Chapter 113: How to Relax (Patreon)

The door closed behind her and Drakul did not move from the spot where he'd stood during the audience, three paces left of the threshold, back to the wall.

Vespera settled into the chair nearest the window and crossed one ankle over her knee, spine loose against the wood, shoulders unhurried, as though the room and its furniture had always been hers to use. She looked at him. He looked at the door.

"She told you to rest," Vespera said.

"I heard her."

The shadow demon said nothing further, but she did not look away. Calculating how much effort enforcement would require, most likely. She would find the answer disappointing. Lilith had given the order and Drakul had no intention of refusing it. He had refused her nothing in sixteen hundred years, and he was not about to begin over something this small.

The difficulty was the mechanics of the thing. A millennium was a long time to spend on one's feet, but it had never once felt like an excess. It felt correct. Standing beside her felt correct, and everything else felt like the space between drills.

He pulled the second chair from the table and sat down in it.

Vespera's expression shifted by a fraction.

"How does one do it," Drakul said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Relax. How is it done, in this age."

She made a small sound in her throat, not quite a cough. Her fingers stilled on her knee. Whatever she had expected him to say, it had not been that.

"It depends," she said finally, "on the person."

"Then account for the person."

She tilted her head. "Common folk find taverns adequate. Or competition. Archery, here, I would imagine." She glanced toward the window, where the city's upper branches caught the late afternoon light. "The elves do seem to favour it."

Drakul considered that. "And for those of higher standing."

"Hunting. Board games, if the mind wants occupation. Some take to the arts." She said it without judgment, but without warmth either. A list offered to satisfy the question, nothing more.

"Hunting," he said.

She settled back slightly. "Traditionally, men pursued larger quarry. Boar, stag, that manner of thing. Women more often took smaller game, birds and the like." She paused. "Though I doubt the elves observe that particular division quite so—"

A knock at the door.

Drakul was on his feet before the second rap landed, the chair scraping back across the wooden floor. He crossed to the door in four strides and pulled it open.

Not Lilith.

The princess stood on the branch-bridge outside, one hand still raised from knocking, silver-blue hair loose over one shoulder. Her eyes moved from his face to the width of his frame filling the doorway and she took a very small, very deliberate step back.

"I." She stopped. Rearranged herself. "I was looking for Ms. Lune. Is she available?"

*

The doorway did nothing to shrink him. Seluna tipped her chin up a fraction more than she meant to, cataloguing the width of his shoulders against the frame, the grey of his skin in the branch-light.

"She's occupied at present," he said. Baritone, unhurried, the accent old in a way she couldn't place a region to. "I can pass along a message."

"Oh." Seluna let her raised hand fall to her side. "No, don't trouble her. I only wanted to talk. It's nothing urgent."

"You may wait, if you wish." He glanced back over his shoulder into the room, then returned his attention to her. "Though we'll be leaving shortly. To relax, as I've been instructed."

The word sat strangely in his mouth, like something borrowed rather than owned. Seluna's curiosity caught on it immediately.

"Anything in particular?"

"Not especially. I thought I might hunt, if the terrain allows it."

"Oh, I know some good spots." The words came before she'd finished deciding to say them. "Past the second ridge, there's a stretch where the deer come down to drink at dusk. But you'll want someone who knows the paths. The fog out past the tree line isn't ordinary fog."

Drakul exhaled through his nose, a long, contained sound, the kind a man made when a simple errand had begun acquiring complications.

"I could guide you," Seluna offered. "If you'd like."

A ripple of dark folded itself into being behind his shoulder, and a woman stepped out of it as though she'd been standing there the whole conversation and only now chose to be seen. Seluna hadn't heard footsteps. She hadn't heard anything at all.

"Princess." Vespera's voice carried an edge of amusement she didn't bother softening. "Doesn't it concern you, offering to lead two strangers into the woods alone? You're royalty. We're guests of a foreign court you've known for less than a week."

Seluna blinked. "I hadn't thought of it that way."

"Clearly."

"But you don't seem like bad people." She glanced at Drakul, who hadn't moved from the doorway. "Even if he's a little frightening to look at."

Vespera laughed, a short, genuine sound that seemed to surprise even her. "Fair enough." She looked past Seluna toward the fading light beyond the branch-bridge, then back to Drakul. "We'll go with her. What do you think?"

Drakul considered the princess for a moment, the offer, the small square set of her shoulders under the weight of committing to something she hadn't quite thought through.

"Lead the way," he said.

Seluna's mood lifted at once, the earlier disappointment folding itself away somewhere she didn't examine too closely. She turned and started along the walkway, moving quickly enough that they'd have to keep pace, already running through which trail would get them past the marsh edge before the light went entirely.

"There's a second path," she said over her shoulder, "steeper, but it cuts an hour off if we take it before the dew sets in. And I should tell you now, the deer aren't the only thing worth seeing out there. There's a grove past the ridge where the moss glows blue after sundown. Half the rangers think it's cursed. It isn't. I've slept there twice."

