![]() “We need to be settled,” Beatrice said, later that evening, sitting on the bed in the damp closet-sized room that was the only thing they’d managed to afford, and for which Riza’s funds were rapidly running out. We may have filled this position by that time, but I will do my utmost to find something else for you then.” He handed her his card, and that was that. ![]() “Please do contact us again as soon as you have settled, my dear. “It makes our office look childish and unprofessional, I’m afraid,” his bullfrog daemon added to Beatrice, who was currently a trim white cat but had entered the room as a sheepdog trotting at Riza’s heels. “Miss Hawkeye,” the elderly man said gently, “you’re more than qualified for this job but, well, it doesn’t look good to clients that you’re so clearly still not settled.” It was the fourth interview for a secretarial position she wouldn’t get when someone finally told her. The solicitor for the creditors had said they’d probably just tear the old house down, it had fallen into such disrepair. ![]() He had his beautiful dream for the country, and someday she hoped to see it realized, but for now, she was 16 years old, the inheritor of a tremendous amount of debt, and in sore need of steady employment and room and board. She didn’t need him to see her as a child. Riza wasn’t sure if that or the mere fact of being unsettled was worse at that moment. They’d been so resolved to stay in one form, to not let their father’s apprentice know, but Beatrice’s instincts had betrayed her, shifting to a rabbit in front of Cornelia the wolfdog, letting her know exactly how they felt as Riza trusted him with her back. Beatrice thought they should have settled when Riza decided to show Mr. Riza thought they should have settled when they saw their fathers dead, Johann’s ragged feathers replaced forever by a pile of golden Dust. (And then it had been Berthold himself, with Riza’s tattoo.) But Berthold had gotten bored with those theories eventually and moved on to flames. It was a revolution in alchemical theories of the connection between body and soul, apparently, that they’d reached the point where it no longer caused pain to be separated without ending up like poor severed Eve Milton from down the road. It was Berthold who had encouraged Riza to walk further and further away from him, who had been so overjoyed at her slow but steady progress, and it had been Johann who had pinned Beatrice to the ground beneath him with cruel talons until Riza collapsed from the pain each time. But Berthold had… changed, and Johann along with him. When they were very small, Beatrice had been an owlet any chance she’d gotten. Riza and Beatrice Hawkeye did not want to settle as a bird of prey as a child, less because of any opposition to nominative determinism and more because Berthold Hawkeye’s daemon Johann was a great tawny eagle-owl.
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