WINTER BREAK - December 19th
I slept late into midday following the bonfire. The mark of Orendell itched enough to wake me, skin pink and already marked up where my nails had scratched in my sleep. It had been bothering me most days since returning the grimoire to the Sanctum and it was getting hard not to notice a correlation. If anything, it was very annoying, but I was getting used to it being annoying. I sipped wolfsbane solution to keep it at bay as much as I could. Not worth fussing over just yet. I had other things still on my mind.
Like the love potion on my nightstand. Aries had been wary of using it, but he'd also opted not to stay the night, so I don't think it was just the love potion that was making him skittish.
I should have been more frustrated over it. He'd been chasing me since we'd met, but too, by this point I knew him well enough not to be surprised. Instead, I ended up rereading the instructions Kelyn had written on the card for that love potion, half imagining what that might look like, until the stinging mark of Orendell got me out of bed to search for my flask of wolfsbane solution.
I prised the flask from my coat pocket and was struck by sudden dread when I realized it was too light. Of course I was out…
I know I'd taken a few sips from it throughout the night, but the full moon was still a few days off. The wolf in my head should have still been asleep. I felt it rousing more and more on days it wasn't meant to.
Generally, I dressed before leaving my room while staying with the Marblebrooks, but there were plenty of mornings where Kelyn and Elandria slept late and stayed in their sleepwear until late afternoon. It wasn't too weird for me to rush to the kitchen still in my winter robe and socks to start working on something to quell the mark. I was mashing up aloe for the poultice Kelyn gave me— it was faster than making a potion— when Elandria appeared in the doorway. She was more dressed than I was- in an oversized turtleneck with a gaping hole at the shoulder seam and a pair of flowy cotton pants she only ever wore around the house. She looked tired, but too, there was something else. I didn't notice it right away.
"Zephyr," she said.
I hummed in response, in the middle of crushing wolfsbane under a pestle. But I was only met with silence until I looked up. Elandria hadn't moved from the doorway. She pursed her lips and there was a kind of obvious pity that I hadn't seen from her before. Something had happened.
"Everything alright?" I asked. I already knew it wasn't, but where something had gone awry was still lost on me. My thoughts tracked first to Aries, then Kelyn, and then back to Aries again when Elandria asked that I sit.
I quickly finished the poultice and sat down at the kitchen counter next to Elandria. She didn't rush me, but that in itself felt like more cause to move faster.
"I spoke with your mother. I'd reached out first just to tell her about how we'd been celebrating Fire's Night this week. She'd been pretty quiet the last few weeks, though that's not unusual."
My mother. Something at The Stag's Court. "I've been watching things over there in the scrying glass," I said. It was true. Everything from what I could tell was mostly business as usual, not that that was particularly helpful. Though I had glanced into it this morning to catch a glimpse of my mother walking home from the market. She was alive and well. I knew that already. What happened?
"I know you had mentioned a possibility that Lady Hart may hire bounty hunters to search for you weeks ago, but even then, we'd been working under the assumption that she would want to handle her grievances privately. It turns out she's far more shameless than anyone could have seen coming."
"I could have told you that," I said.
Elandria sighed. "Sending a couple men to look for you in Fel is one thing, but she's apparently put up enough gold for your capture that it's attracting attention. The wrong kind."
I was already racing ahead to see where this conversation was going. That look of pity. She'd never been concerned for my mother or anyone else. It was about me and only me.
"You're going to make me leave the Midnight Court," I muttered. I didn't want to leave, but my existence here in the first place had always been as a favor and I knew that favors could only go so far.
"Gods, don't be ridiculous," she snapped. "I don't plan on telling the Dean about any of this and even if he does learn of it, you're still here as my guest. I won't turn you out."
So, I wasn't being kicked out. A relief, if short-lived.
"The bounty has turned you into a topic of gossip at The Stag's Court, specifically your likeness," Elandria went on. "I know you've mentioned before there's always been some question around your paternity. Your portrait plastered in print hasn't done anything to quell those rumors. It's gotten so bad that Sylvaris is disowning you."
Elandria set a hand on my shoulder. The gesture was so unlike her I was initially surprised, and then I realized she was trying very hard to comfort me.
None of it had fully sunken in. My father was making a concentrated effort to distance himself from me. Elandria went on to explain that he would be naming a new heir, a distant cousin on his side of the family. Someone roughly my age, who of course had scales instead of skin.
