t any easy way to keep it from them anyway. Furthermore, both were prospective members of Fortune’s Favored. If Jadis had her way, they’d both be inducted into the company once they made it back to Far Felsen. So, Jadis had to tell both Tegwyn and Sorcha about Alex.

They took the revelation relatively well, all things considered.

“What the bloody shit baskets baked in a miller’s pie am I looking at right now?” Sorcha had asked with clear fear in her wide eyes. “Because that looks like fucking Eike wrapped in demon skin!”

Jadis and the others had been forced to explain quite a lot to the goblin woman after that. Eir’s status as an oracle, Jadis’ conversation with Destarious, Alex’s unusually friendly demeanor and intelligence; it was a lot to take in for the witch. By the end of the long, private discussion that took place in the back of the wagon, Sorcha was tentatively on board with keeping Alex’s existence a secret.

“I’ve got to tell you,” she had confided in Jadis, “I’m mostly on board with this because that demon of yours did actually save my life. If it, or she, hadn’t done that, I’d probably being saying bollocks to all this and be screaming for that big therion bruiser to come save me from you crazy cultists. As is, I do feel like I kind of owe the bugger.”

Jadis could appreciate the honesty. The fact that the goblin was so upfront with her doubts while also being willing to go along with the unusual situation just further reinforced Jadis’ decision to keep the goblin around. She really wasn’t a bad sort, just someone who had fallen in with the wrong crowd. She’d been wasted on Stavros. Jadis swore to herself that she’d treat Sorcha much better.

After Sorcha, Jadis had introduced Alex to Tegwyn. His reaction had been somewhat more muted than the goblin’s, though he had still evinced quite a lot of shock. The first thing he had said regarding Alex, though, had managed to shock Jadis right back.

“Do you not have any clothes to give the woman?” Tegwyn had motioned at Alex who had hovered halfway out of her crate while staring at the Dryad. “I’m not one to mind nudity, but I’m finding the sight of a naked demon woman to be oddly distracting.”

That complaint had made Jadis realize just how stupid she’d been to completely overlook Alex’s nudity. She herself had grown comfortable being naked around her companions, which had somewhat translated to not minding being naked in front of decently large numbers of people. By extension, seeing others unclothed felt commonplace to her, natural even. Besides which, Alex had made no indication that she cared about wearing clothing, or that she was bothered by the cold.

Letting Alex continue to prance about completely nude wasn’t a good idea, though. When they got back to Far Felsen and introduced Alex to Vraekae and High Priest Gerhardt, having some clothes on the demon would probably improve first impressions.

Other than pointing out the obvious to her, Tegwyn was fairly accepting of the demon. He by no means trusted Alex, he made that very clear. He did, however, trust that Jadis was telling the truth about what Destarious had said. He was leery of where the experiments with Alex would go, but he was also comforted by Villthyrial’s presence in Jadis’ communion with D. Since Villthyrial hadn’t made any kind of objection, Tegwyn felt that meant he’d given tacit approval of whatever was going on.

One thing that Tegwyn did promise Jadis was that if he received any guidance from his patron god directly, he would be sure to let her know. As it was, Villthyrial was silent. Not unusual, Tegwyn assured her. He was a subtle god, one that did not like to interfere in the affairs of mortals often. Tegwyn vowed to keep his ears open, though.

With both the promised silence and aid of Sorcha and Tegwyn, Jadis was able to find some time almost every night to talk with Alex. Not every night, though. Jadis still had to find time at least once every three days to satisfy the requirements of her lewd rituals with her companions. On those days, she simply could not have Alex around. She was still fixated on having sex with Jadis, so putting her in the position of watching while being denied participation was not something Jadis would do to the frustrated demon. On those nights, Sorcha was given the duty of keeping the demon inside of her crate and distracted, which worked out surprisingly well.

