BEWARE OF CREEPY CONSECRATORS.

The road to Ravynmardi was a long one, and it was not made any shorter by Gidea's insistence on constant training. What was the point in Rosalind having a carriage if she was going to be made to run beside it anyway? Traditionally the Princess was supposed to ride inside the vehicle. But her mother was not often nicknamed the Fighting Fiend for nothing.

To her, every second that you were awake was a training opportunity, and every second you were asleep was time for ambush preparedness training. (For some reason, her mother wanted her to be prepared for being caught off guard since enemies don’t usually bother to make an appointment or even stick to waking hours, I know, rude, right?)

As if that wasn’t bad enough, she had a peashooter and was not afraid to use it to, as she put it, “encourage alertness.” It really did not help that she could shoot down a fly on the wing, knew pressure points, and never missed.

Poor Mibbet, meanwhile, who had not had the benefit of many years of training, was rather sick and tired of getting it in the neck (often in a literal fashion) about this. She was tired and cranky and knew if she still had froggy kinetic vision and tongue, none of those shots would have stood a chance. She had, after all, caught far faster flies.

Instead, now she had taken to walking on the sproingy part of her foot to maximise her chances of avoiding a hit, and it seemed to be working. She was doing far better now, and only two in three shots were getting through now. Plus, she’d managed this really cool thing where she’d used choppy to split one of the small darts in two earlier. So maybe there was something to all this training after all.

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Elvira was training too, of course, right alongside her cousin, and couldn’t help noticing she seemed a lot more relaxed these days; before now, she had just hopped from demand to demand, true many of the demands were targeted at not very nice people, but she had still always looked about ten seconds away from explosion for years. Yet now here they were, helping charity, setting up infrastructure, and even getting along with her mother after a fashion. Usually, they got along about as well as two thoroughly hydrated and argumentative cats who hate each other in a single sack. Yet here she was, accepting training.

Usually, by now, she would have broken a few things, kicked a person or two, sworn a lot, picked a fight, then stormed off. It had always been that way, back as long as Elvira could remember (and she had a decent memory.) So if this was a sign of progress for those two, then she would take it and do everything in her power to make sure that particular state of affairs continued.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

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Gidea was confused by her child’s change of heart; if it meant her child training more, then she’d take it. But not knowing what was going on was getting confusing and more than just a little worrying. The last time her daughter had shown such a drastic change was after she took the title of arena champion and started spending a little more time away from the castle.

She would have liked to have stuck around more but had her grandparents tempers. (Grandpa had been a beast slayer berserker, and Grandma had been a bear type shifter druid and apparently a bare-knuckle boxing champion when feeling more human. That had, by all accounts, led to a rather awkward incident when somebody called in a rampaging grizzly as a job, and... well, I think the rest is pretty much self-explanatory. But anyway, after the silly misunderstanding and the wreckage had been cleared up, they went another round, then decided it would be much more convenient to fight again if they got married, so you could say it was love at first fight.) So for the sake of the kingdom, it was far, far, far safer for her to live as far away from the major nobles as possible, especially given her being permanently armed. Because when you need diplomacy, the last thing you need is a berserker barging in and trying to kick the snot out of a particularly demanding lord, or worse, put them in a time out (they get really, really huffy when you make them stand in a corner apparently, and the correct diplomatic response to their formal complaints is not to track them down and ask “what are you going to do about it?)

Now she was really worried; her baby was learning to fight and not demanding stuff anymore; that bit was fine. But designing canals, setting up temples, selling her stuff to raise funds. Becoming a Saintess? That was new and potentially messy, depending on which gods, in particular, got involved. She hadn’t even heard of Wannashowa until lately, and now here he was consecrating her daughter? He was a mere flash in the pan; how is a god-like that supposed to support her?

Then, of course, there was the worrying issue of the whole married to the gods thing the clergy had going on; she didn’t want that for her daughter. Getting close to gods usually ends messily, and the last thing this world needed was more prophecies. Honestly, sometimes in the city, it felt like you could throw a stone anywhere in the city, and it would hit some kind of a self-proclaimed prophet. (They really can’t have been all that great, can they? They never saw it coming, after all. Or maybe the gods didn’t want to waste a perfectly good prophecy on something like ”duck,” which was fair enough. But she still did not like the idea of her little girl getting dragged in when things got all prophetic, plus even without that, Rosalind was acting kind of different now, and Gidea was going to get to the bottom of it....... right after this training was done.