The Regressor's Cycle (Patreon)

000

Chapter one:

000

Everleigh Davenport’s seventh life began, as all her other lives save the first had, on the pale tiled floor of her washroom where she lay curled up on her side next to the pedestal sink.

Very carefully, she rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling as the shadows underneath her darkened to a pitch black and stretched out into several pools of darkness that surrounded her on the floor. Dark forms rose up within those pools in the vague shape of four women until the darkness broke like liquid and drained back down onto the floor to reveal four seemingly normal adult women. Two were dressed like house maids, one wore the light armor and livery of a female guard, and the last wore the severe dress and chatelaine of a housekeeper.

Eve squinted at her women. “That was faster than usual, Abby,” she commented, working past her dry tongue with only moderate success.

“I feel quite a bit stronger this time,” Abigail, Eve’s chief attendant and first friend, agreed. Then she looked at the others and added, “You know what to do.”

The maids, Eloise and Charlotte, nodded in catlike unison and slipped out of the washroom. Their forms blurred back into shadow as they left, slipping through the cracks of Eve’s locked bedroom door. They did, indeed, know what to do. All Eve’s repetitive lives went differently, according to her varying choices, except for these first few days. She and her growing cadre of eternal attendants had settled on a good strategy early on and Eve now saw very little benefit in deviating from it —within reason. 

They were going to try something a little different this time.

Constance, the guardswoman, helped Abby lift Eve off the ground and carry her to the unmade bed that dominated Eve’s childhood bedroom. Without discussing it, they stripped Eve out of her nightgown and replaced it with a reasonably fresh one. Eve, herself, was of very little help. The act of resurrection pulled her back from the brink of death so she wouldn’t easily slip back over that dark edge without effort on somebody’s part, but she was still light-headed and weak with hunger and dehydration. 

The dress they chose was unfamiliar, which annoyed her. She could no longer remember exactly which dresses in the hamper she’d worn how many times leading up to the final moments of her first life. She used to be able to, but time and repetition had worn away those inconsequential details and now all she recalled was that her father had stopped laundry service when he’d stopped her meals, shut off the pipes leading to her washroom, and laid the bar on her door.

Eloise and Charlotte returned in short order, materializing inside the door carrying a large ewer of clean water each. Their apron pockets were bulging with the other things they’d liberated from the kitchen. They unloaded everything onto or near Eve’s bedside table before flitting back out into the rest of the house to continue their work.

Abigail was an old hand at nursing Eve back from the deprivation and illness that had killed her the first time. She was the oldest of Eve’s shadows, although she’d been much smaller and less person-shaped in the beginning. Eve hadn’t even known yet that she’d died that first time, but she was hungry enough to accept help from any quarter by that point –much less from a cute, puppy-sized magical creature that snuck her food and played cathartic pranks on her enemies.

Not all of Eve’s deaths generated a new shadow. Her second death had evolved Abigail into her current form. It worked out to more or less every other life and their youngest, Charlotte, had come to her at her last revival. This round seemed to have only vitalized her cadre of shadow ladies. In Eve’s previous life, Charlotte could only hold a human shape for an hour or so. Now she seemed to have no struggles with it at all as she flitted in and out of the bedroom, leaving behind all the needful things she’d pilfered from elsewhere in the household. 

Abigail soaked a small pinch of bread in water and held it up to Eve’s lips. Eve took it and, only through sheer force of will, managed to not swallow it without chewing. She’d been here too many times and knew she needed the moisture more, otherwise she’d only choke. She sucked on the bread for a while until her mouth no longer felt dry and signaled to Abigail she was ready for another sip to wash it down with. 

They went like this slowly all while Charlotte returned with enough food to stock a small pantry, hidden in a clothes press in the previously unoccupied maid's room attached to Eve’s closet. The shadows would take the room over for themselves when they weren’t attached to Eve and that space would fade away from human perception. Shadow-zones like that made for an excellent place to hide valuables.

