§
My inner struggle not to burst out laughing, the entire time Rod was confronting Sirth, nearly ended in failure. Somehow I held it, but it wasn’t easy. Since I was still somewhat pissed at him in the end, my humor was probably schadenfreude to some extent. But it was also simple Fae merriment at a trick well-played on my mortal companion. His evolution from fighting adrenaline to puzzlement to simple inability to comprehend was quite a show.
She capped it off with a level of subtle flirting I’m not capable of, causing me to wonder for a moment what her intentions were with my fiancé. But she was just using her feminine charm to maximum effect, something that it seems she had been pretty skilled at doing in life.
Her crew of refugees had included a number of boys, old enough to handle the ropes but too young to stay behind and fight when the clan merchant ship was attacked. Adolescents, in other words. Apparently she hadn’t been above using her sexy to control them, either.
When Sirth went to the balcony and then dissolved into Fan Li’s flock of sparrows, it was the crowning touch. Rod simply stared at the spot where she had been, without moving, until I got up and crossed over to the french doors to the balcony to close them.
“Your Highness, she’s been gone for some time now.”
He cleared his throat and nodded.
“You can sheath your sword?” I added, tipping my head.
He looked down at it, and seemed to be confused about its presence in his hands for a moment. Then he recovered and wordlessly sheathed it.
Seriously, what kind of witchcraft did you use on him, Sirth?
– I’ll be happy to teach ya, sometime.
I ignored her cheeky response and kept my attention on Rod. He was now looking at me with a frown, but it was his frown of concentration, not an attitude regarding me.
“Whatever it is, Your Highness, you should just come out and ask,” I told him as I walked back over to my chair and sat.
He thought for a bit longer, then finally asked, “Exactly what was that?”
Apparently, he was just going to continue standing. Well, fine then.
“You’re calling the woman ‘That’?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. “Kind of rude, don’t you think?”
He answered, “You said… or she said… it was an illusion, but you spoke with her like she was another person, and sent her to do the work…”
Yeah, he hadn’t entirely followed the explanations.
I sighed, then decided not to spend much more effort on it.
“Your Highness, if you must, just think of her as a ghost of my previous life, that I can bring to life with my magic.”
“Even though she is a separate person?” he countered.
“She only seems like a separate person,” I replied, then shook my head. “This is a waste of time. Just trust me, Your Highness. If I carefully manage my powers, I can deal with things through her without leaving the Castle. Besides, we aren’t done. You still aren’t off the hook.”
He looked confused for a moment, then his face grew somber.
“That’s right,” I stated with an icy smile. “I’m still mad at you.”
“I’ll have them return your armor.”
“You will do nothing of the sort,” I answered tautly, to his momentary shock.
He recovered, then nodded. “Then…”
“You’ll apologize to whomever you gave that order to, for putting them in such a difficult position. Then relay to them my request to return the armor.”
Rod looked like he was tasting something bitter, but he nodded.
“And from now on, no more reliance on the ‘it’s easier to seek forgiveness than to beg permission’ method,” I continued, still keeping my voice cold. “I find that approach very annoying.”
§
Leaning back against the marble, with my head resting upon a silk pillow kept dry via magic, I relaxed in my bath and worried about whether I had been too hard on him.
No, I decided. He has to learn.
My notebook and a writing case with a handful of reports rested nearby, but I wasn’t in the right mood to tackle them. I might be resolute that I was right to chastise him, but I still felt bad about it.
“My Lady,” Genette called from the other side of the shoji screen that the maids had set up in case of visitors, after they finished bathing me and left me to take my soak. “Miss Mireia is asking to see you.”
“Show her in,” I instructed, keeping the surprise out of my voice. Until yesterday, when I insisted she spend the day with Rod, Mireia had been spending her daytime hours visiting the military hospitals. I had thought she was going to return to that today.
When I felt her approach the other side of the divider screen and hesitate, I laughed a little.
“You’re allowed to be on this side, Mir,” I told her.
She came around the screen, then her puzzled expression turned to surprise when she saw the nude relaxing in the tub.
I giggled. “There’s plenty of room if you want to join me.”
Her eyes bugged slightly. “I will if you want, but…”
“So if I say I want it, you’ll join me?” I echoed back, teasing a bit.
She let out a slight breath, smiled ruefully, and noted, “I’ll need some help from your maid getting out of this kimono…”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m not going to make something like that an order, Mir. If you want, then you’re welcome to take a bath with me anytime.”
She dimpled, then looked around and located one of the stools that the maids use while washing me. Sitting, she noted, “I’m tempted, My Lady, but I should say no, this time. I came because something seems to have happened between you two, and I was wondering if you wanted to talk about it.”
Pursing my lips, I wondered aloud, “By ‘it’, do you possibly mean the matter between me and Rod?”
With worry clouding her eyes, Mireia hastily added, “If you don’t want me to butt in, just tell me, My Lady.”
“Hm,” I mused for a moment, then noted, “So if I say I don’t want you to butt in, you have no other business here, which means you’re free to join me?”
