CHAPTER TWO LYRA
It's starting to get dark by the time I return home. I've spent the whole day teaching the children. Perhaps I'm not the best teacher the village has ever had, but it's better than nothing. I head back, weary and hungry, heading inside and finding Alaric at the kitchen table.
“Where have you been all day?” he asks.
I shrug. “I told you yesterday I was going out to help teach the children about the ways and creatures of the forest near the village.”
“Did you?” Alaric says. “And what did I say?”
He's slurring his words. I frown.
“Are you drunk?” I demand.
Alaric makes a non-committal gesture. “Drunk is such a strong term. Have I been drinking, yes. Am I completely drunk, no. Am I as drunk as I want to be? Now that's the key question.”
“And we both already know the answer to it,” I say.
Alaric drinks more and more these days, seeming to have little else to do. At first, I used to join him in it, and our evenings would turn into revels where we would both lose ourselves in one another. In those heady first days after we overthrew the emperor, we felt entitled to our celebrations.
But Alaric doesn't seem to have moved beyond that. It's like he's stuck in wanting to party, or maybe he’s afraid of building a life here.
“Did you at least make food while I was gone?” I ask. I certainly can't smell any food cooking on the fire.
He looks at me like he doesn't understand. “Was I meant to do that?”
“Yes, Alaric, you were meant to cook, because I was going out all day to teach the children.”
“That doesn't sound like something I'd agree to,” Alaric says with a frown as he raises a goblet.
Although I can't really tell if the frown is at me or at the fact that his goblet is empty.
He truly is drunk now. “Anyway, why go out and spend the day teaching children the difference between a squirrel and a bear?”
“That's not what I was doing, and you know it,” I retort. Already, my patience is wearing thin with him. It seems more fragile with every day that passes.
“I don't really know what you were doing,” Alaric says.
“Because you don't pay attention to what I'm doing,” I reply. He hasn't taken an interest in my attempts to teach the children in the village. He hasn't offered to help.
“That's not true,” Alaric says. “I pay attention to you whenever you're around. There's not a movement you make that I don't want to watch.”
“Is that meant to be some kind of endearing line? Because it hasn't worked as well as you want,” I say.
It also doesn't tell me anything I don't already know.
I know Alaric continues to be interested in me physically, and I must admit that he's still probably the most beautiful man I've ever seen, but that doesn't count for everything. It isn’t enough when Alaric doesn't seem to truly want to settle in my home.
“I'm sorry,” Alaric says, raising his hands. “But you know what I mean. We could have spent the day with one another, but instead you were off teaching a bunch of children.”
“Because I want to do something useful with my days,” I say. “Why aren't you trying to do the same? Why aren’t you trying to fit in here, Alaric?”
This is dangerous ground. It's the start of an old argument between us, one we seem to be having more and more as the days pass.
“What would you recommend I do, Lyra?” Alaric asks. “Take up farming? Learn to weave fishing nets?”
“You could at least step outside of the house occasionally,” I counter.
“I do,” Alaric says.
“Heading over to the local tavern doesn't count,” I snap back.
“I'm confused, don't you want me to make friends in this village?”
If that were what Alaric were doing it would be fine, but it's not.
I've seen him in the tavern before. He sits alone, and he has the knack of being so caustic that people don't want to be near him.
It's a talent he used back in Ironhold to make sure nobody got too close to him.
He was convinced if he cared about anyone, it would make it more likely he would die there.
Now, it feels like an old habit that's outlived its usefulness.
“You aren't making friends,” I say. “And the barmaids staring at you and occasionally offering to bed you isn't the same thing.”
“I always turn them down,” Alaric replies, as if that makes him a paragon of virtue. He really is impossible, sometimes. Sometimes I suspect it’s deliberate, pushing me as if he can’t believe we’re together, wanting to test the limits of our relationship.
I move over to him, sitting at the table, and putting my hand over his. “I just don't know why you're doing this to yourself,” I say. “You still train, but beyond that-”
“Because I'm bored," Alaric says sharply and suddenly. “Is that what you want to hear, Lyra? I'm bored here in this village.”
“Because you don't even try to find a way to fit in,” I say.
“How would I fit in?” Alaric demands. “Am I meant to entertain small children with illusions?
Am I meant to spend my life attending noble gatherings that don't exist here? When I went with you, I thought it would be for a life of travelling and adventure, not just to settle down and play at being ordinary.”
“So, you're too good for this village?” I say. “For the place where I was born?”
