Chapter 115: Learning to Miss (Patreon)

The water in the leaf-shaped tub held the warmth of the stones beneath it, and Gaearien let her shoulders sink until the surface reached her collarbone. Steam curled off the edges where the great vein-ridges rose to cup the water.

"Did you know," Elatan said from the next room, "that our daughter left the city with two foreign dignitaries?"

"I know."

A pause, then the scrape of a boot against the floorboards. He came to the archway and leaned his shoulder against the frame, arms folded. "And you're not worried something might happen to her?"

Gaearien lifted one leg from the water, and droplets fell from her ankle back into the bath, small and unhurried. "They wouldn't risk a diplomatic incident. She's safer with them than she is chasing after whatever usually occupies her time." She let the leg settle again. "Besides. She's old enough to make her own choices."

"True." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Though she's also the princess. A little more caution wouldn't hurt." His mouth pressed into a thin line, and he pushed off the doorframe, the argument already behind him. "What do you make of the demon delegation? Is it truly her, or another one wearing the name, the way the Solarians would have us believe?"

Gaearien reached up and turned the stalk beside the tub, and water fell in a thin, warm stream from the leaf-shaped basin above her head, running down through her hair. "I'd like to say, impostor. It would be simpler." She tipped her head back under the flow. "But you felt it yourself, didn't you? She's not the usual succubus reach for the belt buckle. She made you lower your guard instead. You told me it was like speaking with an old friend."

Elatan sighed and dragged a hand down his face. "She has a way of making a man want to keep talking." He shifted his weight against the frame. "Do you mean to side with the Solarians?"

"I can't say yet." She shut off the stream and wrung water from a lock of hair over her shoulder. "I lean toward staying clear of both. Choosing either side now looks like the wrong move from where I'm standing."

"We agree there, at least. But that's exactly what she's counting on. Keep us from the Solarians, and everything past that is a bonus to her."

"Still." Gaearien let her hand trail along the rim of the tub. "There's something almost funny about a woman who leads an empire, sitting on a terrace pretending to be a common envoy. I might try that myself sometime."

Elatan laughed, a short sound. "It would let you get away with a great deal more than a queen usually can."

"You'd know. You were never one for formality."

"Courtrooms were never my calling." He pushed off the frame and crossed the tiles toward the towel rack. "Give me a bow and open air any day."

"Our daughter takes after you in that."

"You're the one to say so." He pulled a towel from the rack and held it loosely in both hands. "She's you at two hundred, through and through."

Gaearien rose from the water, the leaf-shaped basin sloughing rivulets down her skin, and stepped onto the warm stone floor. Elatan crossed the last few feet and held the towel open for her.

"You know we have servants for that," she said, taking it from him anyway.

"I know." He shrugged, already turning back toward the archway. "I was already here."

*

The string snapped forward, and the arrow sank into a birch trunk a full hand's width from the knot Seluna had marked.

"Almost got it," Seluna said, hopping down from the fallen log she'd been perched on. "Closer than the last one."

Vespera stood with her arms folded near a stand of ferns, watching him nock nothing now, just flex the fingers that had held the string. "Improving fast, for someone who hasn't touched a bow in a century."

"I wouldn't call it impressive," Sylrena said, retrieving her own arrow from the moss beside the target.

Seluna elbowed her.

"Fine," Sylrena said, rubbing her arm. "It was a close one."

Drakul made a low sound in his throat, somewhere between agreement and dismissal, and said nothing further. He turned the bow over in his hands, testing the give of the wood against his palm, and found that he had enjoyed the strangeness of it, the miss more than the hit, the way his arm had to learn a new argument with the world instead of simply ending one. He had spent centuries with a blade that answered before he finished thinking. This had asked him to wait.

He held the bow out to Seluna.

"Time to go back," he said.

She took it but didn't sling it over her shoulder right away, tilting her head at him. "You're sure? We've still got a bit of light."

Drakul looked past her, through the gap in the canopy where the trail bent toward the ridge. What reached him of the sun was a thin band of orange caught low between two branches, thinning even as he watched it. The shadows between the trunks had gone the colour of wet slate.

"The sun is barely visible," he said. "I'd rather we returned to Lunethel before it isn't."

Seluna followed his look, then nodded, slinging the bow at last. "Fair point. The forest gets a lot less friendly once it's dark."

Vespera pushed off from the ferns, brushing a leaf from her sleeve without any particular hurry, and fell into step beside Drakul as the party turned back down the trail. Sylrena gathered the last of the arrows into her quiver, counting them under her breath, then straightened and looked toward Seluna.

"You'll want to hurry," Sylrena said, "if you're not keen on trouble with your parents."

Seluna stopped walking.

"Trouble," she repeated, as though turning the word over might make it smaller. Then her hand went to the strap of her quiver, tightening it though it hadn't loosened. "Wait. What time did we leave?" She looked up at the thinning band of orange, then down the trail, then back at Sylrena. "That was hours ago, wasn't it. Mother's going to have half the Council looking for me, and Father's going to be insufferable about it for a week, and—"

She was already moving faster than the others, boots finding the packed earth of the trail without looking down, one hand still fussing with the quiver strap.

