Epilogue #2
"What a hardship." I tucked the stray beads into one of the pockets in my high-waisted pants, grinning.
These, at least, had pockets, which was more than I could say for nearly anything else I wore on days we were at the Hall.
One of the definite drawbacks about the work we were doing was that I couldn't get away with jumpsuits.
Then again, a lot of the work was decidedly a pleasure.
It wasn't exactly a massive ask, to be the support that your boyfriend needed when facing down a massive political faction and establishing his house's power base within the tumultuous abayan Assembly, if what said boyfriend sometimes needed was to be fucked in different meetings rooms and reminded of his power.
And I wasn't finding the rest of it as awful as I'd feared either.
There were meetings, true, but there were also incredibly formal and awkward parties.
I'd already been good at parties; with some coaching from the shrewd cinelaat of Creche Thiel, I was getting pretty fucking good at meetings too.
I'd always thought Vivith was maybe the smartest person in any room they were in and had hoped, once upon a time, that they might leverage some of that intelligence to help me out.
And as it turned out, when they did and when they were also scheming with Inmadra of Creche Thiel, well – no wonder the Concord was scrambling to get ahead of the gains we were making.
Although we still had a lot of fucking work to do.
It was early days still, and I was also running another countdown at the back of my mind: not to our impending wedding, although that was definitely approaching as well, but to our trip to Sol.
I knew that what we learned there would change everything – for us and the broader galaxy, but I'd make sure it changed things in our favour.
Araxis reached for me as I tried not to let my thoughts race too far into the future – we still had a few months to lay the groundwork for what Araxis believed was coming, and what I knew was – and he brushed a wave from my forehead. "Hm. It's nearly long enough to braid."
I leaned into his touch. "I know," I said, watching him as my chest ached in the sweetest possible way, studying the warmth of his black stare, the affection lighting up every angle of his perfect face.
"We do have that dinner next week that Lauvis put together so we can all hassle Creche Idrelli into voting with us on the mining bill.
Maybe you'd want to try then? If you'd like that? "
"Of course I would," he murmured, and the sound rumbling in his throat was one I'd come to know well these past weeks, a particular cadence that sat somewhere between contentment and pride.
Like always, it made me immediately flush with pleasure.
I did like it when he was proud of me. I did like it when he made it clear that I made him happy, that I could do that for him.
A chime echoed from Araxis's wrist, and he glanced down, blinking in surprise. "Ah, look: we are on time."
That was on purpose. We'd gotten a bit of a reputation for being late.
Inmadra had told me that it was one thing to be late on occasion, as we were a newly bonded pair; it was another to let that become a habit.
And while no one had ever accused me of being a punctual person, if I had to figure it out so Araxis looked good, of course I would.
Mostly, that meant adding in a lot of buffer time to our schedule. For meeting debriefs and impromptu conversations in the halls and… a few other things. Hard to say when a meeting room might be suddenly unoccupied, after all.
I stepped in close as Araxis reached for the door, catching him before he could open it.
Gently, I pushed him back so that his shoulders tipped against the sliding panel, nudging him into place with my body.
My hand rose to catch his chin, and I tugged his mouth down to mine.
When I kissed him, he exhaled into me, soft and sweet and pleased, and I smiled against him, unable to stop myself.
"There is no one else in the universe like you," I reminded him.
"You're mine; I'm yours." When I pulled away, he looked dazed, slightly drunk, and it was like that – my skin humming with electricity – that we headed out into the hallways of the north meeting wing at the Great Hall.
I folded myself against Araxis's side as we walked and slipped into the role of his declared virra, my stare either fixed near the floor or admiring the lines of his profile.
I still noticed, in the way I would have at the den, who clocked the pair of us as we made our way through the corridors and down the staircases of this sprawling complex.
The fleeting glances, shocked and uncertain.
A flash of jealousy, here and there. Heads inclining, from creches we were on good terms with; pointed looks away, from those we weren't. Lingering stares at the blood-bright mark on my neck.
That particularly abayan flavour of uncertainty – a blank kind of stiffness that we were figuring out how to exploit.
I did let my resolve to be demure and well-behaved slip, just a little, when I saw the cluster of virra hovering near a fountain in the main courtyard.
As usual, Sanna and Arlin batted their eyelashes at Araxis as we passed, wrapped in their gauzy tops and displaying themselves like particularly ridiculous presents.
I allowed myself to glower at them, these little songbirds who liked to flutter around Araxis and pretend like they didn't have any thoughts in their heads at all.
But I knew that act and I knew what they were really doing.
Everyone else seemed to forget that an undeclared virra still belonged to a creche, but not me.
We were overdue for a conversation, virra to virra, but it would have to wait until the next party.
As my stare met Sanna's, something dangerous – sharp, dark, intelligent – flickered across their face, and I knew what that meant too.
Lauvis had been right to describe court as a garden of thorns, but I knew how to deal with thorns. After all, I'd learned in the arena that a sword could be a machete if you tried hard enough.
I shrugged off the last clinging shadows of Sanna's glare as we headed down another set of stairs and into the subterranean halls below.
"How far are the Creche Thiel archives?" I asked with a quick look at my wristband.
I'd built in extra time, but apparently I hadn't factored on how long it would take us to walk through all of the labyrinthine catacombs beneath the Hall.
Adralne, city of spires, was little more than a massive sprawling government complex, and abaya took sprawling very seriously, as if – without adequate space to dance around one another – bad things might happen, like awkward interactions and uncomfortable conversations.
On Seraphim, we'd been living on top of each other.
That wasn't the case in Adralne, and certainly not in Xitera.
I hadn't even realized until we'd gotten here that when Araxis said the creche had an ancestral home on Thelessia, he'd meant that the only habitation on Thelessia belonged to Creche Thiel.
Theirs was the only home on the whole fucking planet.
No wonder he'd thought the kids might be lonely after the clamour of their school on Sozamia.
"We're close," Araxis said as we passed through gleaming opalescent archways that branched into warren-like tunnels lined with endless shelves.
Overhead, the lights glowed in soft blues and purples, as if the light was shining through faceted sheets of ice, or maybe translucent gemstones.
There were abayan words etched into each archway, but I couldn't read them.
What I could do, as we picked up the pace and passed another few archway before Araxis peeled off to the right, was decipher a familiar voice in the distance.
"– because our Ladras says that we're allowed if we just let it live in the tea gardens because there's nowhere else for it to go on Thelessia anyway! "
Next to me, Araxis fluted out a breath and shot me a sideways look. "I know," I said, raising my hands up in surrender. "It was an off-handed comment. I didn't mean –"
We stepped through another, more narrow arch, and the scene before me clarified beneath the pale teal lights overhead.
Our creche-mates stood in front of a gleaming wall inset with segmented shelving, a complex pattern of hexagons and cylinders that, if I squinted, reminded me almost of scales.
There, Talvi had their hands caught in the gauzy puff of Vivith's robes, massive eyes blinking up, pleading.
"I am certain our Sashen will tell you," said Vivith as we approached, "that it is not appropriate to ask if Elethenn might bring you a spider, no matter what our head gardener may say."
"Whoops," I said before I dropped down as the kids rushed over to see us, talking over each other and telling us, in a clamour that echoed off the gleaming walls of the archives, all about the manor on Thelessia and the gardens and our new creche-mates, including the biologist who seemed to think importing exotic insect life to Thelessia might be a rather interesting experiment.
I did my level best to listen, I really did, but my attention drifted to Celravi, who was cradling two metallic cylinders against her body.
They were filigreed and decorated with what looked like woven ribbons.
Araxis excused himself and went over to speak with her.