The return back to the palace passed uneventfully for the pair. Cressia saw the large red flags that had blossomed from the curved ruins of the northern spire near the roof of the place.

  She’d never been truly comfortable when large groups of people came together with flags in their hands—not in the Conclave, when they were forced to honour the memories of those who’d died expelling the humans out of the place; not when she was still serving in the Zantzar Armed Forces and had to go along with all the pageantry and marches that were the esprit de corps of any military across Mylea.

  Perhaps Cressia was a freethinker at her core, and had only reluctantly allowed herself to serve the crown of a king because it aligned with her own interests in life. She still felt like an outsider wherever she went. Even now, alongside Alvin in this carriage, she still felt apart from it all—like a wall would always separate her from the politics.

  “Are you alright?” Alvin asked, sensing her discomfort. She was about to grumble out an “I’m fine,” but they quickly very nearly ran over Weria in the process as he ran out to greet them.

  "Been a while," Cressia mused to him as the carriage pulled up. "What was it like being the regent for a week?"

  "A week?" Weria smiled. "I’ve been at it for nearly three decades. Chaperoning that man next to you from one faux pas to another. Again and again.”

  Alvin shuffled in the front seat in embarrassment. He did not like being reminded that once upon a time he had been a young, childlike prince that Weria had doted upon and helped raise while his own parents were too distracted in life to do much parenting. He was now King, and kings didn’t like to ruminate on their embarrassing pasts.

  Perhaps he should even call for Weria’s head, and then no one would be alive now to have witnessed those mortifying memories. But Weria knew he wouldn’t. He would back down again and again, and then afterwards, the two of them would make up as kings and their closest advisers often do.

  "How much time do we have left then, Weria?”

  Cressia watched as Weria puffed his chest out a bit and motioned with his hands all sorts of intricate plans and spy escapades he'd pulled off while they were both on leave.

  It was hypnotising, and Cressia would've fallen for it if she hadn’t seen her mother pull the same tricks as a child. When Conclave representatives came to pester them about this or that, Cressia would watch from outside the mud hut as her mother grew erratic in her body language, and eventually they would leave them alone in fright for another year or so.

  "You must be joking," Alvin answered, exasperated after Weria's lecture had concluded.

  "I am not, my King."

  "You mean, Hieronymus still intends to duel with me after what happened?"

  Cressia had felt that the sudden ballroom attack meant that Zantzar and the orcs were heading for an all-out war at any moment. But now, surprisingly, that was not at all on Hieronymus’s agenda.

  Instead, he would first crush the King of Zantzar, tearing off his head with his long, dangerous halberd blade. Then he would press on to Zantzar itself, once its people had no one left for whom they could rally behind.

  This was all, well, very elf-y in strategy and tactics. Cressia wondered if Hieronymus had read the revolutionary works of the Elven Conclave in his spare time—it was eerily similar to how the early leaders had behaved against their human overlords. First you destroy the figureheads, and then, when the humans scramble around over who should lead next, you close in to finish them off once and for all.

  Cressia had read those works too, in her mother’s office when she was still in her early teens. It was supposed to make her feel prideful of how far the Elven Conclave had come; instead, it just made her disillusioned with the foundational myths of her home and ever more determined to leave the place behind.

  “Should we even honour him?” Alvin murmured to Weria. “This brutish orc is not a man of his word, as we all know.”

  “The orcs are relentless, my King,” Weria sighed. “But if Hieronymus were to fall, that might be all it takes for their entire military to burst.”

  Scratch that, Cressia thought. Maybe it was just a case of reverse psychology for the orcs, and how they felt their own fears might play out exactly the same for humans.

  She found herself caught between both trains of thought. Yes, Alvin was obviously scared of facing down such a dangerous foe by himself, but Weria was correct. Orc armies always collapsed once their leader was dead, and there was no one else to fall behind and be led astray by. Cressia had seen it play out many times when the Conclave clashed with several nomadic orc groups near their borders.

  Of course, if Alvin lost, Zantzar would lose another king. But if he were to win, then many lives would be saved from a bloody and prolonged struggle.

  “Give it some thought,” Cressia whispered—not so discreetly—into his ear. “We still have a few days. Rest on it, and then make your choice.”

  For a moment, she felt like she’d turned into Zinerthe, the elven goddess of wisdom, who Cressia had prayed to once upon a time as a child. She wondered whether she should make an offering to the absent goddess in these troubling times—something Cressia had not done since late adolescence at most.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  The two men nodded at each other, and then Weria stepped aside to let the pair, their drivers, and their fashionably red carriage into the royal Zantzar palace once again.

  Coming home saw the two once again break apart from each other as they settled back into the comforts of the place.

  Cressia decided she would at first pay her respects to the deceased King Theodore, whose ashes were now confined to an urn in his old study room, all the while being looked upon by a group of disheartened guards.

  Cressia was surprised to learn that his death was still under wraps. Wouldn’t a guard or a maid or even a middling chef gossip with a person or two outside of the place? They hadn’t, in fact. As Cressia moved through the place once again, she realised that a great many of the servants still believed that King Theodore was alive—resting elsewhere.

  Moments like this made the thought of mortality weigh down on Cressia’s head, and how she herself would ask to be treated once her soul in life had been snuffed out. She would not be there, of course, and she would not feel what would happen to her body afterwards, but it would still be nice to be treated with dignity and not cast aside into a forest like some cultures on Mylea did.

