Chapter Twenty-Three: House Arrest
Being on house arrest in the royal palace wasn't the worst thing ever. My chambers were bigger than most people's houses. Heck, they were bigger than most rich people's houses, and I had people coming in to visit me all the time. I could get books from the library whenever I wanted and the big chapel atrium was large enough to do my fighting lessons with the other ladies and Master Dhur in there. And I still had tea with the queen - twice a week, just like usual, though she was pretty snarky and annoyed for the first two meetings.
Alathea mixed sugar into her tea - she liked about half a cube per cup, which was hardly any when you think about it. I took mine with just a shot of cream - which was, apparently, how Laeanna had also taken hers. "What in Alfheim possessed you to go on that foolish gallivant, anyway? Were you lying when you said you didn't desire to return to Urth?"
"I wasn't lying. Believe it or not, mother, but I have no interest in going back to being a farmer in danger of losing her farm, nor in being the only fae in all of Earth, a curiosity for scientists… scholars to poke and prod over. I was worried that the artifact would be used by our enemies, and wasn't I proven right? If I'd found it five minutes earlier, we wouldn't have been chased off by… whoever they were."
"If you say so, my sweet."
"Do you think I'm lying about three boats crammed with riflemen from Earth coming to get the damn thing? Whoever's got it now isn't our friend."
Alathea shrugged. "We don't know who it is. It might have been an antiques collector who happened to have some of these ryfles in their collection. And they were concerned that you were going to damage a priceless relic. You didn't exactly announce yourself as Laeanna, Princess of the Vernal, Protector of Antiques, after all."
"And do you think that likely?"
Alathea sipped at her tea and said nothing. "I do not," she said eventually. "This only reinforces my concern that our enemies are numerous and we don't know who some of them are. You must be protected until the wedding, and I will not have your impulsive foolishness endangering a union millennia in the making. My mind is set - you are restricted to your chambers until we journey to Estival, and if I hear so much as a rumor that you've snuck out, I'll have you confined to the nicest cell in the palace. Am I clear?"
I guess I could have threatened to just abscond, to fly away and make myself scarce, as I'd once threatened the queen before. But she wasn't in good humor at the moment and might well have me confined to a cell on the spot if I did. And I think she and I both knew that I no longer had the heart to leave. Meliswe and my other friends were here and, as if those bonds weren't as strong as any I'd had on Earth, my best friend from Earth was here, as well, and nobody would be helping him get back home if I didn't have the resources of a kingdom at my beck and call. I just had to survive the month until the wedding. So I placed my tea cup down and nodded. "Yes, mother."
Dill met up with me outside the queen's solarium and my escort took me back to my chambers. My escort consisted of six soldiers - three from the queen's guard and three from my own. I'd managed to get two of my woman warriors assigned to duty, and they dressed in something half-way between a lady's dress and a fighter's kimono. That way, when Dill and I went wherever the queen needed me (court was still in session, after all), it looked like four ladies of the court being escorted by four personal guards, which was a lot less embarrassing than a princess and her handmaiden being babysat like children to keep the wayward princess from escaping.
My guards left me at my door, but they didn't bother to lock the thing. If I wanted to escape, I could just buzz up to the stained glass thirty feet up and use a little propuls to bust out one of the windows. I wasn't about to do that, of course. And Alathea's reliance on the honor system meant the queen still had a little trust in me - she didn't think I'd try to escape on a lark, just as Ben and I hadn't ridden off to Hibernal just for kicks. But I had no doubt that every sound that transpired within my chambers was being reported back to Alathea. Which, unfortunately, didn't include any sounds of unrestrained passion - Meliswe wasn't at all happy with me.
"I can't believe you just left for Hibernal without telling me… and that you almost got yourself captured or killed by a bunch of Urth men. How could you do that to me, Laeanna?" she'd asked. Well… she asked it over a few minutes. She sort of fit it between bouts of sobbing, and whenever I went to comfort her, she buzzed out of reach with her wings and then resumed with the sobbing.
"I left you a note," I said lamely. "I didn't want to get you in trouble…"
"I don't care about the trouble… how can you not see that?" she'd said - and that was part of the problem. I didn't want her getting in trouble on my account, even if she insisted it was fine. "I'd have come with you anyway. Better to get in trouble keeping you safe than to lose you."
"You didn't lose me, though… I'm safe, and now I can't even go anywhere until the wedding. That's good, right?"
