.
Allia didn’t say anything, but she grew a complicated expression after Ceria and I appeared for dinner.
Ryuu was avoiding speaking to me as well, I noticed. The Ryuu that Tiana first met had been rude and demanding– well, actually, from my Robert perspective I knew he had actually been angry and lashing out about the summoning and the expectations put on him– and he had turned into self-centered Ryuu as his muscles and confidence grew, but the current Ryuu was… dare I say, circumspect?
Matthias does not have a huge staff like Mother, but he has a highly competent housekeeper. The food was quite excellent, although on the spicy side. Dwarves love hot sauce, pepper, and mustard as much as they love alcohol, and Matthias completely takes after his dwarven mother in that respect.
We were stil in the middle of dinner when Lady Dilorè returned from Castle Hill.
“I wasn’t told about an additional member,” Allia immediately objected when I introduced her.
“His Majesty insists that she have an escort,” Dilorè countered.
“He didn’t say anything to us!”
I sighed, “My Lady, Lady Dilorè’s ‘His Majesty’ is the Fairy King, not King Owen.”
She scowled, but didn’t retort to me. She turned back to my first cousin, twice removed and demanded, “Why would she need an escort? As strong as she is…”
“Her enemies have been repeatedly trying to kill her,” Dilorè stated. “Even if she is twice as strong as me, it is unacceptable to send a fairy princess out by herself under such conditions!”
“That’s what I thought,” I heard Brigitte muttering. “If her grandpa is the Fairy King, that means that Tiana must actually be a princess…”
“She’s not ‘by herself’,” Allia protested. “She has us!”
“We cannot leave her with only mortals for protection!”
“You doubt our strength?” Allia retorted, a fiery glint appearing in her eye.
I imagined this argument spiraling into a Allia v. Dilorè battle in short order and raised my voice. “Stop it! Both of you!”
They both looked at me with the same degree of annoyance.
“Take your pick, My Lady,” I told Allia. “I can travel with Dilorè and we will just match our destinations and coordinate with you as best we can, or we can all travel and work together as a proper team. Either way, she is staying with me.”
Allia’s eyes bugged slightly. “Do you seriously think a youngling like this could do anything against an enemy that a monster like you can’t defeat for herself?”
Somehow, I understood that she hadn’t meant ‘monster’ in the biological sense.
I decided against informing her that Dilorè was over two hundred years old, and simply told her, “It’s never a bad thing for someone to have your back”
My real reason was simply that I didn’t want to alienate any more people on the fairy side, but that was a personal reason that meant nothing to Allia. However, a better argument occurred to me at that moment and I grabbed at it.
“Please understand that Lady Dilorè is not a fairy knight, My Lady. She is a squire.”
“Even though she’s ‘Lady’ Dilorè?”
“She was born with that title,” I stated. “In Fairy, she’s ‘Rehëu‘, not ‘Fele‘. Her mentor Lady Serera was assigned as my escort, but for certain reasons, Serera had to stay with Miröen Fairling and send her squire along with me. While Dilorè is away from her mistress, I’m her acting mentor as a fairy knight. The work experience in the mortal world will be valuable for her, so she is staying.”
I totally came up with that on the spot. Serera had said nothing about me acting as a proxy for her as Dilorè’s master. But, Dilorè didn’t contradict me.
Allia frowned and twisted her mouth a bit, but she shrugged and let it go.
Which was good, because I had something really eating at my curiosity, and I had been itching for a chance to ask it. I turned back to Dilorè.
“Did you find out why the Castle summoned Miröen?”
“I did,” Dilorè answered. “A mine in the south of this kingdom caved in, early yesterday. More than a hundred miners are now trapped under a mountain in Lisrau. The King wants His Wisdom to figure out how to reach them.”
“That’s horrible!” Melione responded, her eyebrows rising to a peak with worry for the victims.
“It is,” Arken agreed, “but it’s also good for us. It would have been bad if the king were recruiting the Sage Miröen to help our enemies. Now we know it’s for something unrelated to our princess.”
“Not necessarily,” Matthias countered. “Lisrau is almost exactly in the direction you’re headed tomorrow. You should be wary of coincidences.”
“The Fairy King sent Miröen to assess King Owen’s situation,” I mused. “He was supposed to just drop me off here and continue on to Thuriben. Is he truly going to take time out for this?”
“They are flying to Lisrau in the morning,” Dilorè reported. “Miröen believes it is likely he will leave Her Wisdom Talene to deal with the mine collapse while he and Lady Serera travel to meet your king.”
I had heard Talene previously referred to as ‘Great Senior’, which is the way a member of a magic or scholarly order addresses a person much higher ranked than themselves. But ‘Her Wisdom Talene’? That suggested she was a sage rank, just like Matthias. Pretty lofty for a girl I had pegged as the bimbo junior apprentice of a wandering mage. I need to be less quick to judge in the future.