  Alvin, for his part, stayed clear of his father’s temporary resting place. Instead, he found himself once again rummaging through Aeryn’s room, looking for anything that might bring him comfort for his world-weary mind.

  "Seven days," Weria had confided to him when they met for dinner afterwards. "Hieronymus has given us seven days before he continues with his second attack."

  Aeryn had collected a great deal of knowledge about the orcs, along with her more fervent search for the old spirits who apparently haunted the forests of Zantzar. Looking through a multitude of sketchbooks, it was only then that Alvin realised she was quite the artist as well—something he’d overlooked out of bitterness growing up, considering how often she pummelled him while roughhousing.

  It was easy to think of her as just another violent princess, and not someone who also surpassed him in artistic ability. One page after another, Alvin realised she had a very strong grasp of the fundamentals needed to succeed in art—perspective, shading, colouring, anatomy, lighting—it all came naturally and confidently to her.

  It was a shame, however, that she largely seemed to focus on drawing orcs and the occasional concept art of a spirit or two. No landscapes or portraits or even a self-portrait of herself, which Alvin felt was out of char—

  He stopped. Then Alvin, at Aeryn’s old studying desk, took a sharp breath and began to quickly flick through the remaining sketchbooks he’d gathered up from her wardrobe. There were orcs spiralled on—and then quickly began to flick through the pages again. Orcs, and then spirits. Then orcs again, and another batch of spirits.

  Everything she’d sketched had either been orcs or spirits. Why?

  An insidious thought began to burrow its way into Alvin’s mind for a moment, but he decided he would let it pass. It was a faint echo that there was something more to Aeryn’s disappearance than he and Weria had first expected. He couldn’t bring himself to say it aloud, so he reached for a scrap of paper that was hanging nearby.

  Did Aeryn allow herself to be intentionally captured by the orcs?

  Alvin began to mull it over and then decided to add a few more words alongside the sudden sentence.

  If so, why? Why the obsession with spirits as well? Did she want to find them and, through being an orc prisoner, it was her only chance of getting there?

  The constant thought of orcs always being on his mind these days had caused him to shelve the idea of spirits. The other cause, of course, was Cressia, who decided now would be a good time to practice her fencing skills alone right in front of him.

  Aeryn’s room was thankfully placed above the back garden, and Alvin began to watch in curiosity as she went through the motions of her training. Of course, he knew the motions, having done them a billion times under her gaze, but this was the first time he’d watched her train all by herself.

  The afternoon was hot, so Cressia had decided to forgo the usual white fencing equipment and had settled on a matching pair of a green sports bra and vale tudo shorts.

  This, of course, did not at all help Alvin with his detective work, as vale tudo shorts differed from other shorts in that they were incredibly short—just a few inches above the knee line—and had also been banned in several Mylea nations for, well, showing a little too much leg and keeping the other gender off balance.

  Cressia did not seem to notice, or even mind, if she was keeping Alvin off balance. He watched as she shadow fenced an imaginary opponent, perhaps a hardened orc swordsman she might have to put down if they stepped forward to take off her King’s head in an underhanded assassination attempt by Hieronymus.

  She parried, ducked, and sidestepped any attack that might have come in her direction, all the while throwing back a combination of several cuts from the end of her sabre that could turn an orc into a more gun-shy creature.

  Sweat hung to her, glistening against the backdrop of the crimson flowerbed that made up the royal Zantzar garden. Not content to even let a weed grace her sight, she quickly jumped up upon the cobbled wall and sliced down any of the insidious creatures that had enmeshed themselves within the palace walls.

  Her face was beginning to redden—and so did Alvin’s as he continued to watch her. Of course, he pretended at first that he was simply watching to study her and add her movements to his repertoire for use against Hieronymus—but of course, he knew that simply wasn’t true.

  Cressia Caravania, Alvin’s fencing tutor, friend, and now most esteemed confidant, was also incredibly pleasing and easy on the eye to watch as she exercised.

  He wondered if she would think of him as something akin to a pervert if she caught him watching her like this, and then he began to panic, reaching for one of Aeryn’s other notebooks and pretending he’d been kept busy this whole time cataloguing his sister’s bizarre fascination with orcs and spirits. Then, when he’d had enough of the facade he’d suddenly put upon himself, he looked up from the crumpled notepad to see that Cressia had spotted him in Aeryn’s apartment and was now staring him down as well.

  She did not seem angry or violated by his perverted, lecherous gaze. Her hands were placed on the sides of her hips, and her smile, though mischievous, seemed genuine and without any ill feeling.

  Then, with her left index finger, she curled it out. Slow and deliberate, well aware that she would wait patiently among the flowers and the silence for the chance to thrash him in fencing once again.

  Come on, I know you like it when I’m dressed like this, she mouthed.

  Cressia, once again, was correct. Alvin could not wait, and soon she watched him throw all the notes he’d gathered up in the air and run like a bat out of hell down the stairs to be with her in the garden.

  She would giggle, if she could bring herself to giggle at Alvin’s simplicity. That would feel instead like she was revelling in Alvin’s weaknesses—and by and large, that was not the Cressia Caravania way.