25 Elowen
25 Elowen
“Bit of a bummer, isn’t it? The bad guys tossing me off the moment they figured out how to get their realm-changing weapon.
Makes a man question his own worth,” Hugh said.
Elowen didn’t want to laugh. But Hugh’s fullhearted grin—and the bravery of asking such a question while the five of them
were quite literally trudging through sinking sand—worked in his favor.
“I’ll say,” Elowen responded.
If Hugh had been smiling widely before, his whole face broke open then, bright as the moon at its fullest. Elowen had expected
him to be dull—or worse, egotistical—but she found he was neither. He had a humbleness about him that surprised her. More
than once he’d had to ask for help getting out of the sinksand, and he always said a gracious thank-you when Clare, or Vandra,
or even Elowen, came to wiggle his leg so that he could pick up his foot and step forward.
It pleased her very little to admit that she liked Hugh. The joke he’d made at his own expense had lightened the tense mood.
Realizing its effectiveness, he kept up the bit as they trekked toward the place where he swore the Order was headed.
“Death by sinksand would be a most embarrassing way for me to go,” he said. “Especially since I’m the one who said we should travel this way. I see now why the Wagons-For-You drivers never use this route, though it’s technically faster.”
“When are you ever using Wagons-For-You?” Beatrice asked him, not hiding her shock.
“You’d be surprised,” he said. “Whenever Thessia and I desire a quiet night out, Wagons-For-You drivers have been far more
discreet than our royal ones.”
Quite frankly, Hugh was their missing puzzle piece. In a literal sense, of course, but also, on an emotional level, the group
needed his presence. Without him, the sinksand of their own relationship drama threatened to pull them under. Having an outsider
around allowed all of them to focus on him instead of each other. Hugh didn’t complain, not even when the sand opened into
a vast expanse of punishing dunes, dry heat blazing down on them. He withstood everyone’s questions with impressive ease,
keeping the conversation light by always finding ways to make himself the butt of the joke.
Thanks to Hugh, the journey flew by so quickly that Elowen did not notice the shift in landscape until they’d arrived.
Vermillion Vale glimmered in the near distance, a glitzy, sparkling stretch of attractions and accommodations. Whether it
was a skyscraping obelisk meant to evoke the Pillars of Askavere, or a shimmering fountain as large as the Waterfalls of Crestrose,
Mythria’s most impressive history had been replicated to stunning effect in Vermillion Vale, each building crafted with one
goal in mind—entertainment. Mythrians came to this city to see the realm’s past in the most carefree light, so far removed
from the original context that it was easy to keep the drinks flowing and the fun never-ending.
Fun. There was that complicated word again, burdening Elowen anew. It was fitting to be in the realm’s premiere fun location with her fun questmates. But what did fun have to do with the bleak task at hand?
“This is where the Order plans to resurrect Todrick,” Hugh explained. “They want to gamble in the city’s largest inn first.”
“Of course they do,” Elowen sneered.
She peered down at her clothes. Her cloak was covered in dirt and sand, and her hands had a thin layer of grime on them. She
looked as she felt, worn down. When she glanced over at her four travelmates, they seemed the same. They’d all been through
it.
“We do not give off the appearance of people who are ready for a raucous day of gambling ourselves,” Elowen noted. When no
one responded, she couldn’t help but remind them of the obvious. “Plus, while we are all recognizable, Hugh is the most famous
person in Mythria right now.”
At the use of his name, Hugh put a firm hand on her shoulder. “Fear not,” he said. “We are far from the weariest-looking bunch
to stumble down the pathways of the Vale. But you make a good point about my fame. Luckily, I’ve learned things from my time
with the queen. There are many ways to hide in plain sight.”
“’Tis true,” Clare confirmed.