"Did you even think of what it would do to me to lose you? If you'd died and there was any chance that I could have saved you, I'd have lived the rest of my days mourning your loss, wondering what I could have done. It would have broken me." And, to tell the truth, she looked pretty broken with me safe and under house arrest.
"There, there," I said, though she still wouldn't let me close enough to console her - probably because she knew it would work. "I'm… I'm so sorry. I wasn't thinking, and…"
"I'm leaving," Meliswe said.
Meliswe was angry and hurt and she was leaving me. Fortunately, it wasn't the I'm leaving you kind of leaving. It was the I'm going to visit my mother in the Greenbriar for a week kind of leaving. She was going to give herself time to cool off and give me time to ponder how much she meant to me, which was: more than anybody else. And, since I was under house arrest, I felt her absence acutely. She packed a few changes of clothes and left, and then I cried myself to sleep, feeling like an absolute dog for having hurt her again.
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The next morning I awoke still feeling like an absolute dog and with an ache in my heart that only Meliswe could sooth. I prepared myself to mope around and feel sorry for myself until she came back but, fortunately, there were a lot of people who'd come into my orbit lately and they weren't about to let me spiral into a cycle of depression. Master Dhyr strutted in an hour early for fighting lessons, declaring that if Meliswe wasn't around to help me wake up in the mornings, then that duty fell upon them. And Dhyr certainly knew how to get the blood pumping and the senses primed.
"We are short one now - an unbalanced number makes for an unbalanced lesson, princess," Dhyr said. We'd drilled with odd numbers plenty of times before, but Dhyr always had their reasons. "The Urth human Bend Boy…"
"Ben Boyd," I said.
"Yes, Bend Boy," Dhyr, apparently, agreed, "Please call for him to join us - thus shall our numbers be even."
"But he's a man," Alfina said - she was an agile half-fey, half-human woman from my 'women's guard' pair.
"So I have heard," Dhyr said. "We will not hold that against him. It will be good to train against somebody who is big, strong, and clumsy, since that is how many of your opponents will be. All too often, men are raised to use their strength and the fear it can provoke to get their way, and their aggression comes out as an uncontrolled, unwieldy thing like a fifty-pound torch - full of threat but easily avoided. The best aggression is fast, short-lived, and expends no energy announcing itself. This shall be our lesson of the day."
Perhaps that was one of our lessons of the day, but it certainly wasn't the only one. Our other lessons included the standing atop hills form, shoulder throws, and just how far we'd come since we began our training under Dhyr. While Ben wasn't too imposing as far as men go - he stood about six feet tall and weighed around one sixty - that gave him about seven inches and fifty pounds on me, and his one sixty was a solid one sixty. You'd never have guessed that people called him 'Ben Belly' when he was fourteen. I squared off against him first, at Master Dhyr's suggestion, fully expecting that I'd get planted on my princess behind and embarrassed within thirty seconds, and instead I found myself helping Ben off the floor and apologizing for not helping him break his fall, since he was a beginner.
Ben knew how to fist fight as well as I'd been able to (his paw had taught us both - we'd learned fisticuffs and how to brawl, but not with much strategy or technique), and he was reasonably fast and strong for his size. If we were similarly-skilled, he'd have wiped the floor with me, but we weren't similarly-skilled. I was a lot faster and I had two and a half months of Master Dhyr's training… and that, apparently, meant a lot more than seven inches and fifty pounds of muscle. Everybody wiped the floor with Ben and, by the end of our lesson, he'd picked up enough of what we were drilling that he could hold his own for fifteen or twenty seconds before he got out-techniqued by whoever he was facing off against.
"Bow to your instructor," Dhyr stated… "and bow to one another. Thank you for your assistance, Mister Boy."
"Um… that's Boyd," Ben said.
"Yes, Mister Boy," Dhyr repeated. "I welcome you to our classes. If you wish to be my student, you will do as my other students do: you will meditate for fifteen minutes upon what you've learned at the end of the day. If you do not know how to meditate, Mentor Laeanna shall teach you."
I jumped in the air and almost whooped at that proclamation. Not because I was especially enthused to teach Ben meditation but because in the Fang school of combat, Mentor is the third rank, and one that usually takes several years to achieve (the ranks are Beginner, Sibling, Mentor, Professor, Master, and Grand Master). I suppose my previous (very rudimentary training), coupled with Laeanna's phenomenal speed and memory made me a very good student. I knew I was the best in the class, technique-wise, but I was still so far behind Master Dhyr that I'd assumed I was maybe getting close to being Sibling Laeanna.
