by Eric Vall
Shoshanne’s smile brightened, and her warm brown eyes sparkled. “I’m so relieved to hear it,” she told him earnestly.
To my surprise, the leader’s expression became more admiring the longer she smiled at him, but he quickly returned to his grim facade as he looked back toward me.
“You will want to change, I’m sure,” he continued. “I’ll show you to your room.”
The head of House Quyn turned toward the entrance behind him, and I was pleased to see he didn’t limp as badly as he once had. There were no guards on hand to assist him in making his way through the house, and I glanced at Shoshanne as we followed.
She practically glowed while she eyed the leader for signs of improvement, and she snuck a light kiss to my cheek as she wove her fingers in mine.
I was glad we’d ensured the leader’s future would be a more comfortable one despite his disease, especially with Shoshanne so happy at my side, but I couldn’t quite match her joy over it yet. Not until I saw how the leader planned to treat Aurora during our stay.
I didn’t like the look he’d already sent her, but as long as no degrading remarks were made, I thought we might at least be able to enjoy our time here.
I made no promises, though.
The house was surprisingly stately inside considering the crumbling exterior. The floors were pristine white marble, and the stonework in the halls was well kept. There were no gaudy decorations anywhere, only simple marble and sturdy stone, with window holes cut through the walls here and there, and vines curling in through the openings. The house was entirely silent except for our footsteps, and I could hear the birds of the jungle chirping lightly in the distance.
We came to a spiraling staircase that led us up to a small tower room, and as the leader opened the door, the four of us exchanged glances.
There was only one bed, and it was just big enough for one person.
“You may rest here, Mason Flynt,” the leader informed me before he immediately returned to the hall. “Your companions may reside in the western tower. This way.”
I cleared my throat and moved to catch up with him while my women grinned to one another in the tiny tower room.
“Uhh … that’s alright,” I told him, and he turned a furrowed expression my way. “We don’t mind sharing a room. A larger bed would be great though, if you have one.”
His deep purple eyes flared as if I’d scandalized the aged elf, and he stared at me severely for a long and silent moment without responding.
I tried to reign in the smirk on my face as I realized this guy wasn’t the type to give me a bigger bed.
“Nevermind,” I tried. “We’ll make do with what we have. It’ll be perfect.”
The leader remained frozen where he stood, but eventually he blinked again. “You have two minutes to change,” he informed me curtly. Then he turned and disappeared down the stairwell.
I raised my eyebrows and returned to the tower room.
“I’m guessing he doesn’t have a bed for four?” Cayla asked, and she smirked as she considered the look on my face.
“The floor is made of stone up here, so I can soften it for us,” I assured them before I glanced around the tiny room. “The floor might be big enough for four, though.”
“Well, there’s no sphinx in it,” Aurora said as she dropped her bag on the bed. “It’s good enough for me.”
It was hard to argue with that, so we counted ourselves lucky to be sleeping indoors for the first time in weeks and dug fresh clothes from our bags. Aurora and Shoshanne changed back into their mage’s robes, and Cayla slid into a pair of black tights and a scandalously short leather dress. We descended the stairs not two minutes later, but the leader looked determined to be irritated with me.
“There you are,” he muttered impatiently, and he led us back down the hallway without another word.
We turned through an arched entryway, and the ceiling suddenly disappeared as we came into a large, open-air sitting room enclosed by stonework on all four sides. There were many cushioned seats placed throughout, and elegant wooden tables topped with dozens of candelabras. Most of the seats were covered in pale pink or purple velvet, and the dense gray fog overhead cast the room in a soft blue light. A vast fireplace at one end of the room was already lit, but the air of the pristine place was as moist and clammy as the jungle around us.
I looked upward into the fog and admired the various plants that grew in from the upper ledge and cut-out windows. The blooms turned upward toward the exposed ceiling of the sitting room, and as I looked amongst the leaves, I noticed a few wriggling tails.