After her initial temper tantrum, Alex made no more complaints about staying in the crate. She usually spent all day long inside the closed box, making no sound whatsoever. At least, for the first few days. After being on the road for a while, though, Sabina and Sorcha told Jadis how the demon had scared the pants off of both of them when she’d snuck half-way out of the crate to watch what they were doing. She hadn’t fully left the crate though, Sorcha had noted, so she supposed Alex was sticking to the letter of the law, if not the spirit.

Good information, Jadis supposed. She could assume then that Alex had some concept of being a sneak as well as knowing that she could get in trouble.

Sabina and Sorcha didn’t mind Alex watching them. She was quiet, made no attempt to talk to them or interfere in anything they did, and quickly retreated into the crate whenever anyone came close to the wagon who wasn’t one of Fortune’s Favored. Sabina suggested that Alex had very good hearing or some other method of sensing, since the demon could hear people coming before either she or Sorcha did.

During the night, when everyone was asleep except for her own people on watch, she would sit with Alex inside of the wagon and quietly talk with the demon. Sometimes one of the others would join her, but mostly it was just a Nephilim to Demon interaction. Jadis divided their time up into sections. Half of the time she would focus on teaching the demon about her language, and the other half of the time she would focus on learning what she could about demonic methods of communication. The results were mixed.

In a continuation of their lessons before Alex’s transformation, Jadis would bring out the letter blocks and practice reading and writing with the demon. Pattern recognition was easy for Alex; she had no trouble memorizing the letters, the sounds that went with them, and even the spelling of words that were laid out for her. Jadis could string several sentences together for Alex and she could repeat them back with near perfect accuracy. Comprehension, however, was the roadblock. Some concepts were simply too difficult, or too alien, for Alex to understand. Not with her limited vocabulary, at any rate.

One of the odder hangups that Jadis encountered while teaching Alex was the idea of food. The demon didn’t eat. She didn’t understand what eating was, nor why Jadis and the others were shoving bits and pieces of things into their mouths on a regular basis. The whole concept of having to consume edible materials in order to fuel the body confused Alex to the point that Jadis couldn’t explain it to her. The issue wasn’t helped by the fact that Alex didn’t need to breathe, either. Sleep was optional, too. She could enter into a sort of torpor when not doing anything important, but she wasn’t truly asleep and she didn’t need to rest in order to recover. All the basic functions of a normal mortal creature were absent in the demon, which made Jadis question if Samleos had cheated the covenant in some way. Demons were supposed to be the mortal avatars of the God of Death on Oros, yet if they didn’t run around getting into fights with literally everything they saw, they appeared to be functionally immortal. Jadis was sure there had to be more to it than that, since the goddess Metethys had Golems, being made of living stone, as her avatars and those weren’t some kind of loophole, she was sure. But how and why demons were so utterly different from the rest of life was something that Jadis added to her list of questions that needed answering.

The times when Jadis would focus on learning how to speak demon were even less productive than when she would teach Alex the common language. Alex wasn’t much of a teacher. Jadis wasn’t even certain the demon understood what she was trying to accomplish. However, one thing that Jadis felt reasonably certain of when it came to demons was that they truly had no form of verbal communication. It made sense, when Jadis thought about the behavior of the many demons she had fought over the months. Bone thieves and bramble fiends made no noise whatsoever. Twisted wretches did, but they were usually mindless squeals that bore no resemblance to any kind of communication beyond possibly alerting other demons that an enemy was nearby. Possession demons mimicked the noises of those creatures they possessed, but any time Jadis had come across such demons they only ever used those noises to trick people. Jadis had never seen a possessed creature try to speak to the other demons around it. Not even the Wailing Grudge, the most vocal demon Jadis had come across before Alex, had used its words to talk to the demons around it. No commands issued, no request made. The only things that horrible greater demon had used its voice for had been to try and lure in victims or frighten and disturb its enemies.

It was as though demons knew that mortals used sound to communicate and knew enough to take advantage of the fact but didn’t actually use sound themselves.