Later, Eve would be able to enjoy a dinner of toast, jam, soft-boiled eggs, and tea. For now, she concentrated on being able to keep her water-soaked bread down as Abigail moved on to the next item in their agenda; a long overdue sponge bath. Eve’s washroom had a sink and a toilet, but her father had the pipe leading to the sink shut off so only the toilet was functional since it used spacial-magic and not water to remove waste.

“Leave the hair,” she said when Abigail started to take it down from the said plait it was in. “I’ll need to look pathetic later, if Eloise’s gambit pays off.” There was a chance it wouldn’t, but either way Eve would learn something. 

Abigail thought about it for a moment and said, “Let me rinse and re-plait it. You’ll be more comfortable, but still have the effect you want.”

All the shadows had their own strengths. Abigail was the most intelligent of the lot and was, in many ways, a better strategist than Eve was. Eloise was a very capable and persuasive agent, Charlotte was the best spy and thief, and Constance was the reason Eve rarely ever felt fear for her life anymore. Her protection wasn’t perfect, but it was formidable enough that Eve now took a concentrated effort to kill. Obviously, Eve’s enemies had still managed to get her killed off in the end, but she’d made them all bleed for it that time. 

Constance had retreated into shadow after Abigail no longer needed her, releasing her human shape and sinking into the ground at Eve’s feet. Eve could feel her prowling around just out of sight. She rarely took human form, even though she could, and didn’t speak often and even then Constance only spoke directly to Eve or one of her sisters. Eve felt her stir every time someone passed in the hallway outside, but no one touched the door. If they stayed quiet, it would be another three days before her father arrived to see if she was wretched enough yet. 

Eve had been trapped in this room for a week before her first death. Was it any wonder she hadn’t survived her first life?

Lacking anything better to do, Eve napped on and off through the rest of the day. It took her mind off her hunger, at least, and this part of all her lives had become something more of a rest cure than anything else. Abigail woke her up to take a little food and water or to change into a clean nightie that Charlotte stole from a maid nobody liked. It was clean, but poorly mended and so wouldn’t interfere with the image Eve needed to project when rescue (hopefully) arrived. 

Eve made it a point to live each of her short lives differently and that habit often paid dividends in the form of information that would become helpful in her next life, even if she couldn’t make use of it immediately.

In her last life, she’d hit a mother vein of priceless knowledge; something that could change her life within the first week of a regression.

Charlotte was waiting by the bed when Abigail woke Eve for her first real meal since her revival; more torn bread, soaked with cream this time, and topped with jam with a plate of hard boiled eggs dressed in salt and pepper on the side. Eve had gotten enough to eat during the day that she didn’t fall on it like a starving animal and was able to divide her attention between eating and hearing Charlotte’s report.

“I’ve withdrawn some cash from the safe box,” Charlotte reported. She’d let her human shape go and was curled up in Eve’s lap, vaguely cat-shaped, as she talked. “Eloise has most of what I took to use for seed money. She’s decided to cultivate the lawyers, the jeweler, and the inn first this time.”

“The account books for the restaurant were showing irregularities near the end, last time,” Abigail volunteered. “Fallendale was closing in on you by then so I wasn’t able to investigate closely, but perhaps it’s a good idea to replace that income stream with another investment this time around?”

‘The Restaurant’, otherwise known as Folyer’s, had been a major cash cow for Eve in her first few lives, once she’d figured out how to make her own money. She was reluctant to give it up, but her business partner and executive chef had gotten married in that last life shortly before Abigail started taking issue with his accounting. The wife wasn’t a problem, but her relatives who got themselves hired for key positions in the restaurant probably were. 

Unfortunately, there was no room for trust or second chances left in Eve’s world. She didn’t have much luxury of time, either. The longest she’d ever lived was to the age of thirty-two and was now starting over again at sixteen. 

“The Restaurant is too flashy for this time around,” Eve decided. It was a shame, she liked Chef  Poole. However, he was too trusting. That was how he’d lost his first restaurant, the Gardens at Folly, and ended up needing an angel investor in order to reinvent himself. Then another thought occurred to her. “If you go into the study again while I’m here, clean the whole safe out.”

