Chapter 22
Thalia takes us to a tavern.
I don't know why this surprises me. The woman runs a city, commands a defense force, and carries the weight of fifty-three apocalypses on her shoulders. Of course she drinks. I would be worried if she didn't.
The Root and Vine sits on the edge of the second ring, grown into the base of a wide tower where three major pathways converge.
The entrance is a set of double doors carved from dark wood, and the sounds coming through them are unmistakable: music, voices, laughter, and the distinct clatter of glasses being filled and emptied that is apparently universal across realms.
"This is the most popular gathering hall in the Verdance," Thalia says, pushing through the doors. "The city built it during the third cycle. It has survived every siege since."
"The tavern survived," I repeat.
"People protect what matters to them."
Fair enough.
The interior is warm, crowded, and louder than anything I have heard since we arrived.
Long tables run the length of the main room, built from the same living wood as everything else, their surfaces worn smooth by decades of elbows and spilled drinks.
The walls glow with amber moss, and from the ceiling, clusters of bioluminescent flowers hang in heavy bunches, casting the room in a light somewhere between candlelit and golden hour.
Musicians are playing in the far corner.
Three fae play stringed instruments and a drummer keeping time on a set of hollow root-pods that sound remarkably like a bodhran.
The music is fast, bright, and heavily Irish in a way that makes no sense for a city in an alternate dimension, but makes me feel immediately at home.
Peeble lands on my shoulder and surveys the scene with the air of a food critic evaluating a new establishment. "Adequate. The lighting is theatrical, the crowd is lively, and I see at least three beverages that appear to be on fire. I approve."
We take a table near the back. Thalia orders for us, speaking to the server in the Verdance's language, and within minutes, heavy clay mugs arrive filled with something amber and faintly glowing.
I take a sip. It tastes like honey, apples, and a third thing I can't identify but warms my chest from the inside out.
"What is this?" I ask.
"Root ale," Thalia says. "Brewed from the Heartwood's runoff. The tree produces a sap that ferments naturally. The city's been drinking it for centuries."
"It's delicious."
"It's also significantly stronger than anything you've had before. Pace yourself."
"She won't," Kaelren says from beside me, because he knows me.
"I absolutely will," I say, and take another long drink.
Kaelren sits close enough that his thigh presses against mine under the table.
He hasn't said much since we arrived, but he's not uncomfortable.
He's watching the room with the quiet alertness that never fully turns off, cataloging exits and sight lines out of habit, but his body is relaxed.
His arm rests on the bench behind me. His corruption marks are dim, settled; the dark lines along his forearms are barely visible in the amber light.
Thalia sits across from us, and within ten minutes, I witness something I wasn't prepared for. She relaxes.
It happens gradually. The first mug of ale loosens the set of her jaw.
The second takes the stiffness out of her shoulders.
By the third, she's leaning back against the wall with her legs stretched out under the table, and the mask she wears every day, the stoic commander, the disciplined leader, slips just enough that I can see the person underneath.
She's young. Not in years, not in experience, but in the way she laughs when Peeble tells a story about Kaelren getting lost in the tunnels of Iteration Ten. Her eyes crinkle at the corners, the same way mine do, and her laugh comes out startled and full, like she forgot she could make that sound.
"I did not get lost," Kaelren says.
"He absolutely got lost," Peeble counters. "He wandered in circles for forty-five minutes, refusing to ask the local wildlife for directions. A mushroom tried to help him. A mushroom, Kaelren. It was pointing. With its cap. And you walked past it. Twice."
"I was following the Rootline."
"You were following your ego, which, as we've established, has its own gravitational field."
Thalia laughs again, and the sound makes my chest ache.
This is what she doesn't get. This is what all the cycles of fighting has cost her.
Not just the people she's lost, not just the sleep and the stress and the weight.
The laughter. The ease. The simple, stupid joy of sitting in a tavern with people you love and listening to a beetle roast your father.
I want to give her more of this. I want to give her a lifetime of it.
The music shifts to something faster, and people start leaving their tables to dance in the open space near the musicians.
The dancing is energetic, communal, a lot of spinning and stomping and grabbing the nearest person to whirl them in a circle.