Before I had a chance to pull Ben aside and teach him the basics of Fang School meditation, Dhyr pulled me away and indicated that Ben should make himself scarce, which he did - when Dhyr told you to be scarce, it was a pretty good idea to comply. Dhyr took me to the little area where I'd set up a Pispistrian-style tea circle, which was where I took tea when I wasn't tea-ing with the queen, and indicated that I should sit. I curled down onto one of the pillows, still especially limber from the day's exercises, and waited for Dhyr to join me. Since I was the princess outside of class, Dhyr generally deferred to me, just as I deferred to them while in class.
"Princess Laeanna… I apologize if this is crass, but we must be clear to maintain the honor of our arrangement. I have been treating our gatherings as a proper Dojo of the Fang School. This is good, I think, because you and your siblings will have legitimacy if they encounter members of the Five Schools in their travels. But there are many traditions of our ancient orders that you are unfamiliar with… normally, these are taught to children or absorbed through culture, but you have not had the chance to do this, and so I must speak plainly. You have proven yourself by thwarting the assassins and by showing good judgment in retreating from the enemy in the cold bay… far earlier than I could have anticipated, you are ready for advancement. It is a great honor to be the first Mentor in a new Dojo."
I nodded enthusiastically. "I can tell! I'm… I'm really excited about this. Tell me what I need to do."
Dhyr smiled. "Good. That's good. I was confused when I named you Sibling and you did not seem to understand. It is traditional, in a teacher-student relationship for the teacher to give the student a gift to symbolize the strengthening of their bond and the advancement in rank. And I thought you understood this when, one week after I gifted you the scabbard of your fine sword…"
My eyes went wide. "Oh! Oh… that makes sense. I didn't understand. I suppose you thought when I brought new students to your dojo that was me returning my own gift."
"Indeed. You are very intelligent, Laeanna, and perhaps the most intuitive student I have encountered. But perhaps not that intuitive. To advance past Mentor… and it will surely be some years before you do… you will have to learn the ways of the Five Schools and of Pispistria." Dhyr reached into their bag and produced a large scroll, handing it to me with great reverence. "This is the Scroll of the Nine Schools. Four of the schools are no more, but they may one day be rekindled with these teachings. I began copying this scroll when I first heard of the princess who wished to be a warrior, and now I am pleased that it is complete and that you are ready to bear it. It is written in the script of Old Pis…"
"That's no problem - I know a spell to help me read-"
"No!" Dhyr said, with more vehemence than I was used to. "No. It would be improper to be read through trickery. You must learn to read it as a child learns to read, and when the time comes, you will copy it and give it to your first Mentor student."
"I'm… I'm your first Mentor?"
"You are not," Dhyr stated. "But I do not anticipate that a princess and future queen will have time to start more than one dojo in her lifetime, even if that lifetime is very long. You shall be the first warrior princess of the fae."
I bowed my head to the floor, mostly to show respect, but also so Dhyr would see how I was crying. "Thank you, Master Dhyr. I'll… my gift of thanks will come on my wedding day." I said it partly because it sounded symbolic, but mostly because it would give me time to think of something good.
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I added 'learning Old Pis' to my long list of things to do - and found that, however inadvertently, I'd already learned some of it. When you read enough texts in a given language through 'divine sight', which I now did by second nature, you come to learn the language even without the sight. Honestly, it's the fastest way to learn any tongue. Sometimes, I had whole conversations with Dill in Sylvalog before realizing I hadn't uttered a syllable of Faeric. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I was as big of a bookworm as the old Laeanna had been and some of the travelogues I'd pored through on the Outer Realms had been written in Reformed Pis, which was the child language of Old Pis. So I already knew a bit - at least enough to piece the alphabet together. I told Dhyr at the earliest opportunity, and they told me that I couldn't undo the past and that I ought not be faulted for my magical bookreading, so long as I proceeded honorably didn't use magic when reading or copying the Scroll of the Nine Schools.