Charlotte slipped off her lap and flowed out the door, disinclined to wait on doing anything she could accomplish right away. Abigail watched her go, looking thoughtful, before turning back to try and bully Eve into eating a little more.

Yes, emptying the house safe was risky, but now Eve knew that the money in it was all hers to begin with. Her ‘father’ would have a hard time reporting it stolen, when the first question the crown investigators would ask was where he’d gotten that much liquid cash in the first place.

Contrary to what one might think, most of the aristocracy lived on credit for the bulk of the year. Their incomes came from tenant farmers and building rentals, so they received their income quarterly at best. Very old, well established families might have a larger reserve and the Davenport family was very old and very well established, but incredibly poor. What remained of the Davenports’ dignity was the house that Eve had grown up in and some timber farms that supplied the royal shipyards at a rate that had been locked in for perpetuity over seventy years ago when a Davenport ancestor got too close to the agents of an attempted coup and needed to be made an example of. 

Sir Davenport, despite that, had managed to marry well. Eve had grown up hearing that and assumed, as a child might when no one bothered to explain themselves, that they were referring to the current Lady Davenport. So it had seemed appropriate, to a young Eve, that Lady Davenport controlled the household spending and spent the majority of the budget for her two girls on the prettier one with worse health. Eve never liked it, but thought she understood her mother’s motivation when it came to choosing her investments and Eve’s marriage had been decided almost as soon as she was born so there was no point in looking for a better match for her.

Cosette, Eve’s younger sister, was as yet unattached and her circumstances were more precarious. She was a breathtaking beauty with crystalline green eyes and long, blonde hair with a gentle curl and the faintest blush of rose towards the ends of it. The problem was that she had a congenital illness that kept her mostly homebound. Their parents had to choose her social appearances with great care. After all, she couldn’t be married if she stayed home all the time, could she?

Eve, by comparison, was fairly plain with straight brown hair, light brown eyes, and ordinary features with a robust constitution. She dressed up well, when she could afford to, but, like most people, she had the kind of appearance that took money to enhance so Lady Davenport wasn’t pinning too many hopes on Eve.

Except, as it turned out, Lady Davenport wasn’t the fantastic match that Sir Davenport had made in his youth. 

Eve happened to be paging through the indices of an old copy of the Capitol Peerage. She’d been waiting on a train and there wasn’t much reading to be had even in the first class lounge where she was waiting. Like most people did, when left alone with a copy, she first looked herself up. That was when she’d figured out the copy was old. She wasn’t included in that one yet because it had been published about four months before her birth. 

Next, she looked up her family and saw a notice of marriage right about where she would have expected to see it —or almost where she would have expected to see it.

There, printed neatly on the yellowing page, was the record of a marriage between Lady Josephine Laurent, Countess of Greenlee, and Sir Percival Davenport, Baronet.

To be clear, the current Lady Davenport’s given name was Claire.

Eve had wondered for a moment if it was a misprint. A marriage between a Countess and a penniless Baronet was more than just one party making an advantageous match, it was a monumental step down for the Countess, but Eve stopped wondering when she noticed their wedding date —a mere six months before her own birthday. 

Countess Greenlee had been pregnant, possibly even showing, during her wedding, which did a lot to explain why she might condescend to marry as she had; Sir Davenport had been what was available. It took Eve a while to confirm her suspicions, but Cosette’s birth alone was proof that the marriage hadn’t lasted long. Eve’s mother had died in childbed or very shortly thereafter and her husband replaced her in less than a year, just going by Cosette’s birthday. Lady Clair might also have been pregnant at her own wedding. Eve and Cosette were born only ten months apart.

Eve hadn’t had much opportunity to learn about her mother. She hoped to change that in this life, but what little she did know concerned the Greenlee Trust.