I felt like I should have been more upset than I was by all this. It hurt to hear it and I could feel a sharp ache down between my lungs that I knew as sadness, but beyond that, I felt little else. I almost wished I could cry and release the feeling, but the tears wouldn't come.
"The trouble's always been that you just look so much like him," Elandria said. She's been talking this whole time, hand on my shoulder, but I hadn't caught half of what she'd said until then.
"What? Like who?"
"Like your father," Elandria said. "It's why the gossip's gotten so far out of hand. Vampire memories are funny that way - half of them assume the bounty is for him and not you."
"Oh…" I had no clue what to do with any of this information. I knew about the rumors and I'd lived with them for as long as I could remember, but hearing it now, so plainly, was still more of a shock than it should have been.
Sylvaris was not my father. Had never been my father. My mother had lied, and continued to lie, going as far as to have Sylvaris double down on it, when apparently half the Stag's Court already knew who my father really was. Even as I still didn't.
"Who is he?" I asked.
"You shouldn't get your hopes up. He's probably dead," Elandria said.
"You know who he is?" I asked, but it came out more as an accusation than I'd meant it. Last we'd spoken about this, I'd assumed she hadn't even heard the rumors.
Elandria leaned forward in her chair. "I've had suspicions, but no. I didn't know. I couldn't have known and didn't really think too much about it. I wasn't lying when I said your mother has always been secretive with her lovers. She's clever and subtle, but I've known her for a long time. And Zephyr, since meeting you… you look nothing like her. Or Sylvaris."
So, apparently it had really just been me this whole time buying into the lie… The sharp ache in my chest twisted a little deeper. Elandria responded by doing the least Elandria thing I could have expected. She pulled me into a hug. I buried my face into the dark tangles of her hair and let her hold me there for a second.
"It's going to be okay," she whispered. She was unexpectedly gentle. "But there are a few things we'll need to discuss."
This next part was hard too, but a different kind of hard. Being disinherited meant that the allowance I'd come to expect was now never coming. Emotionally it didn't feel like an especially harsh blow, but I knew over time, it would be. Elandria explained that I wasn't being left with nothing. My mother had managed to squirrel away a fair amount of money into an account she'd kept in case of emergency. I would be getting that. It was a fair amount of money, and should cover a few more years at the Midnight Court, but for the first time in my life I was going to have to start looking very seriously at getting a real job down the line.
Elandria really didn't have any pity for me over that. "You're going to be a mage. There are plenty of careers out there for mages. You'll be fine. We can have you start as my research assistant this summer."
It probably wasn't fair for her to offer. Divination was still my worst class by a lot, but I was grateful for the offer anyway.
After, the day progressed strangely. Elandria stayed in the kitchen to watch me brew more of the wolfsbane solution to refill my flask. Eventually, Kelyn came in too and helped herself to leftovers from the night before. The day was quiet and strange. I'd slept late enough through the morning that time was slipperier than usual. The sun set as I was just eating my first meal of the day. I found myself lying in bed and staring up at the ceiling for periods that felt short but were long.
I am trying to explain this now, because I need it written out. I hadn't meant to miss Aries.
We were supposed to meet at six. With everything happening, I didn't make it over to The Old Wives' pub until almost seven. There were two glasses at our preferred table. Both empty.
I looked around for him. It wasn't that big of a bar. It was a weeknight, so a little slower than it otherwise might have been. Aries wasn't here.
Shit. I kicked the chair.
"Hey!" the bartender barked. "We'll be having none of that tonight!"
I eyed the two pint glasses. He'd been here. He'd ordered drinks. He'd waited. He'd left.
It didn't take a genius to guess what he'd thought. I paced a few times around the bar, trying to make up my mind over what to do next. I could leave and come back tomorrow, assuming he'd even show again. It was one solution. Not a good one.
I did the only other thing I could think of.
I knocked on the door to Aries's room. The hall in the Vodalysa dormitories was eerily quiet and dark. Though given the lights were out in the hall, it was much more apparent that Aries was in. The thin strip of light spilling out from under the door gave him away.
I could hear him shuffling behind the door after I knocked. He was taking longer than he needed to opening the door. "Aries," I spoke into the flat wood grain.
There was more shuffling. He knew it was me. There was no one else it would have been.
