Chapter VI | A Lone Lily & the Wolven Woods

“And he keeps going on and on about the Church, but there hasn’t been a lick of evidence to question their loyalty. It’s these damned endwolves…”

Lana stared at Claude curiously and admired how the dust swirled around him in the dusk light, through the rotting wooden frame of this place. Ever since he learned how the people gossiped of their meetings, they decided to limit many of them to here. A quiet site that leaned off the edge of the Midtown, on the verge of falling into the ocean to be lost forever. It was a wooden house that was never finished, where only the foundations and the frame stood, somehow yet to be taken up by the hungry animals that yearned to move up layers. “You’re talkative today,” she decided to say. “How’s Lilya? Any injuries?

The king loosened his tie and wiped the sweat from his neck. “No, they always run when we try and catch them.”

“And they haven’t hurt a single knight or guard?”

“Well no, but—”

“Only JANITORs. And they’ve only stolen from them too. Them and the Church.”

“That’s right…” Claude confirmed, suddenly suspicious. “How do you—”

Lana put a finger to her own lips to hush him, and they fell silent together. Her lips were smooth and slick with chapstick, he noticed, and they trembled into a smile. A smile more nervous than he’d ever seen the confident Lana in the years he’d known her. But he didn’t really know her, he realized. He’d been strung along like a puppet, to this lucky he should’ve never come to trust.

“I am one,” she said. “An endwolf.”

A murder of crows erupted from the forest nearby, their shadows splashing across the king’s face as his lips parted and froze in place. He considered grabbing her then and there to throw in an iron cell, but for some reason, his body reacted first. A foot backwards, like he were to slip from the truth and run. Him? Run? And before he could do anything else, she lifted her skirt a touch to reveal a thigh holster, where she unsheathed an ironpale dagger, identical in all but material to the one he took four years ago when they first met. She held the blade to her own neck, drawing a thin line of blood across it, harmless but deep red.

“They’re my family.” Her eyes were locked onto his, and he couldn’t look away. Just a simple hazel, trembling in the light and dust. “I’ll take you to them. I’ll take you if you promise not to hurt them. If you listen to them.”

Strangely, he smiled then. Lana’s brow crinkled in a brief confusion until the Claude who stood a few feet away stood then not even a breath’s distance apart, and the knife was gone, shattered into pieces and thrown out through the empty window and down into the ocean several thousand feet below.

“I’ll promise,” he said, breath like saffron. His hand gripped hers so tight she thought it might break, and her eyes tinged with tears. “But what makes you so sure I won’t break that promise?

From his wrist, she noticed, still dangled that woven bracelet she had given to him the week they met. How did that make her feel? Happy? Or disappointed? “Why are you still wearing that raggedy thing,” she wanted to say. “How can you trust me so little, yet so much at the same time?” Instead, she kept her smile, and the tears left. “Would you really kill a pretty girl like me?”

“Maybe not, but I could kill everyone else.”

Standing so close, she was all too conscious of his warmth. His knee pressed against her stomach and pinned her to the pine balustrade behind her. He had already loosened his grip on her wrist, but it still ached, and she could tell it would bruise. And the skin of her neck stung where she had cut herself. “If that ever comes to pass, Your Grace, then I would kill myself to join them.”

In twilight, Claude paced the northern loggia of the Great Spire. The lights across the garden lit up in response to the coming dark, and the tall fountain nearby flecked him with specks of cold violet. The Holy Lady stood upon this fountain as a statue, watching Claude with her keen marble eyes.

The king’s thoughts were too rapid and too rabid to catch in detail, but no doubt they all revolved around Lana. It wasn’t until his High Lejindir approached him that the thoughts receded.

She came slowly at first, from the other end of the loggia. She would stop and face out every now and then, finger the hilt of the rapier at her waist, then walk a few steps more. Claude felt no guilt for having stared at her the entire way. Her tendency to gaze at the ground made her lashes seem longer than usual, and her skin paler in the light of the nighttime garden. She was still dressed in her RINGKNIGHT garb, of course. It wouldn’t be until Claude took to bed that she could retire herself, and be replaced by a more nocturnal knight of her order. The Leviathan RINGKNIGHT, usually. Sir Kinziru Alakko once admitted to him that sleep oft struggled to find him in the night. And the new member, Sir Sam of House Embers, was all too eager to find a role he could call his, so volunteered too for the night watch. He was barely fifteen, but his betters had vouched for him with such sincerity that Lilya felt she had no choice but to allow it. With six of the nine RINGKNIGHTs under 20 years of age, Claude’s order was by far the most green in history. He didn’t mind. They would grow into their roles, as he would his.

“Good evening, my king,” she said. “Beautiful skies tonight, no?”

Claude came closer to her and touched the fabric of her garb. “The uniform suits you well, my lady.” He dropped his hand from her arm to her waist, where he gripped the hilt of her rapier and pulled it from its sheath. She clambered forward to retrieve it, but he danced away, light on his feet.

