A polished shopfront ended the performance.
The queen caught her own reflection in the glass and stopped dead. The image staring back at her told a tale of pure terror.
Isveth walked into the same reflection a step later.
Silence.
"Myrasyn." Isveth’s voice went very quiet. "How long have we been walking through the capital looking like this?"
"Since the gate."
"And you didn’t think to check?"
"I thought I looked fine!" The queen’s hiss could have cut glass. "You didn’t say anything either!"
"I was looking at you all night! I got used to it!"
"So did I!"
They stared at each other, then at the window, then at the gathering crowd of elven citizens who had been watching their queen parade through the capital looking like she’d slept through a hurricane.
Then their eyes found Quinlan.
"Why did you say nothing...?" Myrasyn muttered, dissatisfied.
Quinlan shrugged in response. "You two look cute."
"C-cute?!" The duo shuddered in perfectly scandalized sync.
With strong blushes, both of them decided he was just messing with them.
What happened next was the fastest exercise of royal authority Quinlan had seen.
"You." Myrasyn pointed at the nearest shopkeeper. "Point us toward the closest salon."
Directions were provided at speed. Both elves were moving before the sentence finished, and the salon - grown into the side of an enormous trunk, all curved wood and soft light - never stood a chance.
Myrasyn swept through the door with Rosie still on her shoulders and Isveth at her flank, and the salon’s quiet morning shattered on contact.
The lead stylist had been mid-sentence with a client when the Queen of the Elves materialized in her doorway looking like she’d been dragged through a forest backward, and the woman’s hands simply stopped.
The b she was holding clattered to the counter. Around her, every stylist in the room turned, recognized, and went pale in the same breath.
"Y-Your Majesty...?"
"Please tend to us," Myrasyn said.
Despite the queen making no demands, existing appointments had been abandoned with stammered apologies within seconds. Chairs had been vacated at speeds that suggested the occupants feared for their lives, and both the Queen of the Elves and Isveth were seated before adjacent mirrors.
The remaining stylists divided between them with the frantic coordination of soldiers redeploying under fire, several of them still visibly trembling as they reached for bs and pins and the finest oils on the shelf, the ones they saved for occasions that never actually came.
This occasion had e, and it had brought the dryad princess.
"Rosie too!!" Rosie announced from Myrasyn’s lap.
The stylists looked at the tiny green girl, at each other, and at their queen, and after a nod from Myrasyn, two of them peeled off to attend to her with hands that shook from reverence as much as nerves.
Rosie took to the chair like she’d been waiting for this her entire life, which at her age was not especially long but had been packed with relevant opinions.
"Up," she instructed.
The stylist gathered a section of hair and lifted.
"No. More up."
Higher.
"Now make it go sideways but also down."
The stylist’s hands stopped. She looked at her colleague, who offered nothing. She looked at the queen, who was mid-braid and could not save her. She looked back at the dryad princess, who waited, patient, certain her instructions had been perfectly clear.
"...Like a waterfall, Your Highness?"
"No. Like a tree."
"Which... part of a tree, Your Highness?"
"The pretty part."
The stylist’s fingers slowed to careful, measured strokes, and Rosie supervised each one with an intensity that made the queen’s lead stylist look relaxed by parison.
"Softer."
"Yes, Your Highness."
"But also stronger."
"...Yes, Your Highness."
Seraphiel observed the proceedings with growing interest, then turned to Quinlan.
"It’s for research," she declared.
"I didn’t say anything."
"You were going to." She was already being seated. "Elven styling is a matter of scholarly curiosity. I’ll be documenting the experience."
"Enjoy yourself, Sera."
"Hehe~"
Quinlan settled into a chair by the window with a view of the whole operation, and Kaelira sat beside him, straight-backed and quiet, her hands on her knees.
"You didn’t want to join?" He nodded toward the mirrors.
"I asked Anna and Beatrice last night." She touched her hair. "The twins handled it. Does it look... is it bad?"
Quinlan reached over and ran his fingers through the bluish-purple strands. Kaelira’s eyes went wide, but she didn’t pull away, and her long ears twitched once.
"They did a fantastic job," he said.
Kaelira’s smile was small and real. "...Glad you like it."
From his chair, Quinlan had a front-row seat to the finest display of elven professionalism he’d ever witnessed.
The lead stylist was rebuilding Myrasyn’s braids from the roots up, fingers moving with extreme speed. She was good. He could tell because the queen’s reflection was improving in real time, and because the stylist’s long ears kept angling toward Myrasyn’s face to check for approval.