Finally, he cracked the door. He didn't hold it open any more than he needed to. Like he'd intended to curse me off and slam it. But all too quickly, that was never going to work. He was glaring but his eyes were pink, cheeks wet. I couldn't even manage a couple tears over getting disinherited yet he was over there choking back silent sobs- over me, no less.
Way to make a guy feel like shit.
"I'm sorry. I was late. I didn't see you." None of these excuses felt like enough. They weren't enough. But Aries didn't slam the door.
He stepped aside to let me in and shut the door behind me.
I realized almost immediately, I'd never been in his room before. It was a mirrored opposite of mine, or close enough to it, but while mine was sparsely decorated, neat, bare, his room was an explosion of stuff.
There were several half drunk glasses of water on the nightstand beside a stack of pulp novels. Laundry on the floor, on the loveseat, on the bed. There was, on the coffee table, the tin of cookies I'd given him, a store-bought box of chocolates, empty coffee mugs, and a dirty magazine. It was a lot to look at. A lot of Aries everywhere. It was a mess, but a well lived-in mess.
The more concerning things were the crumpled tissues on the bed and the fist-sized hole in the wall. The hole was new, if only because Aries was still cradling his hand, visibly messed up and bloodied.
He sat down on the side of his bed, with his good hand took one of the pillows from his bed and hugged it to his chest. The bloody hand looked gnarly. Left like this, it would bloom several terrible colors and probably swell.
"I didn't mean for you to think I wasn't coming," I said. I looked around for a place to sit, but there was clutter on the couch. His desk chair was too far, on the bed beside him too forward. Best stay standing instead.
"You didn't come," he said. "And what? You changed your mind? What was I meant to think?"
I groaned. "Why I was late had nothing to do with you."
His eyes were welling up. He rolled them at me as though he weren't fighting back tears.
"That looks like it hurts." His bruising hand caught my eye again. He knew how to cast a sigil to heal that kind of thing, but hadn't. Maybe that was the hand he used to cast it…
I didn't know how to fix it. I couldn't pretend otherwise. What I could do was shadow step to my room, fetch a few of the pain relievers I'd gotten for the mark of Orendell, and pop back over.
"You didn't have to take it out on your hand. You better hope this heals up in two weeks, or Blackclaw's class is going to be a real beast for you again." I dabbed antiseptic into the open wound. Its sting made him flinch, but he let me apply a topical cream next, something for pain more than healing but still would help, and then bandages. From what I could tell, nothing looked broken, just sore, bruised, and swollen.
"I know I'm probably not your first choice. I'd rather you not pretend…" Aries mumbled.
My hands froze around his injured one. "What are you talking about?"
Aries scoffed. "It doesn't matter. Forget it."
"Marblebrook told me this afternoon that I'm being disinherited and I can't talk to my family to even hear it from them. So whatever it is you think I was doing, I wasn't. Aries, I -" I groaned. What was I supposed to say? That I cared about him?
I couldn't be careless with my words here, because this is Aries. He's listening too intently. He's got all these little hopes pinned on me, some I can see, and some I can't. And it feels like every time I take a step, I'm accidentally crushing one.
His brown eyes were big and glassy. And what I really wanted was to kiss him and push him back onto the bed and run my hands over all of him until he forgave me. But I'd been the one sitting where he was sitting before, Ianthe hovering over me in an argument I'd already lost. Ianthe would have kissed me.
So, I drew back. I wasn't going to be that to Aries. Not unless I got a sign that he wanted it just as much as I did. And that wasn't how things looked right then.
"You just forgot then that you were meeting me at the pub," he said.
"I'm having a bad day."
"You have a lot of those."
I dropped his wounded hand. This wasn't just about missing him at the pub. We both knew that. This was about last night, the thing we hadn't talked about but couldn't not think about. I was still stuck on the feeling of his tongue in my mouth and my hands on his ass. I don't think he was opposed to any of that exactly, but he needed more from me.
For the first time, I thought maybe it wouldn't be so bad to give that to him. There was no reason I should be the one to keep breaking his heart.
Aries was still in a bad mood by the time I'd left. I hadn't wanted to talk about getting disinherited and there was nothing more to say on the topic of what had happened at the pub. We were at an impasse. But I told him I'd meet him again tomorrow if he wanted it. And every day until I moved back to campus for the start of the next term. At least by this point, his tears had dried up and, while his hand didn't look much better, he'd stopped cradling it.
I told him I'd see him tomorrow. I hoped I would.