Chapter 117: I might have an idea (Patreon)

The step back happened before she decided to take it. Her heel caught the packed earth and she steadied herself, and the crack came a half-second later.

Silence.

Then the leaves came down.

Not from the target. The target was gone, a hole punched through its centre wide enough to fit her torso, the straw edges scorched smooth. Behind it, twenty paces further, a birch had taken the remainder of the arrow. The shaft was buried to half its length in the trunk, fletching and all, and the wood around the impact had cratered inward.

Sylrena looked at the bow.

Looked back at the tree.

Looked at the bow again.

Mirion let out a breath through his nose. Beside him, Yareli had gone still. Thaelon said nothing at all. He was staring at the birch.

Drakul nodded once.

She turned to face him. He had his hands clasped behind his back, watching her.

"What was that?" she said.

"The power is unsatisfactory?"

"No." She shook her head. "No. No, it—that's not what I meant." She looked down at the bow in her hand. It had folded back to its travelling length the moment she'd eased the mana out, compact enough to fit in a belt loop. "It's—this is not what I was expecting."

Drakul tilted his head a degree. "Your original had a pleasant weight, but the material suggested ceremony over function. I lacked an appropriate replacement in kind." A pause. "So I gave you a practical one."

Sylrena's jaw tightened.

Ceremonial. He had looked at Elvanyr's work—at a bow grown from a single tree over forty years, coaxed and shaped from the moment it pushed its first shoot out of soil Master Elvanyr himself had prepared, a bow that had taken another decade after cutting before its limbs would accept a string—and filed it under ceremony.

She kept her face even.

"Where did you get it?" she asked.

"An archer." He said it the way someone might say a road or a door. "She was skilled. We fought at length before I killed her."

Sylrena turned the bow over in her hands. The material was dark and close-grained, the surface warm in a way that had nothing to do with the morning light.

Must have been some fighter.

She glanced at Drakul.

He was tall, taller than the doorway behind him. She looked at him now, properly. The ashen cast to his skin. The black hair with silver at the temples, tied back. The armour was engraved, bats and crescents, the crescents repeating in a pattern from a woodcut in a history she'd read as a girl, the paper smelling of age.

He wouldn't leave his post. Just kept waiting. For a thousand years. That was what she'd told Seluna, three days ago on the mountain path, as a point of trivia about a man she'd assumed shared a name with the legend. The Sanguine Duke had not left his fortress since before Sylrena was born. Since her mother was born. Since her grandmother had walked this forest. He had held a vigil so long it had become a lesson the elders cited when they wanted to illustrate the grip the old empire's loyalty had on its people.

There is no way the real one would come here.

And yet he had broken her spiritwood bow and replaced it with a weapon pulled from a fight she would not have survived, and he'd called the first one ornamental without a flicker of apology.

She thought about the strength it had taken to snap spiritwood. Elvanyr had told her once, while he was stringing it, that he'd watched a man try to break a finished spiritwood stave over his knee as a test of its limits. The man had needed a week before he could close his hand around a cup again.

Drakul hadn't noticed.

Lune.

Drakul hadn't left his fortress for a thousand years, and then he'd left it for her—and her was Lune, the woman who had plucked their arrows from the air at the river crossing, who had cut through five armed men before Sylrena had finished drawing breath, who had unravelled Thaelon's will with something she described as a miscalculation.

Not a monster. She'd grown up with a clear image—the Empress of Nocturne was cruelty given a face and a throne. But Lune had fixed the mistake with Thaelon. Had been civil. Had been, if she was being precise about it, more careful with them than they'd been with her.

"Would you look at that crater," Mirion murmured to Yareli, nodding toward the birch.

Yareli kept her voice just as low. "I saw it."

Thaelon still hadn't moved.

Sylrena closed her hand around the bow's grip.

She needed to find Seluna.

"I should try the distance markers," she said. "See how it holds at range."

She didn't wait for an answer before she started walking toward the far end of the range.

*

The comb caught a snarl at the back of Seluna's head, and she hissed through her teeth.

"Hold still," Mona said, unbothered, working the tangle loose with her fingers before trying the comb again.

"I can't hold still, I'm under house arrest." Seluna sat cross-legged on the low stool, arms folded, glaring at the map on the wall like it had personally wronged her. "It's been a full day, Mona. A day of sitting in this tree while everyone else gets to do things."

"You disappeared for the better part of a day with two foreign dignitaries nobody in this city had properly vetted." Mona drew the comb through in a long, even stroke. "It's not exactly a mystery why your parents were worried."

"They weren't worried. They were relieved." Seluna picked at a loose thread on her sleeve. "Think about it—their reckless daughter runs off into the woods, and instead of getting eaten by something with too many teeth, she comes back attached to a vampire and a shadow demon who could probably end anyone who so much as looked at me wrong. I was safer out there than I've been in this palace in years. They know it."

"Even so." Mona's tone didn't shift, but her hands paused a moment on a knot of hair. "It is not appropriate behaviour for a princess."

"I don't want to be a princess." The words came out flatter than Seluna meant them to, and she heard herself say it and didn't take it back. "My mother can have another daughter if the title matters that much. I'm not staying in Lunethel forever, sitting in this tree memorizing etiquette. I want to see what's out there. All of it."

