2 A Fateful Summons #3
“In fact, fuck him,” she continued. “He’ll be sorely disappointed, I’m sure.”
Antal said nothing.
Fionamara snapped him a daggered look. “Antal. He’ll be sorely disappointed. Right?”
Disappointment wasn’t something his father humored graciously.
“He isn’t used to being refused,” Antal said.
“And so, I say again—fuck him.”
Antal bared a fang, a muttered, “It’s not that simple…”
She flashed her teeth right back. “Of course it is. That bastard doesn’t deserve anything from you. Ignore him. That’s what you’ve done for fifty years, isn’t it?”
He knew what she was doing. Fionamara faced every challenge with hackles raised, unflinching—as if bravado alone could conquer a beast as ruthless as his father. As if Antal hadn’t already wasted most of his life on that futile fight.
As if the struggle hadn’t nearly destroyed him, watching his father carve open the throat of a man he’d loved, just to make a point.
Like all daeyari, Antal carried the milestones of his life carved into his antlers.
At the base, those wretched dahlias, symbol of his family.
Next, the sigils of the Planes he’d visited during his travel years.
Then energy conduits, for the academy where he’d studied.
A constellation of stars, for his apprenticeship at the Daey Celva.
Trees and aurora, for his current role as a territory ruler.
But before that most recent addition, a section left blank. Fifty years of mourning for the first human Antal had loved, a kind man who’d tended aurorabeasts for Antal’s family. He should have been safe, serving a daeyari house. Instead, Antal’s father had ripped him apart.
He’d not seen his father in fifty years.
Not since he’d been sent to this appointment on the Winter Plane. Not even when Verne had displaced him. Not even when he might have fallen dead in the snow. It wasn’t until after Antal had reclaimed his territory that the first letter from his father had arrived a year ago.
Well done on not dying. Leaving her alive would have been preferable.
This daggered silence was one of the more merciful punishments Antal’s father had inflicted upon him. By Veshri’s mercy, it still stung.
And Antal was still terrified at the thought of refusing his command.
“He’s never summoned me like this,” Antal said.
“What does that matter? You’re an adult. More than an adult, you’re like… an adult ten times over!”
She’d snapped back to seasonspeak. That was how Antal knew he’d upset her. He was upset at himself, the thought of crawling home, some lowly beast perking at the call of his name.
Fionamara took his cheeks in her hands. “Antal. You don’t need to go.”
“And what if I don’t? What if he decides to come here, instead?”
However vile the thought of returning home, there was Antal’s greater fear—that his father might see what he’d built here. That he could shatter it all with a single claw. Avroz had sat for centuries upon the Daey Celva, the highest authority across hundreds of daeyari Planes.
And Antal’s new policies—an end to live human sacrifices—defied the council’s edicts for territory rulers.
“He wouldn’t.” Even Fionamara’s confidence wavered. “He hasn’t visited. Ever.”
“He’s never summoned me like this,” Antal repeated. Two centuries surviving under his father’s hands had honed him to hunt for tells. Inconsistencies.
Nothing Avroz did was ever without purpose.
Fionamara’s mouth clamped a hard line.
She was silent as she deliberated, delaying her verdict by soaping a towel, scrubbing Antal’s chest. Stubborn woman. But she knew how to weigh hard odds better than anyone.
“Let’s assume, if you do go,” she said, “you could make it quick? Show up, get it over with, leave before he’s any wiser?”
That still sounded too easy.
They finished their bath. Antal returned to Fionamara’s bed, curled amidst the furs. She lay on her side, a deliberate space between them.
Then, a sigh. She rolled into him, nestling her nose to his neck. Antal wrapped his arms around her waist and his tail around her knee, hugging her like a lifeline.
“It will be fine, Antal. We’ll get through this.” In the dark, she traced a finger over his frown. “Yzi vali yzru.” I love you, in daeyari.
He loved her. He trusted her. But…
“Home isn’t easy to evade, Fionamara.”
“Home is where you choose to make it. This is your home now, Antal.”
It was. A better home than he’d had in decades.
But his year with her, his five decades upon the Winter Plane, had been a small fraction of his life.
Two centuries before that, he’d spent on the Twilit Plane.
The thought of returning home, of facing his family again, filled him with a dread that kept him up long past the time Fionamara’s breathing had slipped into the softness of sleep.
And yet, he lay awake even longer, remembering the sweet air of his home Plane. The blush of peach and lavender dusk. The fluttering moths in his mother’s garden. An old yearning he’d never been rid of, an ache to return that defied every fear in his bones.
Antal wasn’t sure he could tell Fionamara in a way she’d understand.