What Cressia had planned didn’t occur that day, or even the next—when Alvin had foolishly assumed it was being an extra hand at the bake sale, or when he disguised himself as Cressia’s mysterious fencing dummy from the Elven Conclave, dressed up in heavy white fencing gear and introduced to the borough children as a former roommate from her days living there.

  No, what Cressia had planned came on the day they both left the boroughs near the light of dawn, to return to the hastily built Zantzar palace and make plans to deal with the Orcs once and for all.

  Of course, they’d met up with Zantzar soldiers not far from the outskirts of Cressia’s discreet cottage, who were willing to lead them back to royal comforts in a rickshaw manner, but Cressia wanted none of that for the time being.

  She decided that she and her fencing student were going to take a detour together along the way, and so she, her arms nestled around Alvin’s as he rode his ostrich, gave him directions that would lead him to the place she wanted to show him.

  It was nestled deep somewhere in the many paths that let one linger their way from the boroughs to the royal city of Zantzar. This path, Alvin felt, had only been scampered down by the feet of an Elven woman who’d somehow lucked her way into the royal Zantzar court.

  He wondered if she was leading him deep into her own little retreat, away from the responsibilities of tutoring both borough children and royal kings.

  “This is the place,” Cressia said with a hushed whisper. It never failed to make her smile and feel happy, that she had this spot all to herself.

  Alvin, at first, felt they were coming up to the corner of a lake, but as they drew closer to the edges, he realised it was far too small for that. It was more like a moderately sized pond—one that was crystal clear, surrounded by the shade of huddled-together branches, and just the right size for two people.

  This must be her retreat from the outside world, Alvin thought. From kings and from borough children and from all the noise and headaches that come with being the only Elven woman in Zantzar. It must mean something to her, this place.

  “Are you frightened?” she asked, as they tied Alvin’s ostrich next to a marsh where it could quench itself with water.

  “Yes, terribly frightened,” he said, without shame. “I’ve considered handing over the crown to Hieronymus and avoiding the whole getting-my-head-placed-on-a-spike thing.”

  “And what would the people of Zantzar think if they heard their king saying that?” she teased, as she led him by hand down the heavy slope to the pond. It was a blessing, that slope. It meant Cressia could undress in peace without worrying someone was watching her strip down to her undergarments. She’d so desperately wished, at times, she’d found—

  “Maybe they wouldn’t mind at all,” Alvin replied. “I have ears, you know, and I heard so much anti-royalty sentiment coming from your students while they munched on cupcakes.”

  “And you’re blaming me for that?”

  “Their cries for change were peppered with Elvish words, after all.”

  Cressia snorted a giggle. It was not intentional on her part; it was something that just happened when the youth grew tired of their familiar surroundings and wanted something new. And the something new they wanted, after Cressia explained to them the intricacies of the Conclave system, was to have a little more than just living in small, cold cottages with their parents.

  Nonetheless, she thought, I’d still prefer that to living in a cold, damp mud hut with my own parents. Not all change is good, and not all traditions are quite so bad.

  The pond’s water was as bubbly and warm as Cressia had expected it to be. Conclave elves had something similar to this. Vesembolo was the term in the Elvish language, and it was one of the few things Cressia so desperately missed since leaving the Conclave behind. Vesembolo was used as a gathering—not for a group of elves, but rather for an intimate moment between two elves when they wanted to get away from all the hustle and bustle of Conclave life.

  Vesembolo could be used between friends or lovers or even strangers who might come across one another, but its core purpose remained the same: intimacy in warm water between two people.

  Cressia felt the closest human equivalent would describe it as a bath crossed with a swimming pool, but it was not quite that either. By its nature, a Vesembolo had to be discovered out in the wild, and once it was, suddenly there was a whole raft of elves ready to use it over and over again. To find one here in Zantzar was unheard of, considering they were largely constrained to Conclave lands. But she did so when she was forced to chase after a borough child who’d run away from home one afternoon.

  Alvin remained mute as he watched Cressia unbuckle her brown boots—Zantzar military-grade, but which had gradually fallen apart after three years without a new pair. She would’ve asked earlier, but felt it was pointless considering she was going to get a new pair anyhow once the two embarked on their final battle to defeat the Orcs.