So, armed with her strong suspicion, Jadis focused exclusively on trying to understand Alex through her other senses. Sight, smell, touch, and taste.

Sight was easy enough. Jadis was already using body language to communicate with Alex and the demon was doing the same with her. Only, Jadis tried to pay special attention to how Alex’s tentacles moved when she wasn’t putting on an obvious display. Alex had a human face to read now that she’d evolved, but that wasn’t natural to demon communication. The tentacles were really Jadis’ only lead when it came to normal demonic body language.

Smell and taste didn’t have much success. At least, Jadis lacked the means to understand what a smell might mean to Alex. It was just too different from what she was used to as a person. Also, “tasting” Alex had prompted all kinds of confusion and misunderstandings that took quite a lot of time to sort out. To Alex, Syd giving her a lick had been an open invitation to lick back and she had not wanted to stop.

Touch seemed to hold the most promise other than sight. Alex seemed to comprehend the intention behind a gentle pat on the head or a calming palm on her shoulder fairly well. On the other side, when Alex used her tentacles to touch Jadis’ bodies, she could usually tell what Alex was trying to do. Whether it was just to get her attention, expressing her distress, showing her affection, or trying to initiate something lewd, Jadis could almost always accurately guess what Alex was trying to do with her touches.

While Jadis did feel like she was making progress, she also felt like she was barely getting anything done at all with her attempts at teaching Alex to talk. She had hoped that by the time they made it back to Far Felsen, Alex would be well versed in the common imperial tongue and she’d be able to speak for herself when Jadis showed her to Magistrate Vraekae. A ridiculously hopeful ambition. All the same, Jadis still felt disappointed that she hadn’t managed better when, nearly two weeks after leaving the Dryad’s grove, the expedition came into sight of the border fort along the road that was manned by Bernd’s Blades.

“Almost home,” Jay murmured as she stared at the fort with its green flag waving from the watch tower.

It was about midday. They’d almost managed to avoid the true Weigrun winter weather, but not quite. For the past two days it had been snowing nonstop. The road was covered in two feet of snow and it was only getting worse. Jadis was certain that the only reason why the horses were able to pull the soldiers’ wagon was because her own wagon being pulled by her goats were acting as a giant snowplow. It had gotten bad enough that the Reavers, who had mostly stayed on foot for the journey, had too much trouble moving through the deep, heavy snow. Jadis had been forced to put them on the roof of her wagon just so that they could keep up.

“You think so?” Aila asked from where she sat on the wagon, a few feet away from Jay.

“Well, yeah,” Jay motioned towards the fort, its walls half obscured by the snowfall. “The fort’s right there. We might even be able to make it to Far Felsen today if we push our pace.”

“No, not that,” Aila said, drawing Jay’s gaze. “I mean, you think of Far Felsen as home?”

Jay paused at the question, taking a second to think it over.

“No, not really,” she said after a moment, shrugging her armored shoulders. “To me, home is wherever my family is. So, you know. With you.”

The blush that crept up Aila’s neck and to her ears made Jadis smile. She was happy to see she could still embarrass her implacable girlfriend.

“You are such a strange woman,” Aila shook her head.

“Yes,” Jadis didn’t bother arguing. “And you love me. So what does that say about how strange you are?”

“Flirt later, pups,” Noll’s voice dragged Jadis out of her pleasant banter with her redheaded lover. “There are riders approaching.”

Looking back towards the fort, Jadis saw that the old mercenary was right. A small band of men on horseback had left through the open gates of the fort and were pushing their way through the snow to meet them. It was hard to be sure at the distance and with the poor weather, but Jadis was fairly certain that two of the men, both tall and similar in build, were Aila’s mercenary uncles, Gerwas and Ludwas. That thought brought a smile to Jadis’ faces, but the thought that came after caused it to fade.

What was so urgent that the mercenaries couldn’t wait for the expedition to get to the fort when there was a blizzard blowing snowdrifts as tall as her across the forest?

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