Behind her, she heard Vespera murmur something too low to catch, and Drakul's reply, shorter, flatter, gone before she could turn to ask what either of them had said.

*

The terrace held the last of the afternoon warmth, and Lilith turned another page of the novel, some minor romance she'd pulled from her inventory to pass the hours between council sessions. A love triangle set on a merchant galley. The prose was clumsy but the plotting had teeth.

The door down the corridor slammed against its own frame.

"Enough! I have had enough!" Cassius came around the corner with his robes half-buttoned, one ring catching the light as he jabbed a finger at nothing in particular. Helena trailed him with both hands locked around his elbow, heels dragging against the polished wood floor as she tried to slow him. Benedict followed a step behind, sword hand loose at his side, scanning the corridor the way a man does when he expects an ambush and finds only potted ferns.

Lilith closed the book over one finger and looked up.

"Something wrong, Ambassador?"

"You!" Cassius stopped three feet from her chair, breathing through his nose, one ring-heavy hand still raised. "I know it's you."

Praise for whatever Nyssa had managed settled somewhere warm behind her ribs. Three hours and the man already looked ready to weep.

"I'm afraid I don't follow."

"Don't pretend." His voice cracked upward on the second word. "The chairs. My food, cold as a corpse and crawling with things that weren't there when I looked again. And now my bed. My bed. Soaked through when I lay down in it, not a drop anywhere else in the room."

Lilith raised an eyebrow, and a fat white splash landed square on the crown of Cassius's silver head, sliding in a slow rivulet past his ear.

For a moment nobody spoke.

Then he understood, hand rising to touch it, coming away pale and streaked, and the sound that came out of him was closer to a wounded animal than a diplomat.

"You! That's your doing too!"

"I can't take credit for the digestive habits of local wildlife, Ambassador." She kept her voice level, faintly puzzled, the tone of someone humouring a man who had clearly overheated in the sun.

"Lord Cassius, please." Helena tugged harder, glancing at Lilith with an apology already forming in the set of her mouth. "It's a bird. It's only bad luck. You've had a difficult week, that's all, let's get you back inside and cleaned up—"

Benedict took his other arm without a word, more effective than Helena's pulling, and steered the ambassador half a step backward. Over Cassius's shoulder, the paladin's eyes found Lilith's and held there a beat too long before he turned away, herding his charge back down the corridor toward the ruined quarters.

Lilith lifted a hand and waved, pleasant, unbothered.

Three hours, and the man was already fraying at the seams. If Nyssa kept this pace, there might be nothing left for her to do at all by the time the council reconvened. A pity, in a way. She'd been looking forward to something more personal.

She opened the book again, found her place, and read on. Baroness had known, of course, the moment the captain's letter arrived, that the tide would not wait for anyone's heart to catch up to it.

*

Seluna set the pace down the switchback trail, boots finding the packed dirt without a glance at her feet. Sylrena caught her at the second bend, quiver bouncing against her hip.

"You're not going alone."

"I'm escorting Nocturne delegates, That's hardly being alone."

"That's my point." Sylrena fell into step beside her, and didn't say another word about it until they'd passed the boundary stones, and by then the matter had settled itself into something neither of them needed to argue further.

Seluna let her have it. Word travelled fast enough through the branch halls without adding a princess sneaking off with the Nocturne delegation to the list, and a second elf at her side made the whole excursion look considerably less like a diplomatic incident.

Behind them, Drakul moved through the undergrowth without disturbing it, and Vespera walked at his shoulder with her hands folded into her sleeves, apparently content to let the forest go where it pleased.

Seluna glanced back at them both. "I don't think I've asked your names properly."

"Vespera." A small nod, nothing more offered.

"Drakul." The vampire's voice came low, unhurried.

Sylrena stopped mid-step, boot heel catching a root. "Drakul."

"You've heard it?," Seluna said.

"We studied him. In the old chronicles, the ones about the lost era." Sylrena's eyes stayed on him a moment too long. "A vampire lord who served an empress before the Shattering scattered everything. When she vanished, he wouldn't leave his post. Just kept waiting. For a thousand years, near enough."

Seluna turned the name over, looking at the vampire walking easily behind her, sword sheathed, cloak trailing shadow at its hem. "That's not you, is it?" She answered herself before he opened his mouth. "Of course not. A man like that wouldn't just leave his post. Not until she came back."

"He would not," Drakul said.

Seluna faced forward again, already half-lost in it. "To hold a vigil that long. Not knowing if she'd ever come. Everyone around him giving up, moving on, and he just kept standing there." She glanced over her shoulder, delighted with herself. "That's rather romantic, isn't it."

Drakul cleared his throat. "It is duty. Nothing more. A pledge given once, and kept."

"It sounds lonely, though."

"It is."

"Duty or romance, I don't see why it can't be both. A man waiting a thousand years for one woman, never abandoning the post." Seluna hopped over a fallen limb, pleased with the shape of the thought. "That's the kind of thing bards write entire cycles about."

Drakul's crimson eyes moved past her, to the ridge climbing green and gold through a gap in the trees.

"How much further to this hunting ground of yours, Princess?"