“What do you do about creatures coming in?” I asked curiously.
The leader gestured for us to sit. “We eat them,” he said flatly.
Cayla smiled eagerly as she settled onto a velvet loveseat. “Do you know what the magenta things are called?” she asked. “The ones with two heads that taste a bit like wild boar?”
The princess’s smile slowly fell as the leader leveled her with a disgusted look.
“Felengine are a peasant’s dish,” he informed her haughtily.
Aurora snorted and immediately ducked her face toward her lap, and Cayla cleared her throat.
“Of course, they are,” the princess replied smoothly. “That much was obvious from the taste. I was only curious if you knew the name of the species.”
The leader nodded and seemed to accept her explanation, but he didn’t say anything more to her, only turned his back on us. “You may rest here while the food is arranged,” he said over his shoulder. “We will join you after tea.”
The moment he was out of the room, Shoshanne and Aurora fell into giggles, and Cayla turned an amused smirk toward me.
“Well, apparently royalty know nothing when it comes to eating lizards,” she sighed.
I lifted her hand to place a kiss on it. “Don’t worry,” I said. “We won’t let your father know you’ve been eating the lizard of peasants.”
Cayla rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that’s my biggest concern right now.”
“My biggest concern is that tail,” Shoshanne muttered, and she gestured to a slender black thing that wriggled at the edge of a window.
I grinned at the Aer Mage. “I like this place,” I assured her as I looked around the subtly regal room. It was like a modest palace, except the roof was torn off and replaced with gray mist and stubborn vines for windows.
I could make out the blue and pink blooms at the upper ledge of the stone walls, and the chirping of the birds I’d heard earlier in the hallway sifted down through the mist of the open ceiling.
“It is beautiful,” Aurora admitted. “I think I can see the garden from that window.”
I stood and strolled over to a pair of long windows on either side of two wooden doors, and I peered through them toward the rich red dirt of the garden.
“This must be the doors we saw while we were working on the naticea,” I said. My eyes fell on the fountain with the symbol of Nemris carved beneath the faucet, and Deya immediately came to mind. She’d been standing beside this fountain when she miraculously vanished into thin air.
I furrowed my brow and turned back to join Cayla on the velvet couch. The house remained silent aside from the birds and the flicker of the fireplace, but then two elves suddenly, and silently, entered with large platters in their hands.
They both eyed Aurora, but they didn’t look surprised to see her there. They simply stared as they took in her ears and her blue hair, then quickly retreated back to the hallway as soon as the platters were placed on the squat table before us.
I eyed the colorful fare on the platters and recognized some of the exotic fruits the elves of House Quyn had brought us after the ambush near the crystal bridge. The variety was much more impressive than it had been then, and the meat wasn’t a pile of steaming and shredded mystery. This time, three roasted, kiwi green lizards curled around one another on the platter, dressed with a leafy garnish, and drizzled in a bright orange sauce.<
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“These must be the fancy lizards,” I said as I winked at Cayla beside me.
“Oh, yes,” she replied mockingly. “You can tell by the much more impressive scales.”
Aside from the lack of a second head on each neck, there was little difference between the magenta and green lizards. The flavors were surprisingly similar, except these lizards chewed a little easier, and the meat cooked into a rich brown rather than black. Personally, I preferred the black bacon of the peasant’s, but I was in the mood to disagree with the head of House Quyn.
We sawed through the tough skins with ornate silver knives, and as we worked through the small feast, the two elves who had served us returned with silver goblets.
The fruit juice in the goblets looked and smelled similar to pineapple juice, but it stung my nose and throat as I drank it, and I didn’t miss the kick of liquor in the after taste. I drained my goblet and let out a low whistle as my knees already began to buzz lightly.
“These elves could teach the dwarves a thing or two about alcohol content,” I pointed out.
Shoshanne cringed after she swallowed a tiny sip. “Nope,” she countered. “Dwarven wine is better.”
