Chapter - 14 Twin Scars

The story of the craters reached the capital.

By the time their party rode back through the palace gates, it had already taken on a shape of its own. Passed hand to hand through market stalls and guardhouses and noble parlors, growing stranger with every telling.

Two mountains obliterated. Open. The Champion walked into a storm and came out the other side untouched. She broke it apart with her bare hands.

They called them “Twin Scars.”

Flare heard the whispers differently this time. Not “the Champion who ran.” Something new.

"Did you hear what she did to that mountain?"

"They say Hercules never did anything like that. Not even once."

"Hercules was different. Gentler. This one—"

The sentence always trailed off before it finished, but Flare didn't need it finished. She understood what came next. Hercules had been half Solmere, people said, his mother's blood softened whatever the title's power might otherwise have made of him, tempering it into love. Flare carried no such softening. Full Solmere, both sides, exactly as her mother had always been so proud to point out.

A demon child, someone had actually said in a hallway two days after the mountain report reached the city, not realizing Flare stood around the corner to.

She hadn't shown anything on her face. She'd learned that much, at least. She told herself, walking away, that it didn't matter what strangers whispered.

***

She stopped going to the training grounds not long after that.

It wasn't a decision she made all at once, more a slow accumulation of reasons to delay. One morning into the next until weeks, then months had passed without her setting foot near the yard at all. She told herself she was resting. She knew, somewhere underneath the excuse, that it was hiding.

It was Denny, the guardsman she'd knocked into a wall a lifetime ago, back when boredom had been her biggest problem, who mentioned in passing while delivering a report to the palace, that Master Orin had taken ill.

“Nothing that serious, I think,” he added quickly, seeing the shift in her face. “The healers say it's just his age catching up to him. He's resting.”

Flare thanked him and said nothing else, but the news suffocated her for the rest of the day like a stone she couldn't put down.

She wanted to go to him. The impulse arrived, and just as quickly tangled itself. Orin had spent a year trying to teach her the one lesson she'd never properly learned—pull your strikes, you're not supposed to be tested every week, that's not the point of what you are—and she had spent that very same year proving, more thoroughly with every passing month, exactly how little of it had actually taken root. He'd wanted her to be a symbol the city could feel safe standing beside. Instead she'd become a demon child, a word that would have broken his heart to hear applied to a student he'd tried so hard to shape.

She couldn't imagine walking into his sickroom now and being anything other than a living confirmation of every fear he'd ever had about her.

She mustered enough courage to go and stood at the edge of the training grounds for a long moment, close to see the wall she'd once put a hole through, still needing repair. And then turned around and went home, unable to make herself cross the last stretch of distance to where he lay sick.

***

The receiving hall's doors stood open when she arrived, voices drifting out and Flare slowed at the threshold, recognizing them.

Lady Borghanai sat across from Flare's mother, elegant and composed in an effortless manner she always seemed to carry herself with. Silver hair catching the afternoon light through the tall windows.

Miriess sat opposite her, upright with visible effort, her expression carrying none of the warmth her guest's did.

“Champion.: Lady Borghanai turned first, offering a warm, genuine smile that reached her pale eyes. “It's good to see you well.”

“Lady Borghanai.” Flare inclined her head, then glanced toward her mother. “Mother.”

Miriess said nothing at all, her attention fixed pointedly on their guest, jaw fixed.

The silence stretched long before her father's voice broke it from the doorway.

“Lady Borghana…” Aldric Solmere stopped mid-stride, clearly not expecting to find her here. Something complicated flickering across his face before he smoothed it into the careful neutrality he wore for most of his household business. Both women rose at his entrance. Miriess slower, leaning heavily on a servant's offered arm to manage it.

“General.” Lady Borghanai inclined her head. “I hoped to have a word, if you have the time.”

“Of course. My study, if the matter's private—”

“Of course it's private,” Miriess cut in, enough poison in her voice to turn every head in the hall, servants included. “He can't even wait to get her alone behind a closed door. Look at him. In front of his own household, in front of his own daughter, and he still can't manage to hide how eager he is.”

The words landed into an awkward silence that felt for a moment like the whole hall had frozen in time. Flare felt heat rush up her neck, mortified at her mother’s words.

Aldric looked at his wife for a long moment with something closer to pity, worn thin from years of exactly this kind of scene.

Lady Borghanai's expression didn't. If the accusation touched her, she gave no sign of it.

“There's no need for a private room,” she said, calm and unbothered, addressing Aldric directly as though Miriess's outburst had simply not occurred. “What I have to say, I'm content to say here.”

A short, brittle argument followed anyway. Aldric insisting she needn't subject herself to it, Miriess insisting just as loudly that she absolutely should, that everyone in this house deserved to hear whatever business truly brought her here uninvited. Lady Borghanai waited it out with visible patience, and when it finally exhausted itself, she simply began.

“I received a letter,” she said, “from an old friend of mine. Sister Aveline, at the temple in Talvane. An elf, like myself, though a convert to their faith some years back.” She drew a folded parchment from within her sleeve, though she didn't offer it to anyone only held it. “She writes rarely, and never without reason…”

“And?” Aldric said, when she paused a moment too long.

Lady Borghanai's eyes moved to Flare, then back to her father, unreadable pupils searching something.

“She's made contact,” Lady Borghanai said, “with several aristocrats in Kaldreth. For protection, she says. Nothing more specific than that. No names. No reason given.” She refolded the letter and tucked it away again. “That's all it says. I thought you should know regardless.”

The hall went quiet again, differently this time. Not with the ugly tension of moments before.