Elowen could not tell if Clare was jealous of Hugh or admired him. Clare tended to be the most famous person in any room,
what with his decade-long commitment to upholding his public image. But Hugh’s fame was royal . When he started dating Thessia, the gossip pamphlets became obsessed with dissecting every morsel of knowledge they had on him. And they really were morsels. Hugh was a bit of an enigma to the public, which only heightened the intrigue. They knew he’d grown up in Paramar Bay, and as a young boy he’d survived a usually fatal sledgeling bite while playing hide-and-seek with his brothers. But no one in his family was willing to talk to the scribes and provide any more information on his personal life or how it was that he’d ended up a Mythrian foot soldier in the first place.
Clare procured a horseball cap from his bag, then tugged it over Hugh’s dark mop of hair. “There,” he said. “He is disguised.”
Elowen arched an eyebrow. Hugh looked exactly the same, only now he had a ridiculous ballcap on his head.
“Thank you, my friend. I am,” Hugh assured them. As he scanned the group, Elowen sensed a melancholy feeling from him. It
reminded her of a child longing for their parent. Or perhaps when someone realized they’d eaten the last bite of a meal before
mentally preparing to be done with it.
“What is it?” she asked.
Hugh cocked his head in confusion.
“Forgive me if this is untoward. I just sense some sadness from you,” Elowen explained.
Hugh brightened at this notice. “My own bachelor party was unfortunately cut short by my kidnapping. We were supposed to celebrate
here in the Vale.” He scanned the group again. “Would you all mind if I thought of this as my bachelor party?”
Elowen stifled another laugh. Hugh’s bachelor party was composed of a grumpy recluse, her dangerously charming former assassin
questmate with benefits, her struggling divorcée ex–best friend, and Clare Grandhart.
Seeing the humor for himself, Hugh smiled again. “It’s a bit untraditional, but since you all traveled far and wide to save
me, I’d be honored to have you among my party.”
“Of course,” Clare replied with his signature enthusiasm.
“Delightful,” said Vandra. “I’m in.”
“Sure,” confirmed Beatrice.
Elowen was the last to respond. “We’d love to,” she told Hugh.
He threw his arms around his nearest questmates, which happened to be Elowen and Clare. “Incredible! Let us indulge in some well-intentioned debauchery before I commit to a wonderful life with my true love.” He dropped his voice to a whisper, though no one besides Elowen and Clare was close enough to hear it. “Also known as finding out exactly where the Fraternal Order plans to resurrect their evil leader.”
He gained the laugh he hoped for. He’d certainly earned it.
Hugh led them to Vermillion Vale’s most expansive inn. It was built out of a white quartz that made the building shine brightly
under the sunlight, though inside, there were no windows at all. Day was indistinguishable from night, which seemed to be
the point, for it was not long past noon, and every gambling table was occupied, with patrons nursing bottomless drinks. There
were people dressed in bright colors, people dressed in very little, and even people dressed up as famous people. Anything
was possible in Vermillion Vale. The hustle and bustle was so overwhelming that Elowen almost missed it at first because of
all the feelings she accounted for with her heart magic. It was only when Beatrice gasped that she noticed.
There were Clares.
Everywhere.
Someone was dressed as Clare on the very day that Todrick was slain. Another was Clare from any of his six Sexiest Man Alive
cover shoots. There was Clare’s ridiculous shadow play cameo character, when Clare must have believed that a goatee suited
him.
Every time Elowen blinked, three more people dressed as Clare would spawn. Two of them—Spark’s Sport Potions Clare, and a
Clare that had somehow merged with his eagle, Wiglaf—were sparring with foam swords, yelling “Good form, sir!” at each other
over and over.
Among the sea of Clare impostors, the real one’s face paled. If it was possible, he did not look himself, despite a hundred different echoes of his existence filling every corner of the inn. “It appears as though we’ve stumbled upon the annual Clare Convention,” he said, self-consciously wiping sand off his tunic.
“Annual Clare Convention?” Elowen repeated, hoping that saying it again would somehow make the situation less absurd.
“It’s usually later in the year. With the ten-year-anniversary of the Four and all, it seems the Clares moved it up,” Clare
said sheepishly.
“That makes sense,” Hugh told him.
Wiglaf Clare paused his jesting to examine the real Clare. Elowen’s stomach dropped, thinking them exposed. The longer Wiglaf
Clare looked, the clearer it became that he did not comprehend what he was seeing.
