13
Soleil
Vayla tactfully pretends not to notice me hastily charming away my vomit. A quick cleaning spell and it disappears, but I’m left shaky and mortified and covered with a sheen of sweat.
“Doing alright?” she asks, giving me a once-over.
“Never better,” I mutter, running hands over my hair and my clothes, like that would do anything at all to help the mess I probably look like right now.
“There’s a stream,” she says tentatively, nodding off to the far side of the camp. “Just beyond that treeline. If you need to, uh, need to…”
“Clean the stench of puke and sweat off me?”
“Hey!” She raises her hands in surrender. “I wasn’t going to say anything, I swear.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I grumble. “But thanks, cleaning up a little sounds great.”
Truly, it sounds fantastic.
I scurry off in that direction, find the stream, and cast a quick invisibility spell so no one will see me stripping down to change my clothes and splash myself with some water from the stream.
Freezing cold water from the stream. Which makes sense, given where we are, and probably does just as much to shock my nervous system back into some kind of normalcy as it does to get me clean.
When I’m finished, I drop the spell and sit on the bank for a moment.
Staying here seems easier than going back to camp.
I suppose I should go help everyone get things set up, but I’m still mortified thinking about how many people must have seen me lose my breakfast over something as simple as portalling.
And Finn…
I can’t think about Finn.
I can still barely handle the idea of Finn, of having a demon… a demon… well. Anyway. A demon whatever he supposedly thinks he is to me. Let alone knowing he had a front-row seat to seeing me so disgustingly vulnerable.
So going back and talking to him is out of the question.
Maybe I could sit here forever.
Maybe I could disappear into the forest and never face any of it.
Sounds pretty good, actually.
“Did you fall in?”
Vayla’s voice from the trees startles me, and I scramble to my feet. She has a hand part-way over her eyes, her head facing to the side.
“You covered up? I wasn’t sure if you were planning to take a dip or something.”
“I’m good.” I let out a weak laugh. “And with how cold it is, I’d probably be dead anyway if I went swimming.”
“Is it?” Vayla stops next to me on the bank and runs her hand through the water. “Huh, maybe because demons run a little warmer than humans, it doesn’t feel so bad.”
“Really? How much warmer?”
We spend our walk back to camp discussing the differences between human and demon physiology and how it relates to healing, and it’s the best distraction I could have hoped for.
While not the most scintillating topic, it gets my mind racing on the implications it could have for Ariana’s grimoire and the potions she was working on.
She was a human witch living among demons, after all.
At camp, everyone is already hard at work.
Tents are set up in a wide circle around the clearing, all their entrances facing inward to where two of the guards are piling logs and branches for a bonfire. Between the tents, lantern poles mark the way, to be lit later when the sun dips down behind the mountains.
“We’ll bunk together,” Vayla says, nodding to a tent on the opposite side of the clearing.
“Just like summer camp,” I muse, then wave my hand at her questioning look. “Sorry. Human thing.”
As we work our way around the circle of smaller sleeper tents to the larger canvas structure where Vayla is setting up a temporary workshop, she points out a few demons we pass, giving me names or making brief introductions.
Though, she explains, a lot of them are just here for pack-in and pack-out and will head back to the court once we’re set here.
It’s a struggle for the names not to escape me immediately, and I only manage to hold on to half of them by the time we make it to the workshop tent.
I’m… not great with people.
Not great with names. Not great with socializing.
Maybe it’s all the years I’ve spent tucked away in my workshop, alone for long hours with my herbs and my brews. Some fundamental capability for socialization has withered away.
There’s a group of guards setting up another tent beside the workshop—not as big, but one that looks to be their center of operations as they unload rolled-up maps and a variety of weapons.
“Glenson you already met,” Vayla explains as we approach the assembled guards. “He’s the one in charge of this whole expedition. Beside him are Petyr and Veron, and just there is…”
She rattles off a few more names, but I’m only half-listening. Hidden behind my sunglasses, my eyes start to wander. Over the camp, the demons moving around the clearing, the mountains in the distance, searching until they find—
I look away as soon as I meet Finn’s eye.