Mona resumed combing, quiet for a stretch. "Is that why you keep finding excuses to visit the Nocturne delegation? More of them than strictly required for a diplomatic duties, I'd think."

"Partly." Seluna considered lying and didn't bother. "I like talking to Lune. It's—" She searched for the shape of it. "It's like she already knows what I'm going to say before I say it. Like she's had the same thoughts herself, a long time ago."

A low chuckle came from behind her. "She's a succubus, dear. Charm is rather the point of the species." Mona set the comb down against Seluna's shoulder, leaning in with mock gravity. "Are you certain you haven't developed feelings for her?"

"What—no!" Seluna spun on the stool so fast a moonstone bead clattered off the shelf. "Don't say something so ridiculous. She's a woman."

"There's no shame in a bit of forbidden affection." Mona picked the bead up off the floor, entirely too pleased with herself. "Some people say it's sweeter for being forbidden."

"I like men, Mona!"

Mona laughed outright, the sound bouncing off the curved wood walls, and set the bead back in its bowl. "As you say, Princess."

Seluna slumped back around to face the map, ears burning, muttering something uncharitable about maids who overstepped and maids who ought to be dismissed to the kitchens.

A knock sounded against the pale wood of the door, three careful raps.

Mona set the comb on the shelf and wiped her hands on her apron. "I'll get it."

She crossed the room, past the rack of leather armour, past a quiver that had escaped its proper place again despite her best efforts that morning, and pulled the door open.

Sylrena stood on the other side. The guard posted outside Seluna's door had stepped aside for her, but no second escort trailed behind as protocol usually required for a visit this deep into the royal branch. Her copper hair had come loose from its tie at one side, and there was a compact wooden shape at her hip that Seluna didn't recognize. Her mouth was already open, the shape of a sentence half-formed and waiting, and something in her eyes said she'd walked the whole way here rehearsing it and still hadn't decided how to start.

*

"Everything all right?" Seluna asked, sliding off the stool.

"Yes. No." Sylrena's hand went to the wooden shape at her hip and away again. "I just realized something. Something important."

"Well, come in, then." Seluna waved her past Mona and the doorframe. "How important are we talking?"

"Important enough for the Queen's ears."

Mona shut the door behind her with a click. Seluna caught Sylrena's sleeve and tugged her past the armour rack, deeper toward the balcony light.

"So what is it?"

Sylrena's jaw worked once before the words came out. "This is going to sound insane. But I think Lune might be Lilith. The real one."

"What?" Seluna and Mona said it together. Mona looked at her mistress like she'd stolen the word.

"Let me explain, Drakul gave me this." Sylrena unhooked the compact shape from her belt and held it out, dark, close-grained wood, warm in her palm. "Pour some mana into it."

Seluna took it, turning the plain little baton over in her palm, until the runes along its length caught her mana and answered. The limbs unfolded with a soft creak of wood remembering its own shape, violet light climbing the grain from tip to grip.

"Wow." She said it flat, then again. "Wow."

"That's not even the part that matters." Sylrena took it back and let it fold down to nothing again. "I fired it at the range. It went through the target. Cratered a tree twenty paces past."

"That's—" Seluna frowned. "That's artifact work. Pre-Shattering. The kind of thing that sits behind glass in the treasury vault, not something you hand a ranger to replace a lost bow."

"I know. And who else but a vampire who's spent a thousand years in one castle would hand it over without a second thought, because to him, it's not rare. It's just a bow he happened to have."

"So he really is that Drakul." Seluna curled her fingers around nothing, the runes' warmth still in them. "But then why would he—"

"Exactly. He follows her. Everywhere. Not as an escort. As a guard." Sylrena's voice dropped. "And I've already seen what she can do herself. This isn't proof on its own. It's the last piece that makes all the other pieces fit."

Seluna sat down hard on the stool, the map on the wall swimming a little in her vision. "So you're telling me I've been sitting on a terrace for the better part of two weeks, talking about demon society with the actual, legendary Empress of Nocturne."

"That's what I'm telling you."

Excitement climbed up through her chest before the fear did. She'd taken Lune for an envoy, clever and a little too observant, from some country trying to look civilized to a room full of elves who'd decided otherwise centuries ago. But if Lune was her, if she was the woman from every old text Seluna had ever half-remembered—

"Your mother." Mona's voice cut through it. "Should hear this. Now, ideally, and not after you've finished being delighted about it."

"That's why I came straight here." Sylrena's hands found each other and knotted. "They wouldn't let me anywhere near the Queen. Your father, maybe, once he's back down, but that could take a week or more."

"There is one problem," Seluna said.

"What's the matter?"

"I'm not allowed to leave this room for another three days." She said it like a confession, which it was. "And Mona can't go to my parents either, not on this, she is supposed to be watching me."

Sylrena's shoulders dropped, and she sank onto the edge of the low bed, the furs shifting under her weight. "Then what do we do?"

Seluna looked between the door, the map, and the little folded bow still resting in Sylrena's lap.

"I might have an idea."