He laughed a little as he tossed it up and around, swirling it like one would a toy. When he turned back to the lady, she had both hands pressed against her face, the skin of it burning red with embarrassment.

“Don’t take it too harsh,” he said. “You don’t fear me, and I find comfort in that. I was never too fond of my father’s mantra. Fear everything, he used to say. Fear everything and you may survive. I do find it ironic that he ended up dead anyway. And mother followed him into that early grave, fearing everything, even him.” He turned his attention back to the rapier. “It has a rootsteel tip. Have you given it a name?”

“I haven’t.”

Upon closer examination, it seemed to be a modified training blade, and the tip was welded on with little delicacy. A cheap job, no doubt, using a scrap of rootsteel some craftsman must’ve spent a month chipping off a support beam. “Think this nameless blade can kill me?”

“I-If I’m not mistaken, Your Grace, even a rootsteel tip can’t pierce your grade of paleplate with human strength alone.”

“In that case, you have other methods. Do you remember what those are, lady knight?”

Lilya looked to the ground again. “The growth of paleplate can only begin at the extremities and at the chest and skull. Therefore, if I aim for an alternate organ—”

“My augments can grow from any cell on my body,” Claude said. “How else?”

“...The growth of paleplate can only begin in two places at once. Strike thrice quicker than the growth, and I can pierce the flesh.”

“Very good,” Claude said. He tossed the blade back to her, which she caught by the handle. “The only problem is that mine can grow in four places at once. Can you strike five times in a single breath?”

Lilya seemed perturbed. “Maybe with my speed and dex triggers maxed.”

“Try it then,” he said. “A spar, just like old times.”

Lilya felt her hands sweat at the suggestion. The comfortable leather grip of her rapier no longer felt so comfortable, even though she had owned it for most of her life. Ever since their first spar. “He doesn’t remember,” she thought, a little saddened.

The Lady Lilya Caecilius had wanted to be a knight for as long as she could remember. She was only four when her older sibling, Aquila, had been named one at thirteen, and they appeared so regal to her. So noble, so beautiful. It didn’t become known to her until much later that Aquila was in fact a boy, her brother. They had both gotten their long lashes and straight black hair from their mother, so the thought never came to her. And with this realization came the knowledge that not once in Purilyn history had a lady been named a knight. Not once, not even back in the records of Old Luridia.

And Aquila never let her train with him and his friends. Not since her father started to dress her in skirts and colors. The more apparent it became that she was a girl and that he was a boy, the further they grew apart. She could scarcely recall what his voice sounded like anymore, and now he had gone off with Nico the Steel to become a HUNTER without a word of farewell.

When Claude and Lilya had first met, they were both only eight years old, and they watched her brother spar with his friends in the courtyard of their manse. Aquila took on his friends, one by one, until it was clear that he far outmatched all of them. One by one, they went down, groaning in pain at having been smacked with the knight’s dull training blade.

“Let me try,” Claude had said. He’d been watching opposite to Lilya, who sat beside the armament rack as usual. She had never known her brother to be cruel, but he must’ve taken insult to this child issuing a challenge to him, and spat in the dirt in response.

“Go home, little lordling,” he said. “This is no place for urchins.”

Claude hopped over to one of the fallen friends and picked up his blade. “You look more the urchin to me, sir knight.”

Lilya noted that he spoke like a lord despite his age. Her handmaidens would always chastise her for speaking unlike a lady.

“You’re Lord Edwin’s kid?” Aquila confirmed. “Fine, I’ll take you. I only ask that you not cry when I knock you down.”

Claude tested the weight of the blade, knocking it against the toes of his boot before lifting its heft up in a ready stance. “Oh, I won’t cry. Maybe I’ll bruise.”

And the two crashed against each other, one boy twice the size of the other. It lasted longer than any other bout that Lilya had spectated before, and she soon found herself on her feet, hands clenched in suspense. The two were evenly matched. Minutes passed, one after the other, until it became apparent that their skill had lasted longer than their breath. The two leaned on their swords, dead tired and out of air.

“I concede,” her brother had said. “You’re a little monster.”

Then their father called for him, and he gave the lordling one last scowl before dragging himself off to see the Lord August.

Lilya waddled up to the Morsylis boy she had just met for the first time then. Breathing heavily, he still leaned on his sword, so she kicked it out from under him and watched him tumble to the ground. She found a morbid sort of amusement from watching him collapse and the dirt swirl up around him. Then she felt guilty and worried that he would tell on her, but he only laughed.

“Was I in your way, my lady?”

“No,” she said, squatting down beside him. “How did you do that? No one ever beats my brother.”

“That’s because your brother never fights anyone who can beat him.”

Lilya poked at his sides and his arms and found they were surprisingly soft. He did seem to struggle a little, holding that sword up for so long. “You’re just a little boy. I bet I could beat you.”

“Have you held a sword before?”

“I have. A while ago. But Father says it’s unbecoming for a lady to learn the blade.”

Claude sat back up, his breath come back to him, and clambered over to the armament rack, where he sorted through all sorts of weaponry until he decided on one and tossed it over to Lilya. “Take this one. My father says even ladies can look pretty with a weapon like that. It takes little strength to wield.”

