Chapter 120: Perfect Balance

Something moved at the edge of her sight, by the doors Cassius had just slammed through. A trolley rolled across the threshold, its wheels ticking over the grain of the floor, pushed by two maids in grey linen and white caps.

The taller maid had a copper braid stuffed badly under her cap. The other kept her chin down, and her cap did nothing for the silver crescent on her forehead.

Seluna and Sylrena. What the hell were they doing?

Lilith lifted her cup and drank. Maybe it was a local custom. Princesses waiting tables on the fourth of Aura, some rite nobody had put in a book yet. A strange one, if so.

She set the cup down and turned back to Gaearien. "I'll likely be leaving in a few days."

Gaearien's knife paused over a slice of pear.

"Much as I'd like to stay." Lilith turned the cup on its saucer. "Your hospitality has been more than I expected. But I have other matters waiting at home. I'd prefer to carry back something more than a promise to ignore Solarian demands, though I'll take that gladly. A rudimentary trade route wouldn't hurt anyone."

"You'll have an answer before you go." Gaearien finished the cut and laid the knife across her plate. She tipped her head toward the doors. "For now, it seems we have an interruption."

The trolley had stopped halfway down the table. Seluna and Sylrena left it there and came on, Seluna in front.

Gaearien sighed through her nose. "What brought you here? Seluna, I expected it of you." Her eyes went past her daughter. "But why did Sylrena come as well?"

Seluna dropped into a bow, the cap sliding toward one ear. "I apologise, Mother, before anything else. Sylrena had an important message. Only she couldn't come straight to you, and I was grounded, so..."

Sylrena bowed lower and stayed there.

Lilith watched the two of them, the crooked cap and the stiff back. The disguises, the trolley, the mother at the head of the table. Some show from Earth, maybe, one she'd had on in the background years ago. The name wouldn't come.

"And this couldn't wait," Gaearien said.

"Well..." Seluna glanced sideways at Sylrena, who had come up from her bow and was staring at the tablecloth. "It seemed important enough."

Gaearien pressed two fingers to her temple. "Fine. What is it?"

Seluna's eyes went to Lilith and stayed there. "It's for you only."

"Fine, fine." Gaearien beckoned with two fingers. "Come here." She turned in her chair. "Lune, would you take a few steps away?"

Lilith lifted the napkin from her lap and wiped the corners of her mouth. She folded it once, laid it beside her plate, and walked to the window. Sunlight came through the glass and lay in green squares over the floorboards. She kept her back half-turned and her hands loose at her sides.

Seluna bent to her mother's ear. Her lips moved fast. Sylrena hovered at her shoulder.

Gaearien laughed.

It started low and got away from her. She put a hand flat on the table, and the cutlery rattled on her plate. Her shoulders shook under the midnight silk.

Seluna straightened. Sylrena's mouth came open. Both of them stared at the Queen.

"Lune." Gaearien waved her back without looking, still catching her breath. "Come, sit."

Lilith crossed the floor and took her chair again. She left the napkin where it lay.

Gaearien turned to the two not quite so maids, who now stood shoulder to shoulder beside the table. Seluna's cap had slipped the rest of the way, and she held it crushed in one hand.

"You did all of this," Gaearien said, "to tell me something I already knew."

Sylrena's head came up. "You mean we did this for nothing?"

Sylrena's face went pale, then pink to the ears, and her fingers found the seam of her apron.

"Certainly not for nothing." Gaearien dabbed under one eye with her knuckle. "I had a good laugh."

Seluna brightened at once. "So everything's fine? We can go?"

"Oh, no. No, no, no." Gaearien picked up her knife again and speared the pear. "You still left your room when you were told not to. Your confinement runs until the end of the month."

"Nooo." Seluna's head went back, and the crushed cap dangled from her fist. "Mother, that's twenty-six days."

"Then you can count them."

Gaearien chewed, swallowed, and turned her eyes on Sylrena.

Sylrena gulped.

"As for you." Gaearien set the knife down. "You were roped into my daughter's antics, so I'll keep my eyes closed this time. Next time, make sure you aren't. In fact, try to talk her out of them."

Sylrena bowed so fast the copper braid came loose from her cap. "Thank you, Your Majesty. I will."

"She won't," Seluna muttered.

"I will," Sylrena said to the floor.

Lilith pressed her lips together. She picked up the cup, found it empty, and put it down again. Gaearien caught the movement and raised one silver brow.

"Your Majesty." Lilith pushed her chair back and stood. "I think it may be time for me to take my leave after all. Your family deserves the room."

"Coward," Gaearien said.

"Diplomat." Lilith smoothed her skirt and inclined her head. "Thank you for the meal."

She stepped around the trolley on her way to the doors. Seluna's eyes followed her the whole way, wide, the cap still balled in her hand. Lilith nodded to the guards, and they drew the doors open for her.

*

The borrowed apron lay across the foot of the bed. Seluna had pulled it off on the walk back and balled it in her fist, and now it sat where she had thrown it, half on the furs and half on the floor. Outside the carved door, two pairs of boots had stopped and stayed. One of them shifted its weight every so often, and the floorboards answered.

She sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed and pulled a moonstone bead loose from her braid.

"A month." She rolled the bead between her thumb and finger. "She laughed, and then she gave me a month. The whole of Aura, Syl."

Sylrena was sitting on the low chest under the map, still in the kitchen smock, scrubbing at a reddened knuckle where the dishwater had got into a cut. "Given what we did, a month is nothing. It's barely a slap on the wrist."

"We delivered breakfast."

"We climbed out of a royal window, stole uniforms, lied to the head housekeeper, and walked a trolley past the Queen's guard." Sylrena held up one finger for each item and ran out of patience before she ran out of fingers. "And you stay shut in here longer than that when nobody makes you."

"That's different." Seluna pulled a pillow into her lap and punched its middle flat. "That's when I find something interesting to research. Or paint. I choose it."

"Then find something to research or paint."

Seluna opened her mouth to argue and stopped. The easel stood folded behind the shrine, where Mona had last hidden it. A jar of brushes sat beside it, the bristles stiff with old blue. She looked from the jar to Sylrena.

"You're right."

"I usually am."

"I'm going to paint Lune." Seluna came up onto her knees on the bed, and the furs slid toward the edge. "Well. Lilith. The real one, horns and all. Hehehe." The laugh came out of her nose. "You'll ask her for me. Ask if she'll pose."

Sylrena's fist opened. One of the pins dropped and ticked on the floorboards. "You can't be serious."

"Deadly serious."

"She's the Demon Empress, Seluna. The one from the legends." Sylrena crouched, found the pin by feel, and stood again. "What if she does something to you?"

"Mother wasn't worried." Seluna settled back onto her heels. "You heard her laugh. She said I told her nothing new. If Mother sat across a breakfast table from her and laughed, it should be fine."

Sylrena looked at the door, then at the map on the wall with its pins along the Wastes border, then back at Seluna. She let out a long breath through her nose. "Fine. I'll ask. Once."

"You're the best." Seluna threw the pillow at her.

Sylrena caught it against her chest and did not throw it back. "And you remember that Lune, Lilith, whatever she calls herself today, is still a demon. A succubus, on top of that. You saw what she did to Thaelon without even trying."

"Yeah, yeah. I know." Seluna lay back across the furs and looked up at the fungus glowing in the seam of the ceiling. "Still. She can't be that bad. Not compared to that human diplomat."

"Ugh." Sylrena tossed the pillow onto the bed. It landed against Seluna's knee. "Don't remind me. He glared at Pellwen as though she'd poured the bottle on him on purpose. If it weren't for the risk of an international incident, I'd tell him exactly what I think of him."

"You'd tell him with an arrow."

"I'd tell him with words. Then an arrow."

Seluna grinned at the ceiling. The guard's boot scraped again outside. She rolled onto her side and propped her head on her hand. "So. You and Thaelon."

Sylrena went back to the cap. There were no pins left in it. She turned it over anyway and smoothed the linen. "Not that good."

"He's cured, though."

"He's healed." Sylrena folded the cap in half. "I just don't know."

"Maybe you need to see him shirtless again."

"Stop it." Sylrena didn't smile. Her eyes had gone a flat amber. "I mean it. This isn't a joke. It's like he's afraid to let anyone near him now. Any of us. Like whatever she did taught him not to want things."

"Then talk to him." She said it more quietly. "Actually talk, Syl. If you keep it shut up inside like you have for thirty years, it never gets fixed. He won't guess. He's spent a season with somebody else's wanting in his head. He's not going to go looking for yours."

Sylrena didn't answer. She picked the cap up again, unfolded it, and looked at the crease she'd made. Her mouth pulled to one side.

"You know what," she said. "You're right." She set the cap down flat. "And I might have been avoiding him too. A little. Since the bridge."

"Go on, my star-bright Syl." Seluna punched the air above her knees.

Sylrena sighed, and her shoulders dropped with it. "I don't know how you manage to be so immature and so mature in the same breath."

Seluna smirked and stretched both legs out across the furs, toes pointed at the easel.

"I'm just perfectly balanced."

*

Dúrinel drew the oiled cloth down the upper limb of the bow, from the nock to the grip, and turned it over to do the belly. Below the knot of bark where he sat, the morning traffic had started on the branches. A water carrier passed with two buckets on a yoke, rangers walked in pairs, and a child dragged a stick along the railing of a woven bridge. None of them looked up. In eleven days, nobody had.

He checked the string for fraying at the serving. Clean.

It was a shame. He set the thought down beside the cloth. The purse waiting at the end of this would cover what it had to cover.

She walked the eastern gardens after first light, with her guards three turns of the stair behind. At midday she rested at the pool beneath the willow terrace. At dusk she went up alone to the platform where the moonflowers opened, and she stayed until the lights came on along the rails. Her spot was forty-one paces from his ledge, and no wind reached it at that hour.

Tomorrow, then.

He slid the bow into its case and tied the cord. By the time anyone in the tree started shouting, he would be past the fog.