MadMaxine

  The game went longer than I’d expected, but I didn’t mind. In fact, I had a lovely time. Though I got the strangest looks after Verrka had asked me if I’d had fun. For most people, I suppose a game pying characters with magic and swords fighting demons and bandits wouldn’t be a “fun restriction” compared to their day-to-day.

  Though that wasn’t the only reason, certainly not. I figured it probably wasn’t always the case, but the simple adventure we’d imagined this evening saw us as beloved heroes fighting irredeemable, indisputable bad guys.

  I had a sword, and I hit things with it. Thoroughly fun, but the moment the door closed and the voices faded, and the dark of night fell upon my daughter and I on the doorstep, I had to let that warmth go.

  It faded slowly, the night air in my demesne not quite so chill as to bite. Though I still pulled on my magic as we started walking, boots crunching on snow that must’ve fallen while we were eating and making merry. Somewhere up ahead was a probably irate king’s messenger, a probably-annoyed-but-hopefully-not-at-me Seyari, and a mountain of anxieties I’d need to climb.

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  I reached over and ruffled her hair. “You’re more than welcome, Joisse. I had a lovely time.”

  She pulled away, but smiled nonetheless. “I still can’t believe you tried to throw your sword at the bandit king.”

  “Verrka said I could.”

  “She said you could try. In that voice. It’s the voice she uses when it’s a bad idea.”

  “How was I supposed to know that?”

  Joisse sighed. “You didn’t have sword throwing as a skill. I don’t even think it is a skill.”

  I blinked. “Well it should be.”

  My daughter shook her head. “I don’t think so. But… I’m gd you had fun. That’s what matters.”

  I took a shot in the dark. “Competitive, are we?”

  “No!”

  Yes.

  Joisse blushed guiltily. “Stop smiling like that!”

  “Dear, if my face was going to stick like this, it would’ve already. And I’m proud of your sleight of hand.”

  Joisse pouted, and changed the subject. “Where’d you fly off to earlier?”

  I looked up and down the street. All quiet, and the one person I saw, who was emptying a bedpan, quickly darted back inside. Probably from the cold and not from me. Probably.

  “Checking up on a demon that had entered the area.”

  “Your demesne?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what happened?”

  “They ran off.”

  “You let them run off.” My daughter side-eyed me.

  “I did.”

  “Why? They were made from the battle weren’t they—the Church?”

  The way she asked it, I was pretty sure she wasn’t expecting a response, but something about my encounter with the demon-turned Sylvia was stirring up other memories, particurly of a certain someone I’d failed to save. I let the silence linger until we entered the main square, then I sat down on a stone bench that was only a little damaged and gestured for Joisse to sit next to me.

  Joisse wiped the snow off and sat down, moving her tail away when it awkwardly bumped mine. I wanted to chase after it, but… well she wasn’t ever a young kid for me and it’d be embarrassing for her now.

  “I think she needed time to think,” I answered finally. “She’d definitely been struggling.”

  “Did she fight something?”

  I gnced at Joisse and realized I’d given something away when she was ready to catch my gaze.

  “We heard something in town,” my daughter continued, “and thought it was an avanche, but with the recent battle no one was going to go check. Did you get a report?”

  I clicked my tongue. “Probably on my desk, or lost in the shuffle.”

  “So was she from the battle or not?”

  “She was.” I sighed. “High Priestess Sylvia, or at least she used to be. And I…” I thought back to the damage, the bent sapling, the ck of any blood or marks of a scuffle. “I don’t think she fought anyone other than herself. Maybe she was trying to hurt herself, maybe she was just taking out anger. I told her what I thought I needed to, then I let her go.

  “Maybe I’ve done it all wrong… again.”

  Joisse swallowed, fidgeting her lower hands in her p. “Again?”

  “Lorelei.” The word was a whisper, easily lost on the night’s wind. I pced a hand over my heart, guilt crushing down on me as I remembered what had happened to her soul. “I’d… put it out of my mind. Focused on other things, even when I’d had all the time to think with Nelys on the trip and the way back.”

  “I guess I thought I’d made peace with her, but seeing Sylvia—or whoever she is now—I don’t know.”

  “I remember you told me about Lorelei,” Joisse said softly. “You could tell me about her again, maybe? If you want to.”