My other new project was to meld old Laeanna's preferred medium of needlepoint with the woodsong that I'd been perfecting with Dill. Sometimes, it felt like I wasn't advancing in my woodsong, but this was mostly because Dill was advancing in her own practice at least as quickly - there were a few books on it deep in Surburrus's library and I'd sent out for every other book on the topic that mithrins could buy. All of the books we found were very old and very expensive, but the Princess of Vernal had very deep pockets. Since I was now relegated to practicing in the atrium, Dill had the servants cart in a dozen different potted plants whenever we worked on our woodsong, and we could rely on the servants staying nearby because we kept the doors open so they could listen in on our singing - the strange, sibilant, sonorous calls of the woodsong. And since I was now singing in my own chambers, I happened to be near one of old Laeanna's needlepoint canvasses while Dill and I worked on our fine control of plant growth. I realized that I could use a wire mesh to weave plants into whatever shape I liked just like needlepoint, and so an idea struck me… and it took me the whole five days until Meliswe returned to bring my idea to perfection.
Meliswe had tried her hand at woodsong and was probably pretty talented at it, but she wanted to become proficient at fae magic, generally regarded as the most powerful and most versatile magic, before she started dabbling in other fields. Her mana pool was about a quarter what mine was now and she'd exhaust herself trying to practice multiple schools at once. I'd later learned that she had wowed her mother with woodsong at Greenbriar, growing her prized tulip garden larger and with more vibrant color than ever before. But Meliswe wasn't an adept yet and she still wore the borderline-precious gems and jewels of a low-tier fae noblewoman, whereas I'd transitioned entirely to living jewelry of the woodsong. I'd eventually sell whatever metal jewelry didn't have familial or historical value, though I was waiting until I thought of a good cause for the proceeds.
"I'm back!" Meliswe called out. She said it as if she wasn't quite sure whether she was actually back. She carried a bunch of her mother's tulips and looked like she was considering whether or not to gift them to me.
"Meliswe!" I said. I beamed and it took every last scrap of my willpower to keep from racing at her and enveloping her in a big hug… I wasn't sure whether she was ready for that. But I wasn't going to let her second-guess what to do with those tulips. "Um… let's get those in some water. I'll have Dill bring a fresh pot to replant them in." Even Meliswe could take cut flower stems and use the woodsong to get them to take root again.
"Sure," Meliswe said, and she finally approached within arm's reach of me. "So… we didn't really part on the best of terms."
"We didn't," I said. "Because I'm a damn fool. It's not my place to think I know better than you what you want to do. And since I love you, I shouldn't have ridden into danger's maw without letting you weigh in on it. I can't promise that I'll always do what you want, but… well, I can promise that I'll tell you about it."
Meliswe started to tear up. "How do I know you won't hurt me like that again?"
"Because I made you a gift."
"Because… you made me a gift?" She wiggled her little nose. "How does that…"
I paced back to my little workbench where I'd been working on my latest woodsong creation and snipped the last of its wire mesh away. Then I brought it out to Meliswe and showed her what I'd been working on - an ornate bracelet of living wood, ruddy red wood of a rare variety every bit as strong as iron. As I fitted it over her slim wrist, I sang a soothing hum that meshed the roots at the base of the bracelet with one another to complete the loop.
"Do you know what this is?" I tapped on the wood.
Meliswe ran her finger along the bracelet, tracing along the curling pattern that spelled out our fae sigil for 'love', the same pattern I'd once grown on a rose bush two and a half months before. She tapped on the wood. It was unvarnished but still had a waxen, ruddy sheen and the feel of something far stronger than ordinary wood. She gasped. "Is… is this bloodwood?"
I nodded. "It doesn't take much blood… only a few drops. The problem with bloodwood, though, is that once it tastes the same blood a few times, that's all it will eat. It becomes very efficient with its preferred blood, but anything else and it will refuse to feed. It'll wither and die. So you'd better not be away from me for more than a few weeks or your bracelet might just become a dead piece of wood instead of something alive. Now… I want you to direct your emotions toward your new bracelet."
Meliswe furrowed her brow, which brought her bracelet to blooming - a dozen miniature flowers, orange and cream pink, Meliswe's favorite colors, budding out from the little love symbol.
"Your favorite colors," I said. "I… I only know that it's supposed to respond to your emotions, but I'm not sure what the colors mean. I hope they mean you're happy."
Meliswe tackled me and planted little kisses all along my neck and face. "They do. I'm so happy."
Meliswe is cute
This comment is very late
I just love your work