"That braid work is nice," Quinlan said, to nobody in particular.
The stylist’s ears perked straight up. So did Myrasyn’s. So did both of Isveth’s stylists’. So did the three attending Rosie.
Every elf in the room went to attention at the same moment, and Quinlan’s inner voice sat up.
’...Oh?’
"The left section could use some more work, though."
Every ear wilted.
He looked at Kaelira. Her violet eyes were already tracking the phenomenon, because she missed nothing that moved with that kind of precision.
Not just queens and shrine maidens, then. Species-wide.
What happened next, he would later maintain, was science.
"Good. Very good." Every ear in the salon, save for members of the Elysiar gang, rose. "Hmm. Wait." They froze at the apex. "No, I had it right the first time, that’s lovely." Ears crested, blushes bloomed across a dozen elven faces. "Although..." Down they came, trembling at the tips. "No. Perfect." Up.
The entire salon rose and fell to his tempo, and Quinlan conducted with deep, quiet joy. He had discovered that every elf was an instrument, and he was sitting in the middle of an orchestra.
"Quin... They’re going to faint at this rate..." Kaelira said beside him.
"Eh? But I’m just offering my sincere opinion."
"..." A certain tomboy elf with perfect abs didn’t buy his bullshit for some odd reason.
But after only three minutes of messing with the overly expressive elves, the novelty of it wore off and, while his victims reeled from the bullying, his gaze found something curious.
The salon shelves held the things elves crafted instead of metalwork: hair ornaments woven from preserved leaves, pins of shaped bark, necklaces strung with polished seedpods and flowers set in amber resin. The materials sat in trays along the counter, fine and delicate and distinctly not metal.
Quinlan picked up a half-finished piece and turned it in his fingers. "Can you work with these?"
Kaelira glanced at the tray. "Those are for decorative elven craft, placed there so those waiting can do something. But this kind of nature-craft is done by elven females and males you’d probably categorize as females knowing you..."
"Hey, I’m nice to everyone. Far be it from me to be rude to effeminate elven twinks."
"..." Kaelira sent him a look full of judgment. "Anyhow, that’s not my thing."
"Fair enough." He set it down. "Apologies for the assumption. Sera’s actually pretty good with this kind of thing, she made some beautiful pieces. Thought all elves were good at it..."
Kaelira’s ears went rigid.
Her eyes snapped to the tray, to the materials, to the weaving tools beside them, and the decision was never in doubt.
"...I didn’t say I was bad at it. Give me those."
She pulled the tray toward her with both hands, and within seconds the smith who had dismissed nature-craft as not real forging was bent over a workstation with the same intensity she brought to tempering battle-grade steel. Her fingers moved through leaves and resin with the precision she reserved for runes, brow furrowed, lips pressed, the rest of the room gone.
She held a leaf to the light, rotated it, set it aside. "Structurally unsound." She reached for another tray.
At one point she borrowed a stylist’s thin b to score a fold line, and the stylist watched her own tool being repurposed with an expression caught between fascination and distress.
She was making a necklace. She hadn’t said so and he hadn’t asked, but the dimensions were scaled for his neck, and the design, clean lines, geometric symmetry, nothing wasted, was Kaelira’s forge philosophy rendered in forest materials.
Quinlan watched her work and made no effort to hide how much he was enjoying the view.
The salon hummed around them, Sera’s voice threading through the bustle, Rosie issuing quiet directives from her chair, Myrasyn’s reflection slowly being the argument for monarchy, and beside him his smith built something beautiful from leaves and a petitive streak.
When the salon finally released its hostages, the results were devastating.
Myrasyn wore her crown of braids like she’d invented the concept. Beside her, Isveth had achieved a state of grace, Rosie’s brown curls had been threaded with tiny preserved flowers the stylists had clearly been saving, and Seraphiel fully intended to make this a recurring appointment.
And around Quinlan’s neck, resting against his collarbone, sat a necklace of woven leaves and polished seedpods in clean geometric lines, crafted by a smith who had poured every ounce of her petitive pride into proving that her hands could master anything.
Kaelira walked beside him and said nothing about it. But her ears were pink, eyes stealing glances to check how he looked, and her chin was up.
The Queen of the Elves rolled her shoulders, took a breath, and became sovereign from the spine outward, her passenger’s feet dangling against her collarbones.
"Now." Myrasyn’s gaze settled on the spires visible through the canopy above. "To the palace."
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