It was just a training rapier, a scraggly little thing with no tip and no edge. But when she picked it up, she felt like a knight. She kept it since then, refitting it as she grew until it became what it was now, a nameless blade that Claude had touched again for the first time in eleven years.

“I’ll name my sword now,” she said, standing across from him in the loggia, twilight turning to night. “After the boy who first gave it to me and made me who I am today.”

“And who is that?”

“Claude.”

He seemed surprised at the sound of his own name, so Lilya couldn’t help but wrench her lips upwards in a satisfied smile. They exchanged no words then, and he unsheathed his own blade, a little rootsteel knife he kept at his belt.

“A single breath,” she thought to herself.

Her augments rattled into activation across her body, in her spine and the muscles of her arms and legs and fingers until she was certain that they couldn’t be pushed further. For this feat, she needed more than that, though. Which of her senses to sacrifice, she wondered. She already sacrificed taste and smell, so perhaps sight next. Her eyes started to dim when she thought it, and her joints then felt like springs, coiled up so tight she feared her limbs might explode off her. One more moment, and she could scarcely see at all, and that’s when she struck.

Her arm didn’t explode. It felt perfect. Like her body the gun, her sword the bullet, she thrusted forth into Claude’s chest, where she felt the metal thud of her rapier striking his paleplate. One. Already, her arm was back and forward again before her brain had realized it. Two. Another thud, another spot somewhere else on his body. Again, and three. She was getting faster and he hadn’t yet moved, so she closed her eyes and relied on her hearing alone. Four. A single breath was but a second long, a second that hadn’t yet passed but was about to when the fifth thrust came forward.

She had done it. Five thrusts in less than a second, enough to bypass even the most advanced augments. Enough to bypass Claude’s. For a moment, she worried that she had seriously injured him, though she did aim for somewhere non-vital in her final strike. She opened her eyes and realized that she was staring at the ceiling of the loggia. When had that happened? Another moment and the rest of her senses came back to her, and she finally realized that her body was limp, and that Claude was holding her up, knife against her throat.

“You are spectacular,” he said, a whisper in her ear, and she went limp for real.

When she opened her eyes again, it was night for true and Claude sat along the terracotta balustrade, her head leaned against his leg. “What happened?”

“Oh, I let you strike me four times and then moved to catch you when you fell. Did you notice you started to go faster near the end there? That’s about when you sacrificed your sense of balance, your sense of temperature, etc. That’s a nasty trick you’ve learned there, Lilya. It could get you killed one day.”

She pulled her legs in and hugged her knees. “It’s the only way I could keep up with everyone.”

“I didn’t choose you for your skill, you know,” Claude said. “Although I’m not upset about it.”

“Then—”

“And it wasn’t because of us, either.” Claude leaned back until he slid off the balustrade and stared up off the edge of the loggia into the night sky. “I don’t remember a lot about us, to be honest. I remember bits and pieces. Call it amnesia, if you want. Could you remind me? What we were.”

“It’s hardly amnesia,” Lilya laughed, rubbing her fingers together. “We were children. Most people would forget.” Her skin flushed as she let the memories flow. “What I remember most was waiting at our front door for you to come back and visit again. It wasn’t very comfortable there, and my handmaidens would always fret at how I dirtied myself, laying there for so long each day. Most days, you would come. Usually in the afternoon, after your studies had been done and you had some time to kill. I’m sure that’s all it was for you. Idle time.

“At first, you wanted to prove to my brother that he wasn’t the strongest. After that, you came to fulfill an obligation to needy little me, who begged to be your disciple. I begged and begged from the moment you first kicked me down in our first bout. Train me. Teach me. Kick me down again as much as you want. I want to get better. But as each year passed, you came to visit less and less. By the time I was thirteen, the same age my brother was when we first met, you only came once a month. Then not a single time again after that. And I still waited. Oh, it was silly. Two months would pass in my fourteenth year, and I knew that you had left for good. I just knew it, but still… My handmaidens set up a sofa in the place where I waited. A comfy little sofa just for me to wait for you. My prince. And oh, how their admonishments turned into teasings. Finally, I acted the lady. A sweet little lady who waited for her lovely lord to return to her, lovesick and heartbroken all at once. Yet hopeful, still.

“I’ve had plenty of time to think about you since then. Do you know how shocked I was when our eyes met in the Throne Hall that day? And you named me your lejindir? It felt like a dream, Claude, it did. We hadn’t spoken for four years, years that felt like decades, and suddenly you named me the position closest to you. It was a dream. It still feels like a dream. Seeing you up close like this, everyday.”

Claude stayed silent for a while, long enough to where you couldn’t hear much aside from the flowing of the fountain, the nightbirds sing in the distance, the chirping of the bugwings. And finally the sound of their breathing, exhale and inhale, warm wisps in the winter chill.

“I’ve never told anyone this,” he finally said. “But I can’t imagine anyone better to tell it to.”