.
The aftermath of a battle which reaches exactly the conclusion you have planned can be a little boring. The Amaga had known for a couple days that, barring something utterly unforeseen, they would prevail and end up with a large number of prisoners. They had everything planned out. Dilorè and I weren’t needed at all.
We headed back to the bird-kin village for breakfast.
Actually, let me rewind. It went like this:
“I’m headed back to Lisrau,” I told her as we flew back to the village. We were just lazily cruising at bird-kin speed to avoid alarming the locals.
“What? No! Your Highness, you just got here!”
I shook my head. “Not really. I arrived before Midnight.”
Dilorè dashed in front of me and halted, arms folded, forcing me to hold up and hover. Her resplendent royal blue monarch butterfly wings had an agitated feel as they flapped. “Why didn’t you come to the village, Your Highness? Where did you sleep?”
“The same spot I soaked in, the night before last,” I replied, a little confused. “I needed to refresh my Water mana.”
“…”
“What?” I demanded.
“You took your clothes off?”
It felt a little like a cross-examination. Except I was wondering what transgression a fairy could possibly imagine that started with undressing.
“There wasn’t anybody around, so yeah.”
“You disrobed and slept outdoors, in the water, in a strange place, without a guard?”
Ah. That was it. “Well… yeah…”
“…”
“I didn’t actually intend to doze off,” I pouted.
“…”
“Dilorè…”
“Hush!” she snapped. “I’m trying to decide whether or not you’re too old for a spanking.”
“Spanking?”
Her lips curled as her normal nature seeped back in. “I’m certainly not against it. It’s a win for me, after all.”
“Wha… Are we talking about punishment or something else?”
“At your age, it works for both,” she shrugged, her eyes twinkling. Then her ill humor returned. “Your Highness, His Majesty charged Lady Serera and I with your protection. I agreed to work separately in order to support the things you have been trying to accomplish, but if I cannot trust that you will act with due caution, I will glue myself to you in perpetuity. I have to live up to Lady Serera’s expectations if I want to continue as her protégé, and I will not shame my grandmother before His Majesty.”
I frowned. Wanting to stop talking about this, I told her, “Let’s get going, alright?”
She had slipped close enough to catch my arm. “Your Highness, please let me say one more thing before we go.”
With all the might I had, I forced myself not to huff like a teenager. Tiana’s age was trying to get the better of me, despite the fact that even she had learned fairly good self-discipline. I knew their concern was because people with lifespans in centuries or millennia had difficulty thinking of a fifteen-year-old girl as much different than a baby, but it was hard to deal with relatives who cared about me trying to shelter me as a young child.
“What?” I asked with as neutral a tone as I had at my command.
“Even for a half-fairy as powerful as you… no, even for a fairy as powerful as you, the world is a far more dangerous place than you realize. Outside the mortal world, and at its edges in places such as this, the monsters become far more powerful and, even worse, the fairies become the greatest danger there is. I’m not talking about the nobles who wish to hurt you, Your Highness, I’m talking about the wily old creatures that stay out of fairy society in hidden places. They love to entrap and toy with those weaker than themselves, and what they love most is to entrap and toy with naive young fairies who believe themselves invincible.”
She was, of course, trying to warn me about fairies like Möemnen. Naturally, they were probably more numerous than the fairy nobility I had been interacting with, and yes, they were probably lurking in places like this swamp. And rationally, I should not make the mistake of assuming that Möemnen is the most powerful such fairy out there.
I suspected, after having met him, that the ancient monster who called himself the lord of this place might be the equal of such fairies and wouldn’t tolerate their presence. But, now was not the time to mention that, and cause Dilorè to think I was arguing. Still…
“My Lady, I do understand about those. I even had to escape from one, not that long ago…”
“Then you don’t understand about those, if you met one and you’re still doing such dangerous things!” she half-yelled.
Caught unprepared by the sudden gush of tears that had just come out along with those words, I gaped at her.
“Dilorè…”
“I was your age when that bitch caught me!” she erupted. “No, I was a couple years older! And she amused herself with my mind and body for forty seven years! And I could never escape her, although I tried with all my might! She only disposed of me because she decided the half-fairy child she’d forced me create for her amusement would be more interesting to raise without me, so she threw me out!”
My mouth was open, but somehow, I couldn’t make anything come out.
Her eyes were still waterfalls. I managed to get over my paralysis enough to reach out and touch her shoulder.
Her eyebrows bunched up and she wailed, “Do you have any idea what it’s like to know you have a daughter somewhere in the world who wasn’t old enough to remember you at the time you were thrown out, and you have no idea where she is? I could never determine where we were, while she had me trapped! That bitch’s lair could be anywhere on the Eastern Continent!”