“He’s trying to figure out which Clare you are,” Elowen muttered in amazement.
“How about the real one,” Beatrice deadpanned.
“This is good,” Vandra said. “They will assume all of you are impersonating the Four to pay homage to Grandhart. And that
I’m doing a jaw-dropping impression of the cunning new woman from the latest quest.”
It was true. By being themselves, they were somehow not themselves at all. And Hugh was in a ballcap, so apparently they were
all effectively disguised.
“The downside is, it will be difficult to distinguish Order members from Clares,” Beatrice noted.
“No Grandhart worth his salt would ever join the Fraternal Order,” Clare protested.
“If there are duds among the apparent diamonds, we have to spread out to find them,” Elowen said, sensing an opportunity to handle some of her personal matters while also attending to the realm-saving ones. “Why don’t Vandra and I search the card tables and see if we can scrounge up any information? Then someone else can roam the pools, and others the tavern?”
Elowen did not wait for a response. It wasn’t often that she found herself giving orders in the first place, and she correctly
assumed the event was exceptional enough that everyone would comply without protest.
Elowen walked ahead of Vandra, combing through Clares for the seediest-looking men she could find, figuring they were the
most likely to be Order members. It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it seemed the most logical way to find evil among Grandharts.
Plus, Elowen wanted Vandra to see her as a woman who took initiative without hesitation. A competent person who didn’t fear
every miserable, daunting unknown ahead.
She stopped near a stackjack table where four of the most composed men she had ever seen had gathered to play. All of them
had blond hair and aventurine-colored eyes, and they wore matching sandy tunics. If they were not Order members, they had
surely started a cult of some kind. They’d have made decent Clares, actually, if they weren’t so committed to the ominous
poise they’d cultivated.
“Let’s listen to them,” Elowen said, lingering nearby. “They look the part.”
“Why not join them?” Vandra asked in return. “We can get better intel that way.”
Elowen flushed. “I don’t know how to play stackjack.”
“No one knows how to play stackjack.” Vandra headed for the table, forcing Elowen to follow. “Care if I jump in?” she asked
the men.
They startled at her presence. She had all of the command Elowen lacked, and the fearlessness, too.
“We’ve got room for two more,” the stackjack dealer confirmed, pushing stacks of colored chips toward Elowen and Vandra.
“All you have to do is stack,” Vandra told her.
“And jack, I presume?” Elowen bit back, already tortured. She hated this confusing game and the way that she could never seem
to make herself enough. No matter how she tried to change, her emotions always pulled her back down. She didn’t know how to
play, but she knew she’d lost before she’d even begun.
“What brings you all to town?” Vandra asked cheerfully, ignoring Elowen. The four men stared, no one answering. Vandra stared
back, smiling at each of them while making such meaningful eye contact that one by one, the men looked down, intimidated.
It was skillful, the way she asserted dominance without uttering another word.
“We are constituents of the Collective of the Resurrected Ghosts,” one finally muttered.
Ah. They had not found Order members at all. They’d somehow stumbled upon monks. Gambling monks.
Elowen, like most Mythrians, saw the Ghosts as what they were, dead heroes from their past, forever honored for how they’d
brought Mythria to life. These men saw them as something much grander. They really believed the Ghosts walked again, reborn
to save Mythria once more. Where the Ghosts were, none of them could say...
Sighing, Elowen got up to leave, but Vandra tugged her back to the table. “You wanted to ask me something, didn’t you?”
Elowen fumbled for words.
“That’s why you broke us off, yes?” Vandra continued, whispering into Elowen’s ear, “These men are too focused on Ghostliness to care about our personal drama, and I’d like to play a round of stackjack. We can sit here and freely discuss whatever is on your mind.”
Vandra had figured out Elowen’s entire game plan. It was utterly stressful, being seen. Worse, because Elowen had no money,
Vandra had to pay for both of them to play. Vandra put forward a handsome amount of farthings, and Elowen gulped, knowing
already that she’d drain every last bit of it.