*

The tea had gone from hot to warm while Lilith wasn't paying attention. She held the cup anyway, both hands wrapped around the ceramic, and watched the fungi glow along the branch outside the window pulse in a slow rhythm against the dark.

Nyssa sat on the arm of the chair opposite, a thimble-sized cup of pale nectar balanced in both clawed hands. She took a long sip, wings settling flat against her back.

"They're not all terrible," she announced, as though concluding an internal argument. "The elves."

Lilith turned from the window. "High praise. What changed your mind?"

Nyssa held up the cup.

"That's all it took."

"It's shoooo good." Nyssa tipped the cup back again, eyes half-closing with something approaching reverence.

Lilith laughed, a short, genuine sound, and set her tea down on the side table. The cup clinked softly against the wood.

The door opened.

Drakul came through first, dark coat carrying the smell of pine and cold air, followed by Vespera, who pulled the door shut behind her without rushing.

"Welcome back," Lilith said. "Did you actually rest, or did you spend the afternoon finding something to guard?"

"We hunted," Drakul said.

Vespera exhaled through her nose. "Princess Seluna joined us. She came looking for you—" a brief pause, the correction implicit, "—for Lune. When we told her you'd stepped out, she offered to guide us to the hunting grounds instead."

Lilith raised an eyebrow. "Oh."

"She was remarkably persistent about it."

"She's reckless," Lilith said, not without warmth. "Almost like someone I used to know."

Vespera set her gloves on the side table near the door. "Someone I'd recognise?"

"No. Before the Shattering." Lilith looked back toward the window, at nothing in particular. "She's gone now."

Vespera made a small sound that wasn't agreement or dismissal, just acknowledgement, and let it rest there.

Lilith gestured toward the wheeled cart near the far wall, where covered platters sat in a row. "There's food, if either of you needs it. The servants brought it roughly half an hour ago, so it should still be worth eating."

Drakul shook his head once. "I have to return to the fortress tonight."

"Tonight? Why?"

"I need a bow."

Lilith looked at him. "A bow?"

From the corner, Vespera had already lifted the cloth from one of the platters and selected a small cluster of deep-red fruits, round as berries, which she carried to the chair beside the window. She sat, ate one, and said, without looking up, "He broke the princess's friend's bow."

Lilith pressed her lips together. The image arrived fully formed: Drakul's hand closing on the wood, the small dry snap that would have sounded exactly like a twig underfoot.

Air pushed out through her nose.

*

Sylrena dropped onto the bench, chin in her hand, and stared at her empty hip where the bow should have hung.

"I lost my bow," she said, to nobody, to the table, to the knife marks.

Thaelon looked up from the arrows he was fletching, a half-finished shaft still between his fingers. "Lost how?"

"It was spiritwood."

"That's not how."

Sylrena sighed and let her head drop forward. "I lent it. To Drakul. He broke it."

Thaelon set the arrow down slowly, like it might go off. "Who is Drakul?"

"One of the Nocturne delegation. He's—" she waved a hand, searching for the right word and not finding one that fit, "—big. Older than he looks. He wanted to try archery."

"And you handed him a spiritwood bow."

"I didn't think he'd snap it in half."

Thaelon's jaw worked. "Why would you go with them? You know exactly what they are."

"I couldn't let Seluna go with them alone." The words came out sharper than she meant, and she didn't take them back.

Thaelon's whole body went still. "Seluna did what?"

"She offered to guide them to the hunting grounds. I went with her."

"Tell me nothing happened."

"Nothing happened." Sylrena straightened, meeting the alarm on his face head-on. "Aside from the bow. We hunted. Drakul gutted an elk with his bare hands, which was disgusting, and then Vespera stored the carcass in her shadow, which was worse. That's it. We had fun."

"You sure?"

"Thaelon." She studied him, the tightness around his eyes that hadn't been there a week ago. "What is it? You've been strange every time anyone mentions Lune, or her people, or anything that touches them. Are you actually alright?"

"I'm fine." He picked the arrow back up, turned it over, though there was nothing left to fix on it. "I don't want anything happening to either of you. Not after—" He stopped there, and didn't finish it.

The door at the far end of the hollow swung open on its hinges, letting in a wedge of grey morning light and Yareli, Thaelon's second-in-command, quiver slung over one shoulder.

"What's going on?" she said.

"Telling him how I lost my bow," Sylrena said.

Yareli's eyebrows went up. "You lost your bow? The spiritwood one?"

"Yes, yes." Sylrena scrubbed a hand over her face. "Seluna promised she'd get me a new one, and if I don't like the replacement, she said she'd let me pick one from the treasury."

"Can we still head out today?"

"Probably not. Not unless the perpetrator shows up with a replacement in hand before noon."

Yareli made a face that suggested exactly what she thought of that arrangement, and opened her mouth to say something further.

A knock sounded against the outer door, three raps, unhurried, and all three of them turned toward the sound at once.