  I forced a smile. “You’re a good kid, Joisse. Maybe someday, but I don’t know that I can right now. In the end… she went out on her own terms, I think. She saved Seyari’s life, someone who she hated and for whom the feeling was mutual. But at the same time, she was only in that situation because I’d failed to save her from Mordwell’s pns when she was human, and screwed up again when she was a demon.”

  “You tried your best?” Joisse offered half heartedly.

  I ughed, darkly. “Thanks, I guess. But I don’t know that I did. There’s no going back, though.”

  To that, my daughter had nothing to say. Together, we watched the stars as the air grew just a little bit colder and the thought that I’d ruined Lorelei’s life twice mixed in with the guilt that I was ruining my daughter’s night now. And compounded with the idea of how self-centered it was to weigh two of someone’s lives against a single evening’s peace.

  I startled when Joisse’s two right arms wrapped around me from the side and her tail closed around mine.

  “It’ll be okay, Mom.”

  Unable to form words, my only response was to cry.

  ***

  The messenger for King Carvalon sat in a dipidated reception room awaiting an absentee marchioness. Somehow, the pce wasn’t drafty despite the chill he’d felt since the pass—a welcome reprieve. Common sense would dictate she was dealing with the aftermath of what appeared a devastating battle against the Church of Dhias’s treaty-breaking incursion.

  However, common sense was not to be applied to the arbiter of the king’s will. He and his guard had battled terribly cold weather and ridden their horses to exhaustion to make it to this tiny, frozen hamlet of a territory. Only for the marchioness to pass along her word through her wife and through a servant that she would be meeting the next day.

  The tea was old, and the steamed potato—without butter—served in lieu of bread did not erase the pangs of exhaustion he felt.

  And then that woman entered the room. A marchioness taking the role over her husband was unusual enough, but for such a woman to have taken a wife was even more uncommon. And for that wife to be a half-angel with crimson-painted wings? Heretical to Dhias no doubt, and perhaps an expnation for the Church’s incursion.

  Though he did understand a non-hereditary, king-appointed position did not have the same demands for retions and heirs, he could not understand how someone so angelic-seeming could be so unsettling. He could have sworn her teeth were sharper, her nails too long under ill-fitting gloves.

  She’d taken the message with little surprise and a cold expression, made no attempt at small talk, and left in a swish of feathers not a minute after she’d arrived. The only thing she’d left was the key to a room he fervently hoped had enough bnkets.

  But the messenger did his best to remain professional even as his guard left to cavort with the soldiers about the battle and the great gaping hole in the castle’s wall. Even as the evening dragged on and he retired to a small, barren room he probably ought to have frozen to death in.

  In the morning, he was up before the sun. Fgging down a cat-eared maid with an accent he’d never heard before and a serious ck of formality, he once again found himself in a dipidated, but warm receiving room with a cup of ill-made tea and a single, steaming potato in front of him.

  The messenger wanted to cry. All the more so as his guard had apparently gotten along well with the simple rural folk of the region. Enough that he was alone when a single knock rattled the door.

  “I apologize for keeping you waiting,” an uncanny, deep feminine voice said from the other side. “I hope your night wasn’t too uncomfortable.”

  The door opened before the messenger could string together the compint he wanted. A compint that died on his lips the moment the voice’s holder entered, ducking carefully so her horns didn’t bump the doorframe. She wore rather pin clothes that jarred horribly with her outrageous complexion.

  “Demon!” he shouted.

  “Yes,” she replied with a neutral sort of expression a face like hers had no business making. “The Church seems to have taken issue with this fact, despite my best attempts to prove sincerity.”

  I take issue with this fact! he wanted to shout, but he kept his lips quiet and stared at the door behind her as it swung closed. Eyes followed the crimson, spaded tail back up to its owner, who took a seat across from him, crossing one set of arms.

  “King Carvalon knows already,” she continued, “though I suspect he hasn’t told you? I must apologize again for the fright I’ve given you.”

  “T-the king knows!?” the messenger spluttered.

  The demon nodded. “Yes. As does the Gelles Company whom I used to work as a mercenary for.”

  A demon. And the Church forces were retreating. The strange warmth of this pce suddenly felt cloying.

  “I’ve read your missive. And I know you’ve been rather heavily deyed. Is there anything else you wish to convey to me in person? Anything else you require for your journey back to Linthel? I’m afraid—as you can see—that Astrye is not able to provide much.”