Of course I had no idea what it was like, nor was my grasp of fairy psychology terribly great, since Tiana had been a very atypical fairy due to her mortal upbringing. I could do math though, and I could realize this was a century-and-a-half-old trauma that was still killing her, and I had just kicked that trauma in the teeth when I appeared to be ignoring her warnings.
I closed in and wrapped my arms around her before I knew I was doing it.
Our wings were in danger of running into each other, as neither of us possess the skill to hover without moving them, the way senior fairies like Mother can, but she just stopped flapping anyway, so it wasn’t a problem. She should have sunk gradually due to that, but I noticed her weight dragging on my arms and tightened my grip on her while increasing my lift so I could carry her.
“I’m sorry, Dilorè,” I whispered. “I apologize. I promise, I’ll take better care.”
After somewhere close to a minute, she pressed herself away and wiped her eyes, then bowed, Dorian-style.
“Rônve mâanrazo. Repedera hefenydd manísa. (I am shown unworthy to Your Highness. You have seen something unsightly.)”
I shook my head and smiled. “I won’t accept an apology where no apology is needed, My Lady. Shall we go find some breakfast? I promise, I really will take your warning to heart.”
“The breakfast is already found, Your Highness. We shall dine with Lord Saerim’s family.”
“Sidis’s family?” I asked, a little concerned. Every time I got near that girl, she turned clingy.
“That’s correct, Your Highness,” she nodded. “You have a small mess to clean, there.”
# # #
Although Saerim himself had apparently not been home since the Berado attack, we were apparently the guests of his family’s treehouse in the birdkin village. Sidis and her brother returned home every night, so he’d had them bring Dilorè there, the first night I left her with the Amaga.
It was a matter of the tribe’s honor in this culture that a sojourning traveler must be somebody’s guest. Although I had yet to spend a night indoors in Greenwater Fen, it seems I was considered his guest as well.
So, the place we went for breakfast was, in fact, the Air Commander of Amaga’s family home.
Ilzha, Dorin’s younger sister and the mother of Sidis, her elder brother and two younger siblings, was less like the noble daughter that she was in theory and more like the friendly, middle-aged housewife she was in practice. The sole human in a bird-kin treehouse, she was a whirlwind in the kitchen, ordering an adolescent bird girl to fly to the bakery for fresh bread, kneeling to open a trap door that turned out to be a sort of refrigerator that they had for some reason built under the treehouse, in order to retrieve a jar full of butter, getting the fire in the stove heated up, slicing cheese and rashers of English-style bacon, frying the bacon and then eggs in the bacon fat, while cooking a sort of applesauce in a pot perched in the door into the firebox under the stovetop, thanking the kid that came back with the bread with uncanny speed and suddenly we had breakfast in front of us.
That said, she didn’t stay to eat it. Although she chattered throughout preparations about how wonderful it was to have such beautiful and valiant warriors helping the tribe, and how grateful she was that we came to her daughter’s aid in Lisrau, and how honored she was to be able to host us in her house, she bustled off after serving the food to take care of the chickens (that lived in a coop also under the tree-house), leaving us in Sidis’s care.
As I looked at the meal in front of me, I was struck by the incongruity of serving eggs to a bird-kin family for a moment, until I remembered that bird-kin are mammals.
The critical turn came when Sidis took her seat so close to me she was practically in my lap. The table here was a low table as is common in Doria, or like you see in Japan. Spacing wasn’t defined by how chairs fit around the table like in Atius.
I had been reluctant to bring up her oddly adhesive behavior, probably because I had a strong suspicion what it was about. But, after breakfast, Dilorè took action, pressuring Sidis to find us a private space for a talk.
It was a very bird-kin-like choice, a simple shack high up in a towering cypress that was apparently a disused observation platform for the aerial cavalry elements of the tribe’s militia. They used it for directing their training exercises, and with all the forces currently tied up with patrolling outside the Greenwater, it hadn’t been used for days.
When we arrived, I could see Dilorè satisfying herself that no outside eyes could peer in, and I grew worried for Sidis. She was a mortal innocently following a pair of fairies into a secluded spot, having completely trusting eyes only for me. I was wondering if I would have to defend her from my cousin.
Dilorè was able to relieve my suspicions with one sentence. “Sidis, please let us help you. You have fallen into terrible danger.”
Her brows bunched a little. “Danger, My Lady? From what?”
“From Lady Tia. And you are going to have to tell us how you want us to fix it.”
