Father Mathis tinkled a bell, signalling the end to their silent meal. At once, Ari gripped the box of Malory and pressed her palm into a spot on the table clear from discarded bread, lugging Claribel’s weak body up from her seat, ready to make her escape.

~No, no, no! I usually relax after the evening meal by sewing and embroidering by the fireside in the Great Hall. It allows me to converse with the others in my household in a more informal manner.~

The gaze of others clung to her skin, heavy with expectation. Now she had to talk as well, to people who were neither Natty nor Claribel.

<…Do I have to? I can think of other things that need doing.>

For example…

===Task: Temporary resting place. Store Malory’s remains in...===

…somewhere that wasn’t her room.

~My solar. It’s across the hallway from my bedroom. We can do that later. Right now, it is time to relax…~

~…and recharge.~

~Socialising?~

~Come on! It’s not that bad. I thought you wanted to find clues by talking to members of my household. Please. I have to be seen tonight. They have to feel reassured that their lady is well, and that tomorrow will be much like any other day: peaceful.~

Yes… but…

If only she could put on her Trojan Threnody playlist and spend the evening polishing her copycat Gullwings.

~Hang on… Do you know how…? I don’t seem to see you doing anything like it before.~

Natty gave her a pitying smile and mouthed, ‘Good luck.’

‘You’re not staying?’ she mouthed back.

But Natty had already draped her arm around one of the gardener’s shoulders, setting off a flurry of laughter around her, no doubt with her surreal, non-sequitur humour that Ari had no gift for.

The chambermaid whom she’d now memorised as Lucy, because it nearly rhymed with sushi, and the chambermaid’s hair was nearly the shade of salmon sashimi–

~What are you using to remember Patricia then?~

~I give up.~

Anyway, Lucy made, and was still making a ring shape with one hand and a daring, rude motion through it with her finger on the other.

~What are you talking ab… Oh. No! She’s making a sewing motion! It’s needle through… through… something. She’s just asking if she should fetch my sewing supplies!~

In that case, Ari gave her a quick nod.

In the awkward wait that followed, she found herself gravitating towards Luna and Sora, until she was standing in front of the crouched form of Tilly; the hounds were large enough to obscure the girl completely.

Tilly scrambled up, one hand still on Luna’s head. Someone had taken good care of her: her skin had been scrubbed clean, and her hair had been washed and brushed, then pinned away from her face with a wooden hair slide painted the same shade of blue as the roses in Claribel’s garden. The colour brought out the blue of her eyes, puffy though they were.

‘Mi… my lady…’ she said, staring at the top of Luna’s head.

‘Hello Tilly,’ said Ari, grasping for something fun and child-friendly to say, something akin to verbal glitter. ‘Uh. Did you enjoy your meal?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘How… uh… How was the stew?’

‘I didn’t eat any.’

‘Oh. Good. It’s not good for you to eat meat if you haven’t had a good meal for a while. Your body won’t know what to do with it.’

‘That’s what the apothecarist said too. You must know a lot about these things, milady.’

Sometimes she could still feel the chicken that the Chief had once gifted her on their first meeting slice into her stomach.

‘Will the apothecarist need to see you again?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll be going as well tomorrow… on the morrow.’

A day of sorrow, when time is borrowed.

‘Oh right.’

Ari bit her lip. This was supposed to be the child who’d befriend Finn, though to be fair, Finn would talk enough for all three of them.

‘Shall we go together?’ she tried. ‘To the apothecary, I mean.’

‘In your carriage again?’

‘It’s a good carriage,’ said Ari. ‘It… has wheels.’

‘Yes. Seats too.’

Claribel merely gazed at her with pitying eyes, but Lucy came to her rescue with an armful of Claribel’s sewing items now that the box that used to house them was fulfilling a different destiny.

‘I’m going to sew for a bit,’ she said, turning towards a chair that another of Claribel’s helping hands had set up for her.

The child nodded and stayed unmoving, staring at her hands, then her feet.

‘Tilly?’

‘Yes?’

‘Do you want friends?’

The child winced. ‘I’m not sure what you mean, milady.’

‘Me neither,’ said Ari, suddenly sure. ‘You don’t have to have them. You don’t have to do anything. Just eat up, wrap up warm, study well and live a happy life.’

Tilly blinked, then for the first time since the courage she must have worn in front of the Guild of Barbers, armour-like, she stared straight into Ari’s eyes.

‘Milady… I… I don’t deserve this.’

‘You don’t deserve… this?’ she crouched down so she was level with Tilly, level with a flick from Luna’s tongue. ‘What do you mean by this? To eat until you’re full? To have a safe place to sleep?’

‘Any of this… I… I’m not made for this.’

‘On the contrary, you never deserved not to have them in the first place. No child deserves that.’ And yet, she’d thought about using the girl. ‘I am very sorry. I will do better. Promise?’

She offered Tilly her pinky.

‘What does that mean?’ said the child, eyeing her pinky with suspicion.

No pinky swears in this world?

