I arrived back at the gathering in a cloud of magenta rose petals, startling a breathless servant who’d been about to address Lord Sabu.
“Sorry,” I said, falling into the empty seat beside Grace. To Nofrei, I murmured, “I t your friend.”
She winced. “I'm sorry. I hope he wasn't rude? He can be a little short with people sotis.”
I just shrugged, then looked over at the servant as he finished settling from the surprise of my arrival.
“Co on, out with it,” Sabu said with a brief frustrated glance at before staring at the servant expectantly. “I can tell when a ssenger carries bad news.”
With a gulp, the poor young man delivered his ssage. “Word just arrived, my Lord. The red beasts attacked Drasteh three days ago. Only five of your house guards escaped. The village was in flas as they fled.”
The demons… if that was what the red beasts were, they weren't isolated? How many roving bands of nightmare monsters were there? Or, was this the sa one we faced earlier?
Lord Sabu digested the news with an expression that grew, adding emotions as it increased in intensity. Finally, through gritted teeth, he said, “Thank you for delivering this… news. You may leave.”
Dr. Ross cleared his throat. “I think we will take that as our cue to leave. You must have plans to make, following news like that.”
“Yes, I imagine so,” smiled Lord Narseh.
Sabu looked like he was about to burst a blood vessel or drop his head into his hands and start crying. “That is correct. Thank you for taking the ti to speak with us, mages, and Dr. Ross.”
“It was a pleasure,” said Ross, standing and bowing slightly. “Should we…?”
We left the estate quickly, but we got barely ten steps out of the ornate wrought iron gate when we heard a call from behind us. Lord Narseh strode out and quickly caught up with us, his top flop of hair blowing in the brisk breeze.
“New friends! Isn't this exciting?” He grinned, rubbing his hands together. “Do you mind if I walk with you for a minute or two?”
Dr. Ross gestured ahead. “Be my guest.”
“Excellent!” said the Ghraiga lord, rubbing his hands together. “And how are you enjoying the city? It's quite quaint, is it not?”
“It’s very pretty,” I said neutrally.
“Very pretty,” he nodded, and then sothing very strange happened. The mont we were out of visual range of the estate, Lord Narseh's face hardened, and his posture beca both more relaxed, and more… lordly. “Fucking conniving little rat, isn't he? Lord Sabu, I an.”
We all stared at him for several confused monts, before Dr. Ross laughed softly. “He did appear to have an agenda.”
“Spoken like a practiced diplomat,” Lord Narseh said with a wry smile. “Could I offer a little advice? Don't make any deals with the minor houses — especially the Pherih. With the red beasts laying waste to the countryside for the past weeks, they're stretched thin and in no place to uphold any bargains that are struck.”
Dr. Ross raised an eyebrow. “Who would you suggest we do make deals with, my Lord?”
“My uncle, the emperor,” he said with a shrug.
“I would've figured it would be difficult gaining access to him.”
Lord Narseh smiled. “I'll get you there. I'm leaving for the capital in two days. If you'd like to ride with ? It'll be good to have martially competent company… the things I've seen have on edge, and loath to trust in mundane guards.”
The last part was said with a hopeful glance in the direction of Eilian and I.
We looked to Ross. He gave the sky a thoughtful glance, then shrugged. “Yes, that sounds good. Your offer of access to the Emperor is too good to pass up — it's what we ca out here to do.”
Silently, I added to his statent in my head, ‘Now we just need to figure out what your angle is, Lord Narseh.’
After that, we unanimously decided to retreat to my grove, where we could talk without being watched by sneaky elf n or any Ghraiga political people. Dr. Ross went off to find his computer so he could do a zoom call with the Avonside council. He had the delightful task of explaining to them just how precarious Avonside's continued independence was.
Grace and I opted to sit on a lawn inside the rose garden, where we could relax in the golden sun, eat yummy food, and just generally de-stress. Oh, and deal with the bird's nest on my head.
Grace's fingers teased out a snarled knot of hair, then she sighed. “All this travel is murdering your long hair. It's all tangled.”
“I keep forgetting to brush it,” I said sheepishly.
“Oh, I know.”
She continued doing what I forgot, stopping every now and then to tease at another knot with her fingers. Despite the fact that it looked like and was almost as tough as tal, it was still hair.
A huge part of had been ignoring how bad it had gotten, because if I confronted it, then… a part of figured that if I was failing to do my feminine upkeep, did that make … less? Did it call my right to my gender into question? Intellectually, I knew that all of that was ridiculous, and a girl could be and look however she wanted, but emotionally I scread as I watched myself fail to take care of my hair, or pluck my eyebrows, or whatever else I didn't even know about.
Grace was kneeling behind , knees to either side of my hips, so she didn't see any of those thoughts cross my face. I could change the subject without it being obvious I was trying not to think about sothing.
“What did you think of everything today?”
She snorted without any real humour. “I think that those Pherih family people are kinda desperate for more relevance in their empire. Like, they reek of the desperation that an upper middle class boor has for the kind of stable wealth that would put them in the upper class.”
Now that she put it like that, I couldn't not see it that way. Nofrei had a little more self-assuredness than Sabu, but they both still made the hair on the back of my neck stand up just the tiniest bit.