“You think dwarven wine is better than everything,” Aurora said with a smirk, and the Aer Mage sent her a coy smile as she slid her goblet toward the half-elf.
“You’ll need this more than me,” Shoshanne informed her.
Aurora sent her a wry smile and took the goblet. “I hope Deya comes around when her father returns,” she muttered. Then she took a long, deep swig from the goblet.
I raised my brows. “Better slow down,” I warned. “If you pass out, you’ll miss the look on their faces when I show them these.”
I slid the parchment from my pocket and shuffled the platters aside to spread them out in front of us, and we leaned in to admire the peculiar elven documents.
The elegant script looped uniformly in pale brown ink across the yellowed paper and was so small there had to be at least a hundred lines of information on each page. There were various symbols and scratches that looked like they were added in amongst the initial writing like notes, and they gleamed in a strange silver ink that caught the light as the paper was shifted. We’d spent the better part of the last three days scouring the documents for symbols like the ones I’d seen on the head of House Syru, but so far, we kept getting distracted and eventually lost in the strange curling letters. Whatever the script said, it had to be important to be preserved as elegantly as this.
We were admiring the loops of a letter that resembled a backward R when I heard footsteps in the hall, and we all looked up just as Dragir entered the sitting room.
He halted the moment he saw us, and after he stood there in silence for a moment, his face relaxed into a smug smirk. “Oh good,” he muttered. “You are dressed this time.”
“And you’re visible,” I shot back.
The last time I’d seen Dragir, I’d been naked and perched on top of a log while the elf ran off into the forest, but this was beside the point.
I knew with absolute certainty I’d seen him vanish into thin air, and I held his eyes carefully as I waited for his reaction.
The elf didn’t betray whatever he was thinking, though. He only took a steadying breath and looked down to the table in front of us. Then his pale pink eyes flashed, and he quickly came forward and stooped to look closer at the documents I’d snatched from House Syru.
“But … ” He inhaled sharply before his eyes snapped angrily to mine. “Where did you get these?” he demanded.
I opened my mouth to respond, but Dragir suddenly straightened up and looked nervously toward the hallway he’d come from.
“Hide them,” he hissed, and then he hurried to find a chair and nearly knocked a candelabra from its table on his way.
The parchments were stowed in my pocket by the time Dragir settled into a seat against the wall, and I cocked a brow at the elf.
He casually crossed his legs, slouched, and looked at the fireplace like nothing had happened.
Then the head of House Quyn entered the sitting room, and Dragir acted like he hadn’t known he was coming down the hall. He gave a slight start before he stood to bow, and directly behind his father, the head of House Aelin entered.
Chapter 2
I quickly stood up, and the three women joined me. The leaders stopped before us with grim faces lined with self-importance, and it occurred to me that before I entered this particular kingdom, I hadn’t needed to bow to many people in this realm so far. Not even the kings of Cedis and Illaria expected it of me these days.
Still, the condescension of the elves had been obnoxiously clear at every elven House I’d visited, and now that I stood before one of the Elite, I felt like it might be the more appropriate circumstance for it.
So, I bowed deeply to show my respect and tried not to smirk when I straightened up.
“Mason Flynt,” the head of House Quyn began, “allow me to introduce you to the head of House Aelin. Aeris, this is the mage Mason Flynt.”
“It’s an honor to meet you,” I told Aeris.
The head of House Aelin stood stock straight in his gray silken robes, and I eyed the slender chains of silver that wound around his waist. They were embedded with small diamonds.
Aeris’ serpentine eyes were nearly the same shade of silver as my own, and he looked at me in a way I couldn’t gauge the meaning of. Then he blinked once and gave a solemn nod but said nothing.
I cleared my throat and turned to my women beside me. “This is Princess Cayla Balmier of Cedis, Shoshanne of the Order of Pallax, and Aurora Solana, Defender of the Order of Elementa.”