“You know what they say, you have to bet big to win big,” Vandra told the monks, winking.
And so they began their game of stackjack, which did indeed involve stacking, yet was also somehow about counting? Elowen
could not bring herself to understand. “I thought you didn’t like to play games,” she dared to say, balancing a red chip atop
two blue ones.
“Fourteen,” the stackjack dealer announced. Whatever that meant.
“I never said anything of the sort,” Vandra rebutted. She put four yellow chips beside Elowen’s red. “Truth or Dare got boring,
so I stopped participating. This one has clear stakes, which I enjoy.”
“Seven,” said the dealer.
The monks strategized their turns as Elowen glared at Vandra. “You avoided answering my question, then,” Elowen said. “That
wasn’t you being bored. That was you being evasive.”
“And what did I have to gain by being honest?” Vandra asked.
One of the monks put down a single blue chip.
“Twelve and three,” the dealer called out.
“You know exactly what there is to gain,” Elowen said, the heat in her cheeks spreading to her neck. She needed to say more,
but she couldn’t bring herself to offer it up.
Frankly, she was terrified. She was also difficult. And she had yet to make the right move at the right time. She’d crossed the line when playing Truth or Dare, overwhelmed by the depth of her own feelings, especially because Vandra always moved through the realm with such ease. Nothing ever seemed to overwhelm her. An entire cave had collapsed with her trapped inside it and she’d somehow gotten out unscathed. During the game, Elowen had hoped to find Vandra’s weak spot. Love, it seemed, was everyone’s weak spot. And that was the wrong instinct for Elowen to have. Why did she want to make things harder? A woman like Vandra would only ever be dragged down by loving Elowen.
In the time it took for Vandra to craft her response, the three other monks played their hands. Vandra was so unflappable.
It unnerved Elowen to no end, which then bothered Elowen that she could not remain cool in response. Feeling Vandra’s emotions
would never be enough. She wanted to crawl inside her brain and understand how Vandra always kept her composure.
“I like games where I understand the outcomes,” Vandra said. “With stackjack, we can either win or we can lose. There are
no other choices. There is no consolation prize or secondary loss. Whatever you put in is what you give up. Nothing more,
nothing less.”
At that moment, Elowen shoved forward all the red chips she had, placing them on the single blue chip the monk had put down
earlier.
“Two,” the dealer said, perplexingly.
“When we played Truth or Dare, it seemed to be a chance for all of us to laugh together, which I welcomed after the hell we’d
been through,” Vandra continued. “Everything had become so dreadfully serious. But you changed the rules. You made it about something personal. I didn’t know what you wanted from that moment, because you were the one who told me that we were questmates with benefits. What you were asking me went far beyond something as casual as two people who romp together for fun , so I decided not to play anymore, because I no longer knew exactly what I was risking.” She paused, leaning closer. “So
tell me, Elowen, what am I risking?”
“I don’t know,” Elowen fumbled out defensively, hating herself even more. She should have stayed quiet, giving herself a moment
to think. But she turned feral when she was scared. She lashed out. And truly, if Elowen could not even do something as simple
as admit the depth of her feelings, how could she ever do something as complex as love Vandra in the way she deserved?
Vandra sighed, then waved her hand at the dealer. “All aboard,” she said.
The four monks, plus the dealer, held their breath. Elowen sensed great anticipation.
Vandra gathered up all her chips, then stacked them one by one atop Elowen’s last play. With every new chip added to the pile,
the suspense grew. Whatever Vandra was doing, it was gutsy.
Before she placed the last chip, she looked at Elowen. “Bet big to win big,” she said. She put the red chip atop the tower,
and the whole thing fell, eliciting a loud gasp from the table.
“Thirty,” the dealer declared.
Elowen assumed Vandra had somehow become victorious. But the dealer pushed the coins toward Elowen instead.
Vandra stood up. “Congratulations,” she whispered. “You’ve won again.”
At that, Vandra walked away, leaving Elowen and her mountain of coins at the stackjack table with four disgruntled monks and
a thousand words left unsaid.