Chapter 116: Drawn Taut (Patreon)

Yareli crossed to the door and pulled it open.

She stopped there, hand still on the latch, and looked up. Then further up.

Sylrena glanced over from the bench and found the doorway filled almost entirely by Drakul's shoulders, the low ceiling of the entry making him stoop to fit under the frame.

"Who is that?" Thaelon said, not moving from his stool, the unfinished arrow still in his hand.

"That's him," Sylrena said. "That's Drakul. The one I told you about."

Drakul inclined his head toward the doorway without stepping through it. "May I come in?"

Yareli's mouth opened, closed, opened again. "Er—yes. Yes, of course." She stepped back to let him pass, tilting her head back to keep him in view the whole way.

Drakul ducked under the frame and straightened once he cleared it, the top of his hair brushing the beams anyway. His eyes found Sylrena.

"I brought your replacement. As promised."

Yareli leaned close to Sylrena's ear, eyes still fixed on the width of Drakul's forearms where his sleeves ended. "No wonder he snapped your bow," she murmured.

Sylrena ignored her, mostly. "It hasn't even been a full day."

"It wasn't an issue," Drakul said.

She looked him over, at his open hands, the empty air at his hip where a bow might have hung, and found nothing. Before she could ask where exactly he was hiding it, something flared blue-white in his palm and resolved into shape, the same way his greatsword answered his call. Of course. If he could summon that blade from nowhere, a bow was no trick at all.

He held it out to her.

It was smaller than she expected. Smaller than made sense. A curved length of dark wood no longer than her forearm, tapering at both ends, without a single limb bent to hold a string, because there was no string at all.

"This is a bow," she said.

"It is."

She waited for the joke, the twitch at the corner of his mouth that would tell her he was having her on. His face gave her nothing. Either he believed entirely in what he'd handed her, or he was better at lying than any elf she'd ever crossed blades with.

"So, how do you use it?" she said, turning the handle over in her palm.

Yareli looked between the two of them, arms folded, waiting for someone to make sense.

"Put mana into it," Drakul said.

Sylrena breathed in, closed her hand around the wood, and let a thread of her own magic run into it the way she might test a stream before wading in.

The handle woke.

Limbs grew outward from either end of her fist, wood curling and joining itself in a rush, runes surfacing along the grain and glowing faint violet as they settled. A string cracked into being between the tips with a sound like a plucked wire, and the limbs bent themselves to take the tension, easing into a shape that had not existed a heartbeat before.

She yelped and nearly lost her grip on it.

Yareli's breath left her in one long gasp. Thaelon's arrow clattered onto the table as he swore under his breath.

Sylrena held the finished bow at arm's length, turning it, running a thumb along a limb that felt warm rather than cold, warm like something alive rather than carved. She had strung a hundred bows in her life and never once seen wood grow itself around her hand. And to think this had come from a man who by his own account never touched one.

"Feel free to test it," Drakul said.

She realised she had been staring at the thing for longer than was polite, turning it this way and that under the low light of the hollow while the other three watched her do it.

"Right." She nodded, mostly to herself. "Of course." She looked up at Yareli, then at Thaelon, who was still frowning at the fallen arrow as it had personally offended him. "Come on. All of you. Let's see what it can do."

*

The path to the range wound down through roots thick as house beams, the ground floor of Lunethel opening into a long clearing walled by hedges grown into precise, deliberate rows. Straw targets stood at intervals along the far end, feathered arrows already bristling from two of them.

A lone figure stood at the nearest firing line, releasing an arrow as they approached. It struck home with a soft thock, dead centre.

"Mirion!" Yareli called out.

He turned, bow lowering, blond hair catching the light filtering through the canopy far above. His eyes went past Yareli, past Thaelon, and settled on Drakul with the particular stillness of someone recalculating the size of a room.

"Morning," he said, easy enough despite it. "Who's your friend?"

"Guest," Thaelon said, the word coming out flatter than the sentence needed. "From Nocturne."

Mirion's eyebrows went up. "That Nocturne?"

Thaelon nodded once.

Mirion looked Drakul over again, slower this time, the way a man might reassess a bridge after learning its age. "So what's he doing all the way out here, with a foreign diplomat and everything?"

"We're testing my new bow," Sylrena said, before anyone could make it more complicated than it needed to be.

"New bow?" Mirion set the tail of his arrow against the string without drawing. "What happened to the old one?"

"She broke it," Yareli said.

"What?" Mirion's gaze swung to Sylrena.

"I did not break it," Sylrena said.

"I broke it," Drakul said, without heat, the admission landing as plainly as a stone set down on a table. "My error. Not hers."

Sylrena lifted her hand, the bow still unfurled. "Look what he gave me instead."

Mirion leaned in, studying the wood, the seams where the limbs had grown themselves into shape. "Huh. That's impressive."

"I know, right?" Sylrena turned it over once more, feeling its weight settle against her palm in a way that made her fingers want to close around it properly. "I can't wait to see what it does."

"Be careful with it," Thaelon said. He hadn't picked up another arrow. His hand rested near the quiver at his hip instead, fingers not quite touching the fletching.

She understood the caution. Understood exactly where it came from, the same place his hands sometimes went still mid-sentence even now, days after Lune had supposedly severed whatever thread had been wound through him without meaning to. Care was reasonable, coming from him.

But whatever this bow was, whatever grew in her hand when she poured mana into that handle, she wanted to feel it loose an arrow more than she wanted to be careful about it. If anything should have made her cautious, it was that.