  “Ah,” she groaned in relief, once she’d settled her tanned red ankles into the water. Bliss.

  “Are you coming in?” she said, motioning to Alvin’s silk loafers. They were horribly out of place for an afternoon spent trekking through deep forestry, but Alvin had never worn a pair of boots that were comfortable enough for him and his soft feet.

  He began to unravel the laces, and couldn’t help but feel how unfair, how totally unfair, it was for Cressia to appear so radiant in this moment. The morning dew, the scent of the bubbling clear water, even the strands of golden light that drifted through the stray branches made her feel otherworldly and out of his league—even for a Zantzar king.

  He started to gulp. He did not like it when he gulped, especially when it was around women, and especially when he’d planned to give her something today that he’d secretly crafted over the week spent boarding with her. He reached across for his brown handbag and began to dig it out.

  If he did not do it now—when they were alone and away from all the impending pageantry that was to come once they’d arrived back in the Zantzar palace—then he would not have the chance to do so in this same intimate, Vesembolo way. Peering in, daisies never seemed so yellow to him as they did in that moment.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Cressia was busy splashing away with her reddened feet when Alvin approached her with his homemade crown. It was fastened from daisies, yes, but also with the tulips and lilies that Cressia had planted outside of her home—and ones whose disappearance she’d chalked up to the borough children snatching them to make flower chains with.

  But she had been wrong. So thankfully wrong. And as Alvin placed it on her head, she discovered that it also, thankfully, felt very comfortable and smelled very good.

  “For me?” she asked, eyeing him curiously. She did not feel a gift of this gesture was something humans did easily for friends. In Elven culture, giving flowers was seen as a gesture of friendship, but to the best of her knowledge, humans only made gifts from flowers when the person was close and dear to their heart.

  “Yes, for you,” Alvin answered cautiously. “For being a wonderful teacher and a wonderful— and for being a…”

  “For what?” The silence around them was now deafening.

  “For secretly being good at making cupcakes!” Alvin hastily added. “I didn’t know Elvish girls were big into cupcakes.”

  “Oh. Well, yes, I am fond of making cupcakes,” she answered, sounding rather deflated as Alvin settled in alongside her in the Vesembolo.

  Moments—perhaps even minutes—Cressia could never be sure, passed, and then Alvin finally decided to try and get Cressia to open up a bit more on what awaited them.

  “Are you frightened?”

  She wanted to shake her head, to pretend that she would stand tall and strong against an avalanche of Orcs heading in their direction. But she couldn’t do that—couldn’t muster up that strong woman image she’d meticulously crafted around him—not after his gesture of profound childish softness in the form of a daisy crown on her head.

  She nodded. “I am.” In fact, Cressia’s usual nerves of steel had completely withered away as the days closed in on them before their return to the palace. She felt the sort of quasi-domestic life they’d carved out together, running and playing around with the borough children, slowly slipping out of her fingers.

  She’d wanted to stay like that for even longer. To be with Alvin. To not return to a ruined palace where legions of Zantzar soldiers—red banners and all—would be awaiting them to lead them down a path of bloodlust against the savage beasts that had terrorised them on and off for the past year.

  Then, as though Alvin had suddenly developed telepathic powers, she felt him reading his way through her distressing thoughts.

  “We could still run away,” he said. “Together.”

  She stayed silent, but smiled at him, in a way that reprimanded him to please put those silly ideas of yours away, Alvin.

  “I’m serious,” he continued. “We could run away right now and pretend to be a pair of travelling minstrels for the rest of our lives.”

  Her smile broke apart, and then, once again, Cressia Caravania found herself giggling at King Alvin Zantzar.

  “You know I cannot sing, and I know you definitely cannot sing, if your attempts at ballads in the shower last night were anything to go by,” Cressia softly said, still reeling from that silly image of his.

  “But if we pull it off, they might write ballads about us.”

  “Yes, but not the good kind of ballads.”

  “Well, what are the good ballads then, Cressia?”

  She looked at him, quite puzzled. “The ones you wanted people to write about you. Remember when we were in the archery fields?”

  “I do.”