Ryuu asked, “This Miröen came in some kind of airship, right? If he’s flying the same direction, can we ask him to give us a ride?”
For a moment, that almost seemed like a good idea, but Matthias wasted no time shooting it down.
“Such a thing would raise your visibility too much. You are legitimately operating as an adventuring party on a quest, but you still need to avoid drawing the King’s attention. It would not be good if he became aware that you are a task force for a foreign crown. He has no alliance with your king, and he could potentially have an alliance with your enemies.”
Arken asked, “You warned us already not to contact the Castle. Do you distrust him?”
Matthias was quiet for a bit, then explained, “King Adair of Arelia is a good king, but I have one particular concern about him.”
I sent a glance toward the kitchen where his housekeeper was currently working. Orestania has freedom of speech protections. Lèse-majesté is limited to physical threats and credible slanders against the crown. But we weren’t in Orestania, and some kingdoms don’t require much at all to press charges.
Matthias smiled, guessing my worries. “Bellia came to this country with me, and she is quite loyal to me. And this isn’t anything I would fear reaching the King’s ears anyway.”
He leaned back in his chair, then launched into lecture mode. “King Owen’s father, King Stanley the Fifth, had ten children, but only two are children of his wife, Queen Jessamine. She bore his first child, the disgraced ex-crown prince Cullen, very soon after marriage, then had no more pregnancies until she was nearing the end of her childbearing years, when she finally managed to bear a second. Princess Gloriana was born in the same year as Lady Bonnie’s child, whom we now call King Owen, so those two grew up together and perhaps she is friendly to him. But, Gloriana’s only full sibling is the former Prince Cullen. I do not know which brother she would side with. The reason that it is important is, she is now Queen Gloriana, the wife of King Adair of Arelia.”
Arken nodded slowly. “Blood is thicker than water, they say, so it’s fair to assume that blood is thicker than half-blood as well. You’re right that we shouldn’t risk it.”
“There’s also Owen’s pedigree issue,” Matthias noted. “His mother was a mere palace maid. She only became ‘Lady’ Bonnie after she bore Stanley a second son and he declared her his concubine.”
Ryuu frowned. “I’ve heard that this Cullen was a criminal? He kidnapped a lot of women, right?”
Allia answered, “Over the course of about five years, he and his cronies abducted several dozen attractive daughters of the lower nobility and merchant class and sold them to Regaritan slavers. They lured women into hidden corners with promises of affairs that might lead to concubine positions. And they did such a despicable thing merely to obtain extra cash to finance their debaucheries.”
I felt a pang of associative guilt for a moment. Not all of those girls had gone to the Regaritan Empire. Some of them ended up in my father’s hands.
“Why would a woman support someone like that?” Ryuu wondered.
“People often refuse to believe that a family member is a criminal,” Matthias explained. “And she was being asked to accept that it was her own big brother doing such a horrid thing, to girls the same age as herself at the time. Some of the victims may have been her own schoolmates.”
Arken humphed. “This is all speculation. We don’t know what she actually believes, or whether King Adair would be influenced by her beliefs. But, Matthias is right. We can’t risk it.”
With a nod, Allia said, “We have a wagon and teamsters already hired. It’s four days to the border, so we’re leaving first thing in the morning. Any objections?”
She looked around the table. Everyone else was nodding, but I raised a hand.
“My Lady?” she asked me with her brow knitting.
“I’m not raising an objection,” I said, quickly waving my hand. “I have just yet to hear about the place we are going, or exactly why we think Amelia might be there.”
Matthias chuckled. “I forgot. We were done discussing that subject long before you arrived.”
Once Bellia the housekeeper finished clearing the remains of dinner from the table, Matthias brought out maps and began explaining the situation. He covered many details about specific places and what we knew about them, and I learned a lot about the territory where we were headed, but the main points boiled down to three simple facts.
First, the day after Amelia disappeared, Orestanian mountain rangers observed a large group of soldiers wearing what looked like provincial uniforms, but without identifying markings, flying up a mountain pass that lead out of Orestania into a neighboring kingdom. Some of the flying mounts carried second passengers.
Second, on the following day, subjects of that kingdom witnessed a group of the same appearance escorting two women matching the description of Chiara and Amelia into the Tabad, the vast chaotic mountain wilderness that stretched along the Great Wall southward from Arelia. That region is governed only by its many warring semi-nomadic tribes.
And third, during the week since then, a certain group known as the Berado tribe had been rumored to have gained a powerful Orestanian ally, and the other Tabadan tribes were also abuzz with the news about that tribe’s exotic new ‘foreign women’, a pair of buxom green-eyed beauties, one with blue hair and the other golden-blond.