I hope he’ll take the hint, but as soon as he spots me, he’s striding across the clearing. Morning sun gleams off his golden curls, highlights the curves of his wings, and makes him look like some kind of fallen angel as he half-jogs over to me.
“I got you some water.”
Oh. Right. That.
He did say something about getting me water, didn’t he?
I take the canteen he offers wordlessly, and though I used a couple of mouthfuls of stream water to rinse out my mouth, being able to actually drink some helps settle the lingering nausea.
When I’m done, I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and pretend I don’t notice Finn’s eyes lingering there.
“Thanks,” I say, handing it back to him.
He shakes his head. “Keep it. We brought a few spares.”
That’s good, because I’m beginning to realize I’m woefully under-supplied for a camping trip.
He seems to be about to say something else when another guard calls out to him from the other side of camp, waving him over to help set up the outdoor kitchen.
Finn gives me a rueful look before he goes, and I’d like to pretend I’m not painfully relieved not to have to make more small talk.
It probably makes me a coward.
It’s probably just one more thing I can’t deal with, one more thing to overwhelm me when I feel like I’m barely treading water here.
Vayla has said nothing through the entire awkward exchange, but as soon as Finn goes, she lets out the soft snort of a laugh.
“Do you want to talk about—”
“Nope. Absolutely not. I’d rather do anything else.”
Another laugh, and she nods back to the tent where we’ll be sleeping. “If you need time to rest, everything should be ready.”
Part of me is tempted, if only because it would give me the opportunity to hide away.
But I’ve played the coward one too many times over the past couple of days.
Time to put on my big-girl pants and stop being such a wimp.
“It’s alright,” I tell Vayla. “I’m good.”
“Well,” she says, considering. “If you’re feeling up to it, there might be a few things you could help me out with in the—”
“Please,” I say, desperately grateful for the suggestion. “Put me to work. Anything you need.”
Anything to keep me away from my own thoughts and the demon I absolutely can’t face right now.
Give my hands something to do, and I’ll be able to ignore my head and the nagging thread of magick near my heart.
Turns out that even in a different realm, work is still my escape.
Vayla’s gone off to partner with the guards on scouting fields where we’ll search for the stellarin flowers, leaving me alone to prepare the other ingredients we’ll use to brew the fever remedy.
The blooms have an incredibly short shelf-life once they’re harvested, and since the brew itself takes several days to complete, we’ll have to field-process the flowers.
It’s tedious work, making sure all the brewing equipment is set up, that we have enough jars and vials to bottle the extract, that everything is organized and ready for work to begin.
It’s the kind of chore I’d probably give to a first or second-year coven student while I was busy… I don’t know. Ideally studying, reading over the brew recipe, doing some theory work to ensure the potion was completely successful.
In reality, I’d probably be off doing something annoying for one of the priestesses. Hardly in a better place than that student, completely at the disposal of those higher in the Crescent Coven food chain.
It’s one reason I’ve been so determined to Ascend.
Once I sit the council, things are going to change. At least in so far as I’m able to change them.
Unlike a student I might assign to brew prep—a boring chore, yes, but one that would teach an important lesson about good work habits—most of the priestesses are accustomed to using their underlings as personal assistants.
That ends with me.
I won’t be sending anyone on pointless errands or assigning them to vanity projects just because I can.
And I won’t be quiet when the rest of the council does, either.
That’s one good thing about Ascending—once you do, you’re on equal footing with the rest of the council. Sure, there might still be a social hierarchy of sorts, but rank-wise, priestesses are all the same.
They also can’t be removed, no matter how vocal or critical they might be of the coven and its leadership.
It’s a kernel of hope I’ve tended privately, making plans for how I can do better, be better, push the rest of the council out of their antiquated ways.
I don’t dare say any of it out loud, even to my fellow apprentices. I can’t imagine critiquing the system that’s been in place at the Crescent Coven for generations would land me a spot as a priestess.
I have to wait.
I have to play the game the best I can until I have the power to change the rules.
Keep my head down, plan silently, bide my time until I can make my move. It’s been the way I’ve operated for years now.
At least until yesterday.
All that work, all those years, I might have sent it all up in flames.
There’s nothing strictly forbidding apprentices of my rank from leaving the coven hall.
But mostly we just… don’t.