~No idea what you’re talking about.~

~Wait…~

‘It’s an Aquilon tradition. You link your pinky with mine, and we say an oath together. The promise I make to you will then be unbreakable. It goes…’ Ari scrambled to sanitise the version she’d been taught, where a man with a knife would go around and slice off the offending digits of oath-breaking children. ‘It goes:

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

‘One, two, pinky swear,

Three, four, truth I bear,

Five, six, if I lie

Seven, eight – pierce me with one thousand needles –

Make me hope to die.’

‘I hope you won’t die,’ said Tilly, more solemn than she’d been at the remembrance dinner.

She bit back her usual response: that all must die, even the universe and time itself. ‘I hope so too.’

‘I’m glad. Then you won’t. Because you’re strong, mi… my lady.’

‘So are you.’

Lucy cleared her throat.

~Poor Lucy. She’s only trying to help, considering what she sees as my ability to converse with a child just dived to the bottom of Lake Una.~

She was about to make a case for being at least halfway to the surface of Lake Una when Lucy proffered her a half-finished embroidery. It bore a cascading arrangement of pink primroses with heart-shaped petals, entwining with a branch of apricot blossoms, a blush away from white. There was also one crisp blue violet with delicate threads of white and yellows dotted in the centre. Outlines of other violets had been traced onto the silk next to it.

This time, she bit back a curse.

‘Right. I’m going to…’ Claribel swooped in and finished her by finishing her sentence, ‘…finish this simple work of embroidery for my beloved Sir Aurelius by adding in six more violets, then moving onto the leaves.’

Tilly looked as horrified as she felt, and sauntered off wishing her luck, leaving her clutching her doom.

~You are good at wires, you say?~

The box that contained Malory’s ashes and stubbornly uncharred remains still sat in the satin that she’d wrapped it in. She pushed it a little further from the fireside, hoping that the cold would slow down the festering within.

~I was going to suggest a different activity when I realised that you couldn’t sew, but then you dared belittle the art of the needle.~

Looking inside the small round box among the homeless spools and fabric cast-offs made things even worse, for it contained a thimble, a pair of tong-like scissors and yet another box. The smallest of the Russian-doll boxes was a long, leather tube that rested neatly in her palm. As with most of Claribel’s things, it was a work of beauty; but unlike most of Claribel’s things, it was crimson instead of blue.

A golden outer casing attached to its lid, showing a circle with spiralling arms that ended in three bird-like patterns. She’d been used to assuming all birds in Claribel’s household as ravens, although these seemed to have extra claws instead of an eye in their beaks. There too, etched into the leather, was the dreaded bird. A red raven, leering at her failure.

~That’s nothing to do with your Red Raven.~

Ari flinched at the name, spoken aloud, albeit in silence.

~That’s just a golden raven.~

~That’s because it’s a sun raven. They can guide us to the true path when we are lost, but you must never look at them directly, else they’d peck your eyes out, like it did to one of my ancestors. More importantly, I think you should stop gawping at my needle case, surrender the embroidery and pick up some simpler sewing.~

Sewing. Yes. She knew how to do that. The thin scar on the front of Connor’s right leg was a testament to her stitching.

As there were no bloodied legs around, she settled on some leather cast-offs among the silks, velvets and linen.

A ball couldn’t go far wrong.

Perhaps she’d cut two circles and attempt to attach them together. But wait. That’d make her a pancake. Well, she’d just have to stuff in more bits of scrapped linen to make it a lovechild between a frisbee and Saturn.

~Have you… considered looking at a pattern for a ball?~

~You’re… making it for my dogs?!~

~Tilly? Finn? Why would a dog want that? Luna and Sora are alant gentils. They are made for hunting. I’ve also got a pair of alant veantres - they are a little too fierce to bring to a feast though. You know what they like to chew on? Wild boars and bears. I don’t think they’d appreciate a deformed disc.~

~Squeaky bones?!~ squeaked Claribel.

It was challenging to telepathically convey the noise of a rubber squeaky toy, and Ari feared that she’d made it sound too much like a dying donkey, which was most likely why Claribel stared at her, eyes like saucers, mouth agape enough to catch a leather ball.

~No thank you.~

~Please stop making it worse.~

The world heard Claribel’s wish and delivered her… Sir Dagon.

He made a beeline for the chair next to hers, weaving past a handful of straw-filled mattresses that were being dragged back into the Great Hall, leaving behind a flurry of giggling scullery maids. Instead of his usual attire, he wore a quilted jacket with a mandarin collar that ended at his thighs.

‘Good evening, Sir Dagon, your gambeson looks very becoming.’ Claribel’s translucent face settled into her usual service-smile even though the knight could no longer see her expression. Ari, on the other hand, struggled to twist her new face into anything other than her neutral glare.

‘Thank you, my lady,’ Sir Dagon responded with the same glare. There was a pained twitch around the corners of his mouth that mirrored her own effort to produce a friendly smile.

He set down his longsword and saddlebag and untucked a book from under his arm – a rather… child-sized, rectangular… not-a-book.

Upon a closer look, the wooden box only looked child-sized in his hands. The lid had been etched and carved with thin, long bellflowers shaded in vibrant pinks and oranges. At the centre of the flowers was a woman’s face in gold who smiled out at them with emeralds for eyes.