It reminds me of the barn dances Grandma Jo used to drag me to when I was a kid.
Less hay, more glowing moss, but the same energy.
"You should dance," Thalia says, nodding toward the floor.
"I should have another drink."
"You should dance," she repeats, and the look she gives me is warm and firm and very much her father's daughter. "The city celebrates before Bloomfall because it might not get the chance after. This is how the Verdance says I'm still here."
That gets me.
I grab Kaelren's hand. "Come on."
"I don't dance."
"You do now."
He lets me pull him from the bench with a resigned expression. I drag him into the crowd, and the music catches us, and I spin into him, and his hands find my waist, and we move.
He's a better dancer than he'll ever admit.
His body follows the beat with the same instinctive precision he brings to a fight, and when I spin away, he pulls me back, and when I press close, his hand slides to my lower back and holds me there.
The amber light turns everything gold. The music is fast and bright and joyful, and for three full minutes, we're just two people dancing in a tavern.
Then someone taps my shoulder.
I turn. A tall fae man is standing behind me, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, with the kind of effortless confidence that comes from being the best-looking person in most rooms. His marks are vivid green, pulsing with the easy glow of someone well-connected to the Rootline, and he's smiling at me with a smile that is approximately sixty percent charm and forty percent audacity.
"You dance well," he says. "I'm Krag. May I have the next one?"
I open my mouth to politely decline, but Kaelren's hand is already on my hip. Not gripping. Resting. The way a predator rests a paw on something it has decided belongs to it.
"No," Kaelren says.
Krag looks at him. Looks at the hand on my hip. Looks back at me. His smile doesn't waver. "I was asking her."
"And I answered."
"Kaelren," I say, putting a hand on his chest. "It's fine."
"It's not fine. He's looking at you like you're a dish he's considering ordering."
Krag raises both hands in a gesture of mock innocence. "I was only asking for a dance. No harm intended."
"No harm will be necessary," Kaelren says pleasantly, "as long as you walk away in the next three seconds."
"Kaelren." I press harder against his chest. He doesn't move. The corruption marks along his jaw have started to pulse, which is the fae equivalent of a dog's hackles rising. "Dial it down."
Krag, who clearly has more confidence than survival instinct, turns to me. "Your mate is quite territorial."
"He's not my mate, he's my..." I stop. He is, actually. Technically. As of a conversation in a war office that ended with a throne and several other things. "He's mine. And you should probably listen to him, because the last person who tried this lost the use of a hand."
Krag's eyebrows rise. He looks at Kaelren with renewed assessment, taking in the corruption marks, the silver eyes.
"My apologies," Krag says. "I didn't realize."
"Now you do," Kaelren says.
Krag leaves. Kaelren watches him go with the focused attention of a hawk tracking a mouse that has wisely returned to its hole.
"You are ridiculous," I tell him.
"He wasn't asking you to dance. He was testing the perimeter.
" His hand slides from my hip to the small of my back, pulling me flush against him.
His mouth drops to my ear. "There is no perimeter.
There is no test. You are mine, and everyone in this room knows it, and if anyone else walks over here and asks you to do anything that involves their hands on your body, I will make Fenric look like a gentle warning. "
The heat that goes through me at those words is deeply inappropriate for a public setting.
"You're insane," I say.
"You like it."
"I hate that I like it."
He almost smiles. Almost. And then he spins me, and we're dancing again, and his arms are around me, and the music plays on.
Two hours later, the tavern is louder, warmer, and significantly more chaotic.
Peeble has found the Root ale. I don't know how a beetle drinks ale, and I don't want to know, but they are currently standing on the bar, delivering what appears to be an impromptu speech about the philosophical implications of cross-dimensional travel to a crowd of increasingly baffled fae.
They are gesturing wildly with one foreleg while the other clutches the rim of a thimble-sized mug.
"And furthermore," Peeble announces, their voice carrying across the entire tavern, "the fundamental error in most interdimensional navigation is the assumption that time is linear.
Time is not linear. Time is a drunk bee trying to find its way home.
It goes sideways, it goes backward, it occasionally stops to pollinate something irrelevant, and it arrives at its destination only by accident. "