All entailed Laurent family income was paid directly into the Trust. No one, not even the Laurent Matriarch, had unfettered access to the Trust’s principal, short of a Royal Decree. All family members drew an annual allowance determined by their rank and work for the family with bonuses for the regular life events such as marriage and funerals. Eve, it turned out, was no exception, even though she was a Davenport and not a Laurent. The Greenlee Earldom descended through the natural maternal line and so, as long as she was born within wedlock, Eve was the next Countess Greenlee —which did explain why the late Countess was so eager to be married.

It said something about all Eve’s past lives that the matter of her inheritance had never come up, even after she came of age.

At first, Eve had assumed her stepfather was the executor of her mother’s will and had used the opportunity to revitalize his own finances. He did seem to have an awful lot of money for someone whose income should barely extend to hiring servants. 

Then she thought he must have been abusing the Greenlee Trust, but had since learned that the Trust only paid a little child support for orphaned family members in the form of a bonus to the already generated income of whichever family member had custody of the child, likely in order to encourage orphaned Laurent children to be kept within the family. Eve couldn’t imagine him supporting an entire family in comfort and even splendor on an allowance meant for only one of his teenage daughters.

Her best conclusion so far was that Countess Greenlee must have had some of her own unentailed assets, which her husband had long since swallowed. Even then, she wasn’t sure. It was possible.

The real executor of the late Countess Greenlee’s estate was one Earl Nox, her mother’s distant cousin and a man Eve had only met that one time she ended up on trial and he’d mysteriously provided her with lawyers —only not so mysteriously, as it turned out. It had been his long-neglected responsibility to protect her and the trail would have been the first time she’d come under public fire.

Earl Nox had never shown much interest in Eve’s welfare. He’d never performed any checks on the Davenport home or ensured that she understood her own finances. From the outside, the Davenport family seemed very happy and comfortable so perhaps it was understandable that he already thought she was well-cared for. What that told Eve was that she’d have to rub his nose in danger before he ever started to look for it.

There was a lot Eve hadn’t figured out regarding her late mother’s affairs or her father’s mysterious income and her chances of learning more while still confined at home were slim to none —so this time, she was going to escape early. 

She’d tried to salvage her life here too many times. There was a direct correlation to how long she survived and how soon she was able to separate her affairs from that of her family. The earliest she’d ever left was once she’d reached her majority. 

This time, she was going to leave right away –or, more precisely, she was going to arrange to have herself taken away. 

000

Richter Able’s seventh life began, as all his other lives save the first had, in a stable house behind his father’s townhome. It took him a moment to realize where he was, when he was, and what that meant.

She’d died. Again.

Fury bubbled in his chest as he rolled over on his side to punch the thick straw mattress he’d grown up sleeping on. That didn’t help so he punched it a few more times, which didn’t help either. The first brilliant edge of his anger eventually passed, leaving him disheartened and he fell back onto his back.

There were sounds in the yard and that reminded him that if he stuck around, leaving would become harder. So he sat up with an irritable grunt and began putting together the few, meager possessions he wanted to take away from here; his important papers, his mother’s locket, and his grandfather’s knife. Everything else had been taken away by his half brothers over the years, but Richter now knew that everything in the townhouse could be his if he decided he wanted it. Eventually, he would, but in this life he had a more urgent task.

“What life are you living?” he muttered as he closed up his knapsack and pulled on his worn cap. He didn’t particularly want it, but his hair was distinctive and he knew his father’s people would come after him if he left a trail they could easily follow.

‘We barely made it to our thirties that time,’ he thought and that, too, was disheartening. He took a breath and strengthened his resolve. ‘This time, for sure.’

Wherever she was, whoever she was, she had to be learning from her experiences the same way he had been. Their lives were trending towards longer. He might be starting over again, but he was now confident that she could keep herself safe for a little while and that meant he could move to establish himself and become the sword and shield he was meant to be. 

Escaping the stable was second nature by now. Richter was out the back and over the rear wall before the yard steward could make his way up the stairs to barge into his bunk. He made his brisk way through the back lanes until even the alleyways took on a tidy sparkle. 