  “And how you didn’t want to be remembered as the Zantzar who ran away when Orcs came crashing into the place?”

  He did remember well. That one instance of shared growth between them. In fact, it had been his growth as a person in some time.

  “Well, those are the kind of ballads people would write about you. And about us, once they coloured in the charming Elven fencer who led the credulous prince astray with Conclave tales.”

  She kicked the water in a deep, dark frustration. She found Alvin’s idea silly of course, but also realised she would still be pencilled in as just the elf girl who’d run away with him. The elf girl. Not the tutor who’d helped him—just the elf, the noble savage who was alone in a symphony of human bluebloods.

  “You know, if I die in the fight against Hieronymus, you might have to lead Zantzar.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Weria, despite his humble origins, is not all that popular with the people.” He carefully placed each word in front of the other. “But you are.”

  She wasn’t sure what to lead meant, but surely it did not mean that Alvin expected her to become the next leader of Zantzar if he were to die? There would have to be a billion clauses in the Zantzar terms of succession that meant an elf girl could never become royalty, right?

  Right?

  There was another pause, and then Alvin finally mustered up the courage to ask her what he’d always wanted to know about her Zantzar Armed Forces days.

  “Have you ever killed someone, Cressia?”

  She turned her head, frowning, but nodded at him anyway.

  Just like that? he thought.

  “In the Armed Forces,” she said, averting his gaze, letting it drift to the lower depths of the Vesembolo, “when the pirates came to the Zantzar pier.”

  She had ruminated on the act long enough on her own that she felt comfortable now telling someone else. Cressia had not been so na?ve as to think that when she joined the Armed Forces, she wouldn’t see combat. She knew the risks—that being deployed might happen to her—but at the time, Zantzar had not seen major combat in almost thirty years.

  So when Swordmistress Helena, both her commanding officer and her own teacher in fencing, had come into the barracks banging a pot to wake them up and tell them they were under attack, she almost felt her number had been called.

  She’d known she lacked the gameness needed for war. It was nowhere to be found in her slim build and temperance, and at times she knew if there hadn’t been a promise of world-class fencing training dangling in front of her, she probably would never have served in the military at all.

  But the elf girl nodded at Helena’s command, as she always did when she felt alone among humans and had to work with them. Then she and her fellow compatriots were whisked away to the small stubble that was the Zantzar pier in order to take down the pirate raiders.

  When she struck him down, it was after they’d run into each other at the far end of the ship. The rest of the pirates had either given up or were already subdued, and he didn’t—when Cressia glanced into his swarthy eyes—seem to have much desire to be a pirate at all. He might’ve once been like her, a free spirit who fell into a rigid hierarchy just to supplant his dreams. Or perhaps his goal had been more noble, stealing things to feed a young family back home.

  No matter what it was, armed with a thick cut of a blade, he swung at her head first, and Cressia—armed with her own rapier—ducked and countered with a thudding stab into his throat. He dropped the blade and then lingered, like a skewered animal underneath the sun-drenched landscape, before Cressia lost control of the rapier and he gently fell back into the glistening sea.

  Helena came around at that point and brushed her along, told her to keep moving and attend to the two or three slaves that were onboard the pirate ship as laborers, but Cressia was still in a dismal trance as she helped them. She had nightmares for weeks. Private nightmares, that she couldn’t seem to show to anyone else in military life around her, lest she plummet down the hierarchy and forever be branded as a wailing woman fit only for kitchen duty.

  So, she’d never wailed. Never grieved over what she’d done—until she’d come across this Vesembolo after leaving military service a year later, and decided to wail to herself. Alone, and in private, and away from all the harsh expectations that she was seemingly accustomed to as an elf in a majorly human land.

  “It never leaves you, does it?” Alvin gently probed once she’d finished her tale, and she decided to lean her head into his shoulder for balance. Always talking about herself, always fretting over the past like that, was incredibly taxing for her—especially when someone, no matter how comforting he may be, overheard it.

  “It comes and goes, I feel,” Cressia answered. “If it never left me, I would always find myself wailing in this place.”

  Cressia wished she could wail, but knew her tears were better saved for the aftermath of what was approaching them both.