The three women offered their own respect to the elite leader, and I noticed Aeris returned only two of their bows. Aurora didn’t seem to mind being left out, though. The half-elf casually twirled a blue braid between her fingertips and smiled sweetly at the leader with the dusty blue hair.
I knew Aurora’s conversation with Deya about the superior quality of her true-blue hair had gone to her head, but I honestly hadn’t expected her to flaunt it so shamelessly in front of the elite elf with his own diluted shade of blue. It took every ounce of my willpower not to burst out laughing at the look on her face.
Aeris’ long feathery hair stretched to his waist and was a dull blue that reminded me a bit of the fog we sat beneath, and his serpentine eyes flicked to Aurora’s true-blue hair for less than a second before he pointedly turned his back on her. He found a seat for himself on the opposite side of the little grouping of chairs, and when he sat, he positioned himself so he wouldn’t have her in his line of sight.
I snuck a wink at the half-elf as she settled back into her own velvet chair, and I thought I saw the faintest smirk on Dragir’s face, but it was gone by the time he sat down.
The head of House Quyn chose a seat adjacent to Aeris, and with the two aged elves side by side in their silken gray and white robes, they looked a lot like saints. Judging by the looks on their faces, they considered themselves to be nearly as important as saints, although Dragir’s father looked humbler about it. Maybe it was the disease he’d struggled with for so long, but he didn’t hold himself as stock straight, and there was a wariness in the lines around his deep purple eyes that Aeris didn’t have. The Pura Rubrum had clearly taxed his system badly, and I suspected it betrayed itself the most in the lines on his face.
The leader of House Aelin looked to be the older of the two, though. I recalled Deya mentioning he was four hundred years old now and had taken over as the head of his House nearly two hundred years ago. This didn’t show much in his features. He didn’t look any older than a man of fifty might look back on earth, and I wondered how old the head of House Quyn was in comparison. Or Deya for that matter …
Either way, the elite leader was around long before the Master’s rising, and I looked at him with as much respect as I could manage while I waited for an opportunity to figure out how much knowledge of rune magic he posses
sed. He didn’t seem very talkative at the moment.
Aeris sat perfectly still in the silent sitting room, and the head of House Quyn did the same for several minutes before he finally spoke.
“This is the healer who tended to the naticea for us,” he informed his elite counterpart in a low voice, and he gestured toward Shoshanne
Aeris nodded gravely and looked over. “You have honored the elves,” he told her. His voice was deep and smooth, and he had the tone I’d expect of a king as he bestowed his praise on the healer without a smile.
Shoshanne blushed and looked like she couldn’t decide how to respond at first. “It was no trouble,” she assured him quietly. “M-Mason did the important part.”
The Aer Mage had a nervous glint in her eye that showed she really didn’t want to be the center of attention at this meeting, so I addressed the head of House Aelin myself.
“I am a Terra Mage,” I explained. “I can manipulate the element of earth. The naticea needed a more proper growing environment, so I adjusted the nutrient content of the soil.”
Aeris raised his brows a millimeter. “I wasn’t aware magery was as advanced as this,” he admitted.
I nodded. “Every mage begins with the rudimentary ability to influence their element,” I told him. “Eventually, as you become more intimately connected to the element, you’re able to embody it in a more complex way.” I gestured toward Aurora and carefully watched for the reaction of the elite elf. “Aurora is an Ignis Mage and has taught me most of what I know about magery. In fact, she’s responsible for my being able to hone this connection enough to adjust the soil. I couldn’t have done it without her.”
I smirked at the blank stares of the two heads of houses. It was painful for them to have to acknowledge the half-elf’s presence at all, let alone accept they owed her an amount of gratitude. Neither of them looked at her, and I left them to their rude silence for a few minutes.
Eventually, the head of House Quyn cleared his throat. “You influence metal as well, though … ”
“I do,” I replied. “The gods have blessed me with a magic the Order of Elementa has not encountered before. It’s an honor to be able to use it to aid so many.”