Grace wasn't done though, because after a second of thought, she blurted, “Also, I'm pretty sure that Lord Narseh guy rolled up specifically to fuck over the Pherih while they tried to pull power grabby shit with us.”
“I got that impression too.”
Eilian's voice startled both of us, and we turned to see her peeking around a rose bush. “Sorry, couldn't help but overhear you while I was taking a bit of a walk to sort out my thoughts.”
Smiling, I waved for her to co join us on the almost offensively green grass. It was crazy how vibrant plants could look under the warm glow of the afternoon sun. “Well, I was wondering sothing actually. I saw the look you gave Lord Narseh. What was that about?”
Chuckling, Eilian sat down in front of us, and nearly blinded in the process.
“God damn, you are way too shiny and gold to sit there — you're reflecting the sun right into our eyes,” Grace complained, making a sideways shooing motion with her hand.
Laughing a little more, the obrec shifted until she wasn't a living flash-bang anymore. “That look, was recognising that he was only playing the part of a typical foppish nobleman. He's got backbone and so real cunning — don't let him convince you otherwise. Which is to say, Grace is right. He was absolutely running interference.”
“Why, though?” I asked, sowhat rhetorically.
“Those two groups aren't allies. The Pherih are from the Tolem lineage, while Narseh is Sarcid, if he's the nephew of the Emperor. Screwing another lineage out of an opportunity is reason enough,” Eilian said with a shrug. “He's a real dagger.”
“A dagger?” Grace asked as she finally finished detangling my hair. It was very quickly put into a neat and simple ponytail.
“Yeah, you know, a— oh.” Eilian looked like she'd just run into a sign post. “I'm the only obrec noble you've really encountered, right?”
I made a thoughtful sound and shook my head. “Nah, we t so Stonechaser nobles, and I think r and Otho are like, very minor nobles?”
“Stonechasers don't count, they spend too much ti talking to humans,” Eilian grimaced. “A dagger is a noble who is good at subterfuge, courtly mingling, diplomacy and general sneakery. Their opposite is a mace — a noble who fights in the open, tes out justice, and deals with internal administrative shit.”
Imdiately, Grace joked, “Ah, the two genders.”
I laughed, but Eilian gave us a quizzical look. “Uh, I was under the impression that you Avonsiders had more than two genders?”
Honestly, I couldn't help but wince as her lack of context shone a high-beam onto that particular .
“Uh, no it's a sort of joke, because transphobes like to throw around that kind of thing unironically,” Grace explained quickly. “It's poking fun at that, and also kinda… I don't know. It's hard to explain how it works.”
“Okay, I think… maybe I understand?” The obrec nodded, with an expression on her face that didn't inspire a lot of confidence. “What is a transphobe?”
I had to turn all the way around just to look at Grace, but honestly I felt like the question required a little non-verbal communication before one of us tried to answer it.
“Soone who hates and/or fears soone like Ryn, who changed her body to better reflect the gender she felt she was,” explained Grace tentatively.
“Huh,” grunted Eilian. She looked at for an awkward mont, then cleared her throat and asked, “You… so I heard ntion of this, but it hasn't really been explained to . I understand you were like Catherine? You went into the fruit as a man, and ca out of it a woman? And… you wanted this?”
“Yes. A part of always felt that my body was wrong… so when the fruit fixed it for , I was pretty happy,” I said, nestling deeper against Grace so I could feel a little more secure in this vulnerable mont.
Eilian smiled. “Incredible. It seems crazy to that you should look any different than you do now. It's very obvious that this is you — it's how you're ant to look.”
I felt a grin tug at my lips, and I felt around in the grass for my phone. My previous phone was destroyed, but when I booted up my old laptop, I found a backup of my phone there. Turns out, my half-hearted attempt to jailbreak my phone has actually done sothing useful.
“Here, want to see what I looked like before?” I asked, sowhat excitedly. I wanted to see her reaction to the titanic changes that the fruit had wrought.
Eilian didn't say anything, but her eyebrows rose in tentative curiosity.
Flicking through my old photos, there was a notable lack of pictures of my old self. Eventually, I found one. It showed Bray, Miles, Kayla, Logan, and — the old gang, during the one holiday trip we were able to afford to go on. We were all posing in Tis Square with a costud dude, lights in the background, and the length of a tall New York street running off into the distance.
“Oh, interesting,” murmured our obrec friend. “Which one is you?”
I pointed myself out with a finger.
Her eyes widened, then she considered my face, then the image again, “By the spirits, you're utterly different. There's so small similarities in facial build, but… wait, what is happening in the background? What are those strange cliffs?”
“They're buildings,” I said, confused for a second before I realised what that would look like to her. “That's one of our world's more impressive cities.”
“Buildings?” She hissed, disbelievingly. Then she leaned closer. “Windows, a balcony… fuck , those are buildings. I thought Avonside's large towers were impressive… it must have taken centuries to build them…”
“Eilian…” I murmured, feeling a grim expression take . “This is what we an when we talk about how powerful the knowledge of Avonside is. We could build towers like that in like, one to five years.”
Sobered by that, she sat back to stare up at my tree. “That is impressive, but all I can think of is how Fennimore or Ghraiga would use all that.”
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