The Courtyard
DALI
The sentinel at Teorin's door did not move when she approached.
Different from the others. Broader. The kind of creature that had been placed rather than stationed, which meant someone had thought about it.
"I wish to see Teorin," she said.
"No, Saren." He spat on the ground between them.
She looked at him. She considered it briefly and decided against it. A bad feed from an unknown creature was dangerous. She did not know what he was and did not have time to find out.
She turned and walked back down the corridor.
She was nearly at her chambers when she heard it.
Laughter.
A man and a woman. Coming from somewhere below, carrying through the way sound carried in Morrath, distorted, arriving from the wrong direction.
She stopped.
The smell hit her a second later.
She stood in the corridor and did not move and felt something happen in her chest that she had not felt in a very long time and had no name for and did not want.
She followed it.
Down the stairs. Through the northern passage. Out through the gate and into the courtyard where the night air was cold and the gardens were nothing but thorns and strange greenery she could not identify in the dark.
The voices were clearer out here. The woman's laugh. A man responding, low and amused.
She moved toward them.
They were sitting on a bench with their backs to her.
The woman she placed immediately. Fiersa, Asharin’s little bird, she thought with a snicker.
She had a drink in her hand, her feet tucked underneath her.
She looked nothing like the loyal servant she usually walked around Darkway pretending to be.
The man beside her had his back to her. The smell was overwhelming. She knew exactly who it was.
Maridale forced her way out. "Turn around," she said, voice gentle.
"No.” Dali forced her way back, the teal returning.
Her hands were shaking. She looked at them and could not make herself look away and could not make herself go forward and stood in the dark of the garden with her hands shaking and told herself it was not possible and understood that it was.
"You," she breathed.
Fiersa turned. Frowned. Started to say something.
He turned around slowly.
He looked at her with an expression that was impossible to read. Surprise, yes, but not the joyful kind. It was also not the horrified kind.
"Dali," he said.
"I thought you were dead," she whispered.
Fiersa's eyes went wide. She looked at her brother. "Oh shit." A pause. "This is her?"
He nodded slowly.
Dali looked at his face. All of it. The years in it. The life she had not been part of. "All these years," she said. "All of it. The planning. The revenge. All of it was—" She stopped. Drew in a breath. "You were thrown into the pits. How did you survive?"
She looked at Fiersa then, her eyes narrowing. "And who is she to you?"
Iavis stood slowly. "I survived because of what I am." He held her eyes. "Fiersa is my sister. We share the same blood. I came back to see her and to retrieve some items."
Dali looked down.
At his hands. At what sat in his lap.
She had not noticed it before. She noticed it now.
A small infant sweater, pale and carefully folded. A matching hat beside it, no larger than her fist.
Her hands began to tremble.
"Who is that for?" Her voice came out quiet.
He said nothing.
"Who is it for, Iavis?"
The ground beneath them shook. Just slightly. The thorns in the garden rattled against each other in the dark.
He made eye contact with her.
"My wife just gave birth to our second child," he said.
Fiersa looked at her brother as though she could not believe he had said it. As though she would have found a different way, any other way.
"I have moved on," he said. "And you should too."
“How could I move on when I thought they killed you? How could I move on when my other half lost her own child? How could I move on when I thought you had rotted somewhere without a proper burial?”
The ground beneath them began to shake.
"Why?" Dali screamed.
The glass in his hand shattered, every piece of it, the ale hitting the stone and the sound of it swallowed immediately by whatever came out of her next, a sound that did not belong to anything human, tearing up through the garden and into the dark above them.
Fiersa grabbed her brother's arm. A flash of wings and they shot upward together, into the sky, and were gone before the sound finished leaving her throat.
She looked up at the sky and laughed, her eyes wild.
An Ivakar. He had never told her that is what he was.
A wife and two children.
Dali stood alone in the garden.
She could not stop laughing despite the tears streaming down her face. She had not known she could do either. She looked down at her own face reflected in a shard of broken glass at her feet and did not recognize what she saw and did not look for long.
She brushed the tears from her face with the back of her hand.
"It doesn't change what we lost," she heard Maridale whisper in her mind. "All the groveling, all the serving I did. All the pretending. All of it still matters. We can still get what we want, and we still are owed revenge. All this did was add another to our list.”
She stood in the dark for a moment longer.
Then she turned and walked back into the castle.
Whatever came next would come next.