Richter tossed away his hat when he spotted a clean rain barrel with the lid ajar. He paused to rinse his face and arms and to finger comb his black hair away from his face. He switched his shirt and shoes for the ones he’d once kept reserved for whenever he’d been commanded to make an appearance in his father’s house. If he looked presentable then he was less likely to draw the attention of a constable before he reached his destination.

Fallendale House was buzzing with activity when he arrived at the back gate, which was to be expected. Richter wasn’t the only one who’d had an unwelcome revelation that morning. Most of his people were already safely housed in the main building, but those who, like Richter, had been born on the outside all had to make their way back on foot after a sudden return like this.

The guards minding the rear gate recognized him and admitted him with polite deference, but not enough respect to make it obvious to anyone watching that he was anything other than one of the many ‘day laborers’ entering through the rear gate. The others entering with him gave him space and sympathetic side glances.

Once he was inside, however, he straightened his back, dropped his shoulders, and lifted his chin. Carls, the house supervisor, came dashing out to meet him with a black stole over one forearm. He, along with everyone else in the house already, had a gray mourning band on his sleeve. If they’d been out in one of the country estates, that band would have been black, but people were nosey in Town and would want to know why Fallendale was in mourning when no one was dead so, when this sort of thing happened, they had to settle for gray.

Carls held up the stole for Richter with his head bowed and Richter, feeling brittle and angry, accepted both the stole and the failure it symbolized. 

The Chapel was already packed with Elders, who’d awoken this morning to find all their children and grandchildren had undergone a subtle, awful change. Grand Duchess Fallendale, soon to be Dowager Grand Duchess, stood at the altar, as she always did when Richter arrived in this place and this moment, in front of a bank of candles. 

The Chapel fell silent as the doorguard, a member of Richter’s generation, banged the butt of his spear against the marble floor and announced, “Lord Richter Able, Ascending Duke of Fallendale, enters the Fallen Chapel!”

The Grand Duchess was the last to turn and face him as he made his way up the aisle. For her, this would be the first time they met. This moment was never easy even though, for him, this both was and would be his adoptive mother. 

Finally she turned, holding a long silver lighter in one hand. She looked him up and looked him down, taking in his slight figure. “How many times?” she asked. This would be the first time anyone would have dared to ask that question of anyone in Richter’s era. 

“Seven,” he rasped and let his gaze fall. “I greet you with respect and awe, Mother.”

“I see you, child,” she replied, still tense, as she looked over his shoulder for someone who was not there. “If you are to be my son, then where is my daughter-in-law?”

Richter had answered that question in all sorts of ways. It never got easier. Now, all he could say was, “Hidden in the custody of the Devil himself, it seems.”

“Seven,” she breathed and closed her eyes. “There hasn’t been seven since we abandoned the Dale.”

There was nothing Richter could say. It was true. Their ancestors had been nomad warriors who were slowly fenced in by settled folk until their choice became to either integrate or be eliminated. The secret gift of the Fallen folk made it nearly impossible to eliminate them, but their leaders who led the integration did not do so until they had died and died and died, taking their people with them back into the past over and over again, until it became clear that there was no way to sustain all of their ancient practices any longer. 

Together Richter and the Grand Duchess lit fourteen candles for seven cycles of rebirth and the seventh death of their unknown Duchess. Richter retired with his adopted mother to a private balcony pew, screened in with elaborate openwork wooden privacy panels.

A low murmur filled the space of the Chapel. This wasn’t a mourning service, exactly. No one had died, after all, except for the one who had. This ceremony had more to do with the living. The ones who’d returned reacquainted themselves with those who had never left under the light of fourteen candles.

Likewise, Richter’s mother sat down heavily on one of the two padded benches in the balcony. “I wonder, do we get along?” she asked, not bothering with the small talk.

“We fight sometimes,” Richter replied honestly as he took his seat. “You taught me most everything I know.