"I know," she said. "Don't worry. I'll be careful."

She walked to the range line, boots settling into the packed earth worn smooth by a hundred years of stances just like hers. The target stood forty paces out, straw face scarred with old holes. She drew an arrow from her quiver, the fletching familiar between her fingers even if the bow beneath it wasn't, and set the nock against the string.

Behind her, Yareli had gone quiet. Mirion's arrow rested loose in his own bow, forgotten. Thaelon watched with the stillness of a man counting his own heartbeats.

Sylrena breathed in, slow, and drew the string back.

The runes woke.

Violet light climbed the limbs from tip to grip, brighter than it had been in the hollow, brighter than any bow she'd drawn before, humming faintly against her fingers like something with a pulse of its own. The tension under her draw hand built past where wood should have given, past where her own strength should have mattered at all, the string biting into her fingers as the glow raced up past the riser and into the arrow itself, the fletching catching a shimmer that had nothing to do with sunlight.

She held the draw a heartbeat longer than she meant to, feeling the bow answer for itself, feeling it want.

Then she let go.

*

The teapot rattled against its saucer as Cassius poured, and the whole branch beneath his feet gave a slow, groaning shudder, wood creaking somewhere in the walls like the tree itself was settling its weight.

Tea slopped over the rim onto his knuckles.

He set the pot down hard enough to rattle the cup again and pressed his scalded hand flat against the table, waiting to see if the tremor came back. It didn't.

He thought, absurdly, of the God he'd been praying to with rather more frequency these past two weeks than in the preceding decade. Had Solaris finally heard him? Was some righteous woodsman even now taking an axe to the base of this abomination of a tree, three hundred meters of elven smugness ready to topple?

Perhaps it had never been the tree at all. Perhaps it was only him, his own hand, after two weeks of mysterious 'incidents'. He no longer trusted the difference between what moved and what only felt like it did.

He rose to check the window, robe swishing round his ankles, and reached for the shutter latch. A gust caught it first. The frame swung wide and struck him full across the face before he could pull back, wood cracking against cheekbone and nose both, and he staggered a step with his vision full of white sparks.

"Gods rot this cursed tree," he hissed through his teeth, one hand flying to his face.

His fingers came away red. Blood ran warm over his lip, dripping onto the front of his robe, a bright bloom against pale silk.

The door to the adjoining room opened. Benedict filled the frame, armour catching the light, sword hand already loose at his side out of habit.

"Ambassador. Everything all right in here?"

Cassius turned on him, hand still cupped beneath his nose, blood welling between his fingers. "Do I look all right to you?"

Benedict's jaw shifted, the closest he came to reacting.

Cassius exhaled through his mouth, the breath ragged, and waved his clean hand toward the washroom. "Cloth. Bring me something for this before it ruins the carpet as well as my face."

Benedict withdrew without a word.

Alone again, Cassius pressed his sleeve to his nose and let the fury settle where it wanted. Two weeks. Two weeks of ruined chairs, spoiled wine, and parasites that vanished the instant he looked at them properly. Two weeks of boots filled with something that squirmed when he pulled them on, of ink that turned into biting insects the moment his quill touched parchment, of a bed that had, on one memorable night, folded itself in half around him like a pastry.

Two weeks of laughter drifting from empty corners whenever calamity struck, gone the instant he spun to find its source. And never once, not a single time, had anyone else in the room seen a thing go wrong. Only him. Only when Helena's eyes were elsewhere, only when Benedict had stepped out for a moment, as if whatever did this waited for privacy the way a coward waits for an empty street.

They were starting to look at him differently. He'd caught it in Helena's face yesterday, that flicker before she smoothed it into professional concern. They thought his mind had started to slip.

He crossed to the looking-glass mounted near the washstand, wanting to see the full measure of the damage, tilting his chin to catch the light.

The reflection smirked.

Not a trick of the blood-smear, not a shadow. His own face, in the glass, wearing an expression he had not made.

"What," he said to it, low, "are you laughing at?"

The door opened behind him. Benedict returned with a folded cloth, but the sight in the glass caught him mid-stride. Cassius, alone, addressing his own reflection. Benedict froze in the doorway, cloth forgotten in his hand, his eyes doing the arithmetic of a man quietly revising his employer's fitness for duty.

"You should rest, sir," Benedict said. "It's been a difficult few days."

"I don't need to rest." Cassius rounded on him, cloth still clamped to his nose, muffling the words without softening them. "I need to determine how she is doing this. Always when eyes are elsewhere, always when there's no proof to show—"

"Sir."

"—and I will find the thread, Benedict, I will pull it, and when I do, that woman will answer for it—"

"Sir, I only meant that a day's worth of rest might—"

"You think I've lost my senses." Cassius lowered the cloth enough to be understood. "Don't lie to me, Benedict, I've watched you think it for a week. You and Helena. Whatever Lune is doing to me, the two of you are enjoying it. Hoping I trip badly enough that someone finally hands my seat to one of you."

"Sir." Benedict's voice didn't rise, didn't waver. "I'm a soldier. That's all I am. Please. Get some rest."

Cassius held his stare a moment longer, blood cooling sticky against his lip, and said nothing more. Let them think what they liked. He would find the seam in it himself, the thread that led back to that infuriating woman on the terrace with her books and her serene little smile, and when he found it he would lay the whole business bare in front of the council, in front of the queen, in front of anyone who'd doubted him.

He lowered himself into the chair across from the ruined one, dabbing at his nose, and said nothing else at all.