“Yes!” Alaric looks me straight in the eyes, taking me by the arms. “We both are. We both fought our way through the Colosseum. We both have powers that most people here can only dream of. I’m a noble of Aetheria, not some…”
“Some what?” I shoot back, But Alaric doesn't continue. We both know that if he keeps talking, he'll go too far. I've known for a long time that he thinks he's too good for a place like this, that he's only here because of me.
“Some villager,” Alaric says, and somehow, he manages to turn that into an insult.
“I'm from this village,” I point out. “My mother is a villager.”
“Your mother's the healer everybody relies on back in Seatide,” Alaric says.
“And you… you went through an experience no one else can imagine here.
You fought your way through the arena. And let's not pretend that you're just a simple villager.
You're the greatest beast whisperer the world has known for generations.”
“Do you know how arrogant all this sounds?” I shoot back.
He gives me a sardonic smile. “That's what I do isn't it? Arrogance. A refusal to see the world as anything but a cruel joke. There was a time when you liked that about me.”
“What I liked was that underneath it all, there was someone who cared about the people around him.”
“About you,” Alaric says. He waves a hand in the direction of the village. “Not about all this.”
He turns and heads for the door.
“Where are you going?” I ask him.
“If I stay here, we're just going to keep fighting,” he says.
That hurts more because it's true. We've fallen into the habit of fighting with one another, and it's always about the same few things.
Alaric feels trapped here in the village, doesn't want to settle down the way I do. And I feel guilty for holding him here.
It means I don't stop him when he walks out of the door. I know where he's going, anyway. He’ll head out into the fields to practice with a sword for a while, then make his way over to the local tavern to sit in a corner and brood.
I sit at the kitchen table trying to hold my emotions in check, but I can't. They roll over me like the tide, making tears come to my eyes.
It hurts so much when we fight like this, and it's happening more and more.
I can feel myself and Alaric drifting apart from one another, when I thought I was so deeply in love with him that nothing could drive a wedge between us.
Nothing but the simple realities of being with him.
Alaric is… he's astonishing in so many ways.
He's handsome and clever, kind and vulnerable under a hard outer shell that doesn't let the world in. I’ve seen him crouched in front of a crowd of children, conjuring images in the air to entertain them.
He's also dangerous and sharp edged. He's someone it was easy to fall in love with when we were both trapped in an impossible situation. Now that we’re just trying to live our lives, he feels like a caged beast, pacing and trying to find a way beyond the bars.
I watch him through the eyes of my shadow cat, which slinks through the growing darkness with ease. It feels almost the way I imagine Alaric does: it's there because it's loyal to me, but it's still a deadly predator, held back by its connection to me, wanting to be so much more.
I watch Alaric training for a while, but he doesn't go out to the tavern the way I expect him to.
Instead, he goes out to sit not far from our home, on the beach, staring up into the stars as if wondering how he might get to them.
I know that's what he wants: to be free to wander, to go where he wishes.
Am I the thing stopping him now, rather than the Colosseum?
I head out to join him, determined to make this up to him, hoping that we can make things better even as a knot of fear sits in my stomach.
I'm worried that we can't make this better because we want very different things.
I approach him in the darkness. He's sitting there with a sword across his knees and I take several deep breaths.
I know there's a danger in the conversation we're about to have, because it might be the one that finally drives us apart for good. Or it might patch things together again, hold us to one another until the next time we have this argument. I'm not sure which would be worse.
I'm almost grateful when we are interrupted by someone running up to us: a young man wearing a white tunic and golden sandals, a messenger’s bag across his shoulder.
He has a glowing stone at his belt to light the way, and he's moving a little quicker than most people would be able to, suggesting a magical gift put to use to speed his way.
He runs up to us, looking us over as if trying to decide if we're who he's looking for. He frowns and then nods to himself. I'm surprised that recognition takes him so long. There was a time when everyone in Aetheria knew my face and Alaric’s, when our fame in the colosseum meant we couldn’t go anywhere without being recognized, on the rare occasions we were permitted to leave the fortress prison of Ironhold.
As gladiators, we were meant to stay in there between the games, unless called from the fortress by our patrons.
“You’re Lyra and Alaric?” the messenger said. “I had to ask in the tavern to find out where you live.”
“That's us,” I say, stepping forward. “Do you have a message for us?”
The young man nods, taking a scroll from his bag.
There was a time when a scroll like this would have been sealed with the symbol of the empire: a sword plunging through a burst of magic.
Now it's sealed with the symbol of concentric magical bursts that has become the symbol of the Aetherian Republic.
“I have a message for you from First Senator Rowan. Your presence is required in the capital at once.”
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