  The messenger blinked and shifted in his seat. The sheer normalcy of her questions, the fact she was a good deal more polite than some recipients threw him. He opened his mouth, then closed it. He coughed into one hand and tried to think.

  Questions swirled, and for all his years of training not to think and just deliver he for once struggled not to blurt out something even less professional. Rather than meet her gaze, he stared down at his feet, trying to ignore the fact she’d started tapping a cw half as long as his finger against her seat.

  Finally, he settled on a compromise: gather information, and deliver in the same breath. Just as was taught.

  “Will you be attending?”

  “I will.”

  He tried to picture the demon in front of him in a room of the kingdom’s elite and shuddered. He harbored no goodwill toward the Church that had let a rogue faction burn his house down years ago, but he had to wonder: Were they justified?

  “Is my attendance going to be a problem?”

  The messenger gulped and looked up from the floor.

  The demon was smirking. “Dress or trousers—which do you think better sells the right aesthetic for the Marchioness of Astrye?”

  “I… what?”

  The demon shrugged… both sets of shoulders. “I want to make the right impression.”

  Dhias those teeth. The messenger set his jaw and took a deep breath. Does the king really know? How… how could this have fooled him?

  “Can… you look…” The messenger paused, choosing his next words very carefully. “Forgive my presumption, but it may be best if you could look less… intimidating for the summit.”

  The demon waved her hand, and he flinched away from a burst of crimson fmes that didn’t burn. When he opened his eyes, the demon was repced by a woman of the same height and impossible build, with piercing blue eyes and a somehow gentle smile full of normal teeth.

  “Better?”

  He looked her up and down. “You’re too tall.”

  “Straight from scared to blithe? I’d say it’ll do just fine then. Ogre blood, for the height.”

  “That’s not…” The messenger almost bit his tongue to hold in a stronger retort.

  She tilted her head and raised one eyebrow. “Can you prove it?”

  “No, but…”

  “No buts. It’ll do, I suppose.” She waved a hand and was back in a blink to her demon form, teeth and all. “Anything else? Something for my ears only?”

  Wait. There was something. The messenger had almost forgotten the most important job. “Is the room secure?”

  Another wave of her hand, this time accompanied by another, and another and a fixed look of concentration complete with forked tips of tongue sticking out one side of bck lips.

  After an awkward, tense moment, the messenger felt the air in the room still, the faint pounding of stoneworkers outside dim to nothing, and the temperature increase to just under uncomfortable.

  “This should work,” the demon said.

  He still couldn’t be sure she was the marchioness… could he? Should he even tell her?

  “Cat’s got your tongue?”

  “What?”

  “You’re giving me that look.”

  “What look?” He looked sharply away.

  “The look that says you’re wondering if I am who or what I say I am. I’d bet you’ve not really even considered me the marchioness yet, have you? I’m just a demon in your inner monologue?”

  His blood ran cold; had she done something to him? He… wasn’t angry per se, but…

  “Did you do something?” he accused.

  “Nope. I’ve just been through this song and dance too many damn times.” She raised her chin and her next words lost the casual air she’d started to slip into, and she pced one cwed hand over her chest. “I am the Marchioness Zarenna Miller of Astrye as appointed by King Carvalon. If you have a message for me, please deliver it.”

  There was no threat to her words. More of an inevitability, the messenger felt. In such an instance, were she an imposter, giving her a probably coded message in exchange for the chance to leave and warn the king would be the best thing he could do. It might also make her stop smiling—he wondered if this was how hens felt toward the fox.

  “The message—” His voice hitched, so he took a breath and started over. “The message is thus: Your presence is truly needed. Just as what lies ahead is unprecedented, so too must be our unity.”

  “Huh.” She tapped a cw at one horn and frowned. “I… think I get that. Anything else?”

  “No… my dy.” He added the st bit after a moment’s pause.

  Unfortunately, the honorific earned him another smile. “Great! If you need anything just let one of the maids or myself or my wife know.”

  An odd thought struck the messenger. Even if he didn’t like the idea of spending time on the road with a literal demon. “Will you not be returning with me? As you yourself have mentioned, my arrival was greatly deyed and the meeting is in only—”

  She cut him off with a gesture. “I will be flying there. I expect to arrive ahead of your return.”

  “Oh.” His brow furrowed. “Wait. What?”

  The only response he got was an even wider and more terrifying grin as the demon marchioness swept up and out of the room, sound returning in her wake like the prickling sensation of a numb limb.

  MadMaxine

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