‘Did your princess gift you that?’

His ears blushed deep red. ‘I am always in her debt, so I wanted to give her something in return, but… I am not a prince. I will buy her a necklace if I win gold at the tournament, but for now… I have… I am… making something for her.’

With a click, he unfastened the lid of the box to reveal a sewing kit not unlike Claribel’s. Rummaging in his saddlebag, he drew out a half-finished embroidery stretched out on a round, wooden frame. It put Claribel’s to shame.

‘Did you… Did you embroider that, sir?’ said Ari, feeling humbled. Sir Dagon’s [Dexterity] must be through the roof. Did Claribel’s fingers afford her the same advantage? She scrambled around in Claribel’s kit, drawing out a thicker needle for her leather scraps.

‘Hmm. It’s a fish turning into a bird,’ he said, offering her the roundel for a better look.

A twisting, geometrical pattern framed the edge of the roundel, stitched with hawthorn-blossom white and fennel-flower blue. Therein, the bottom half of the black silk had been covered in cresting waves in verdigris-greens, opal-whites and blade-silvers. Out of the waves, a fish with every scale detailed in oranges and reds leapt out of the water and transformed into an unfinished outline of a bird.

‘It’s…’ For a moment, Ari felt more lost for words than usual. ‘It’s… beautiful.’

~Wow… Look at that forbidden stitch. It’s amazing.~

~Calm down. It’s just an embroidery technique. You make tiny knots with a heavy-silk thread. You can’t use it to kill people, if that’s where you were going with this.~

~Not now please…~

Dead bodies were two-a-penny in her line of work, acquaintance or no, but Tristram’s corpse and Malory’s remains still weighed heavily on Claribel, so here they were: finding distraction with needlework.

~In Ventinon, it is forbidden for anyone other than the King and Queen to wear a stitch this fine. To gift it to a princess of Rernin, with that design, is… a statement.~

‘I’m planning to use a little gilded thread for the eyes and the feathers,’ said Sir Dagon. ‘Tarry helped me buy a spool at a friend’s rate.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Tarry?’

‘Not my Tarry,’ said Ari, glad to have remembered the name if only because that was the person who was supposed to assign Natty a seamstress. ‘What’s your princess’s name?’

‘Pacari,’ he said, caressing each syllable. ‘It means “dawn” in their Old Tongue.’

~Oh.~

~That’s their seventh princess. I was hoping… well… Since both their fifth and seventh princess came on the pilgrimage recently, I was hoping that Sir Dagon had taken to the fifth. The seventh is not going to marry a man like him.~

~For an ambitious woman who wants to be queen, the problem would be his title.~

~Ummm… She wants to be the Queen of Rernin. And she’s a Princess of Rernin. She’s not going to marry her father or her brother to get there, though I’m sure she’d do it if that’s what it’d take. It’s more like… she’ll need to find a way to win the war to succession by becoming the Crown Princess over four brothers and two sisters also in the running. She’ll need powerful allies. People who aren’t born with a paved path to the throne don’t get to wear the crown by choosing love.~

Then what of Rosalind? In the first chapter, she’d merely been a daughter of a viscount who was a vassal to Duke Auster. In chapter two, she’d inherited his title upon his untimely death. Though hardly a peasant, the ladder from viscountess to queen held many rungs, but she’d climbed her way to the very top through her whirlwind romance with the hidden heir, Leolin.

~Pfft. If you think there is anything in Her Majesty’s heart other than her beliefs, then the gold she paid to get Dommy to write that ridiculous puppet show must have paid off. She should definitely commission a play next.~

‘My lady… Do you… do you think she will like it?’ said Sir Dagon.

She’d been silent for too long, digesting Claribel’s words.

‘I am sure your feelings will come across when she receives your gift.’

He returned a single short, curt nod. ‘That is more than I can ask for. And I am grateful to you, my lady, for your understanding.’

‘As long as Her Majesty graces us with her beauty, the fish shall be free to gain its wings.’

At the mention of the fish, she felt Claribel clam up.

~Your seafood pun isn’t funny.~

~You really should form a double-act with your friend.~

~Fated One help me. All right, all right, the fish is a mythical creature from Jumontian mythology, and as we from Aquilon once came from Jumont, we carried it with us. It has many meanings, but to us, it represents freedom. Rernin used to belong to the Ventinon Empire before it regained its independence during the last waning. Ventinon tends to sail to lands afar when the magic waxes, guided by the strength of the wind mages, backed up by the flames of the fire mages. However, when it wanes… I’m sure you can work out the rest.~

Ari stared at the freedom that Sir Dagon was wishing upon the Princess of Rernin with every stab of steel through silk.

The taverns seeking mage-certification. The dancing flames on Master Keating’s fingertips. The black bracelet that sat under her trailing sleeves.

She didn’t need to see Claribel’s nod; yes, she could work out the rest.

Ari struggled against the words that took form in her mind. It wasn’t relevant to her mission; it was none of her business.

===Branch: Take It, Don’t Leave It. Conflict between Ventinon and its former colonies. [Unlocked]===

This one would always be written in blood.