Her eyes grew wide for a moment, then immediately grew wiser. “My Lady, you’re teasing me.”
I let out a laugh, then wriggled into a more comfortable position. “Of course I’m teasing you. And I’m not going to tell you not to butt in.”
I spent the next several minutes summarizing what had happened. By the end of it, her cheeks were puffed up and her brow was wrinkled.
For a moment, I thought she was mad at me, but she cleared that up right away. “I can’t believe him! I mean, I get why he did it, but…”
She ended the sentence by just shaking her head.
I scooped water a few times to pour it over my shoulders as I noted, “Rod can be that way sometimes. He gets tunnel vision over some issue and responds to it without thinking things through. He seems to be a lot smarter about his official responsibilities, but when it involves his personal life, he’s just like he was when we were kids.”
“So can I help, somehow?” she wondered.
Just before I could tease her about getting into the bath again, she added firmly, “With Rod, My Lady.”
I rolled sideways to face her, which left me in a nicely sexy pose, with my upper body partly out of the water, and pouted. “It has to be about Rod?”
She gave me a Tibetan Fox stare that left me laughing again. Whether she knew it or not, she was already helping.
Once I sobered, I settled onto my back once more, then advised, “Ah… just cheer him up for me. He left here looking like a sad puppy.”
She giggled. “He was still looking like one when I ran into him.”
“And stay with him tonight. You two should have a proper night of your own.”
Surprised, she asked, “I thought I was supposed to be staying with you?”
“That’s only officially, so there’s no rumors about him jilting me for a lover,” I told her. “But the rumors will go the other way, if you don’t spend time with him.”
Her eyebrows formed a peak and she shook her head, with her lips slightly pursed. “What have I gotten myself into?”
I giggled. “This is only temporary. It’s only until the message has gotten across to everyone. And you’ll have your own room eventually, anyway.”
“Exactly what message is it that we’re trying to get across?”
“That there’s no palace drama, no rivalry between the wife and the concubine. Instead, the new duchess’s marriage is a trio rather than a duet,” I told her, growing dimples of my own.
§
It’s a hard, cruel tale to tell, but Fan Li actually left me on my own, right there in mid-air, standin’ on a giant lotus blossom floatin’ five hundred paces above the forest, with a couple o’ fairy knights on their way to intercept me.
No matter how hard to believe, it’s the truth. Somehow, that old witch pressed into my mind the basics of how to maneuver the thing usin’ my spirits, since I couldn’t yet use ‘Will’ like her, then declared she had to contract the vessel to economize, and left me in that situation.
Seems I could dismiss the blossom and re-create it, too, even make it as large or small as I needed, but that was somehow some technique she left behind for me, that I could use without understandin’. But seems I should be able to do it, from now on, so I suppose I should be grateful.
Grateful, in a pig’s eye. I seriously wanna spar with that woman one o’ these days, just to work off the stress. It’s a lot, you know?
So I’ll thank her after I get it outta my system. There’s an order to things.
Lady Dilorè spoke first as the two approached, and she sounded baffled. “Sirth? Why… How are you here?”
Noticing her apprentice’s familiar tone with me, Lady Serera lowered her guard. She asked, “You know this… being?”
Dilorè’s nose wrinkled at her mentor’s choice of words, then said, “This is actually Tiana, My Lady.”
I performed a bow similar to the one I gave His Highness, then stated, “Captain Sirth is the name, atcher service, My Lady. I’m yer Tiana from a prior lifetime, y’see.”
Her eyebrows rose. “That would explain your… odd nature.”
“It’s apparently a vampire technique. Gotta ask the princess about it. Don’t think she’ll explain it to you, though. She considers it a trade secret.”
Serera suddenly smiled and let out a light ‘o-ho-ho-ho’. “I see. And this… unusual flying technique?”
“This belongs to a different incarnation,” I replied.
“Fan Li?” Dilorè guessed. She had seen it before, in Sky Ocean.
“Yeah,” I admitted. “Can we head down now? As much as I love the sky, I love it a lot more with a proper ship under me. Without one, I’d rather have my feet on solid ground.”
“Can you control that thing?” Dilorè wondered.
“More or less,” I stated, then reached out to my friends, the breeze blowin’ my hair and my feathers a bit in response. Both Serera’s and Dilorè’s eyes grew large as their fairy sight showed them the crowd of my friends who showed up to tow me down to the forest below.
As we descended, Dilorè prompted, “You still haven’t explained what you’re doing here, Sirth.”
“Well, it’s pretty simple. Everybody was against lettin’ the princess come out, so she sent me.”
Serera wondered, “To do what? Áne of the Green Tower is a dangerous, ancient fairy, far stronger than me, and we don’t know why she’s trying to kidnap the rescue party.”
I scratched my head. I had all of the princess’s memories of what had happened here before, with Áne, and with her father Erebos. But knowing what happened and explainin’ it were two different things.
Finally, I just answered, “Well, that woman is someone the princess has dealt with before, you know? She reckons we can deal with her again.”
