This will be fun, p.2
This Will Be Fun, page 2
Next in her heroic legacy would be this robe!
She sprung for the servants’ stairs. Even wine drunk, in mismatched boots, Beatrice no-longer-de-Noughton was nimble. She mounted the winding stairs swiftly, swung right, followed familiar corridors under limbs of the oak—until, just like she’d planned, she found herself in her old room.
She was startled by the unpleasant feeling in her gut the moment she stepped inside. How did she not notice it in years of living here? Fortunately, the room provided her the perfect distraction.
Her pink robe, draped over Robert’s bed.
She snatched up the soft garment. Pulling on the sleeves, she welcomed their sudden warmth. It was perfect. Reveling in the enchanted comfort, she strolled out of the room—
Only to find footmen spilling from the servants’ stairs. Well, she had not gone unseen, then.
Following the footmen were—worse—guards. She was too drunk for guards. While she could not fight them, however, she could flee. Rerouting, she wove through the house’s hallways. Finding the main stairwell wasn’t difficult. Her robe snug on her shoulders, Beatrice descended the stairs.
From her wine fog, she suddenly remembered why she had avoided the main stairs in the first place. They were crowded with guests celebrating the end of Beatrice’s marriage, sipping wine from the manor’s fanciest glasses. Her head ducked, Beatrice evaded the guards while keeping herself inconspicuous. Until—
Halfway down the steps, she collided with someone. Someone large. Someone male. Someone whose jostled drink flung flecks of wine into her soapy hair. Well, she couldn’t look worse.
“Shit, sorry—” she started.
“Beatrice.”
The sound of her name—in that voice—stunned her motionless like not even the realm’s darkest magic could.
She looked up. For the first time in ten years, her gaze met with the eyes of her closest-guarded fantasies, his irises crystal blue like the waters of the Galibrand Strait, though the storminess in them held more in common with the cruelest winds of Mount Mythria. The years had not drawn on him. He was intolerably handsome.
“There you are,” Clare Grandhart said.
There you are? Like he was looking for her? Here, at Robert’s banquet? Or here, in front of him, despite the years and the distance they carefully maintained, entrenched in rage neither of them would ever forsake? There you are, at last. She didn’t know.
Oh, she was struggling. Only resilient instincts, combined with the power of inebriation, kept her coherent in the face of the man who’d occupied her dreams and shattered her heart. “Did you expect to find me at the party being held in honor of my eviction?” she said witheringly.
With her own words, she faltered, realizing. When her eyes went wide with indignation, Clare smiled, politely grim or perhaps grimly polite.
“Did you journey here to celebrate my divorce?” she shouted.
In fact, the notion of handsome eligible men coming to this party eager to cheer her singlehood rather pleased her. What did not was the idea of this man. If there was one person in Mythria who had no right to revel in Beatrice’s new relationship status, it was Clare Grandhart.
He watched her carefully. When she shouted, she could have sworn she caught something flicker in his expression.
Unfortunately, her exclamation had the one result Beatrice did not wish. The musicians halted with resinous squeaks of their strings. Everyone stared. Here was Beatrice of the Four, in her favorite enchanted robe, standing drunk, uninvited, in the middle of her ex-husband’s banquet.
Whatever emotion crossed Clare’s expression was gone in fleeting moments. While the guests gawked, he only shrugged. “I was invited to a nobleman’s party,” he offered with unconvincing nonchalance. “If I happened to notice the name and the neighborhood on the invitation . . . well . . .” Once more, his warmthless smile. “Your ex-husband’s idea of roasted grawk likely wouldn’t have justified the journey. Commemorating your unhappiness, however . . .”
She gaped. Not in surprise, exactly. Nothing Clare was saying contradicted the way she understood them to have left their ruined relationship. She’d just never expected to feel his unforgiving disregard in person. Why end their decade of spiteful silence now? She could hardly believe the golden-haired, glaring ghost of her past was here.
“You and Robert should form a club,” she returned. “Beatrice’s Greatest Mistakes. You could wear sashes.” The words tasted deliciously bitter on her tongue. It was unconscionably tempting to keep going, to open up old wounds on the staircase of her freshest injury. To see just how much she could hurt.
Clare leaned forward, like he, too, was pulled to the pain pulsing between them. To yell, to curse, to clench, to dig his fingers in deep, to—
He glanced to the side. Conjurists were conjuring their image, preserving the way their heads leaned together forever. It would reach Mythria’s gossip pamphlets forthwith, she knew. The scribes would love this. The Four’s contentious couple, reunited and . . . fighting.
Curious or not, masochistically or otherwise, Beatrice did not want to deal with conjurists. She stepped back, forgetting she was on the stairs.
Clare caught her.
The closeness hit her white-hot, hurtling her past and present into one impossible collision. How could his hand, on her for only one steadying instant, feel exactly the way she remembered when everything else was devastatingly different?
Then he released her. The moment was over, its hint of chivalry—of fucking compassion—erased. In its place, however, Beatrice was darkly delighted to notice him uncomfortable. It felt like points scored in a game she didn’t understand.
While she waited, Clare squared his shoulders. His demeanor, she noted, was changing. Inexplicably, he was putting on something like formality. It fit him like poorly smithed armor.
“You—look well,” he said, standing straighter for their spectators.
Beatrice knew Sir Clare cared for his celebrity more than he cared for anything or anyone. The three of them had been offered knighthoods in recognition of their quest. Beatrice wanted no involvement with the guilt-ridden spectacle. Elowen had by then practically vanished from the realm. Only Clare showed up—strutting and smiling for every scribesheet.
Beatrice, however, cared nothing for the scribesheets. She didn’t then, and she didn’t now. She wouldn’t play nice just so he could look gallant. “Do I, Clare?” She gestured to her pink robe, to the calamity of her hair. “Do I look well?”
“I didn’t say you were dressed well . . . but you—” He coughed. “You’re lovely as ever.”
The compliment soured her stomach more than too much wine. How dare he try to be nice to her in front of an audience. What an absolute scoundrel.
“Same old Clare Grandhart. Enjoy the party,” she said loudly, intending to leave him behind for the second time in her life.
She stepped successfully down the stairs while everyone watched. Beatrice heard murmurs of “Claretrice,” which made her want to shrivel up. She’d on occasion heard the “couple name” Mythria’s popular scribes had coined for her and Clare’s unfortunate liaison during their quest, like they were shadow play stars or something. It grated on her, one more way her heartbreak had become nothing but the source of others’ entertainment.
The herald in the great hall’s entrance was likewise struggling with the surprise of her presence. “Esteemed guests,” he started unsurely, speaking to the crowd. “Lady Beatrice of the Four, hero of the realm!”
With her confidence starting to ebb, Beatrice reminded herself she’d faced worse. She stopped and managed to curtsy. “Just ‘hero of the realm’ is fine,” she said loudly. “No longer a lady.”
When she surveyed the room, she caught the eye of Robert, standing motionless near the roast. She recognized the look of quiet fury vibrating on his face.
In her ex-husband, she’d eventually noticed the hunger she knew to lurk in other meek men. To be looked up to. To have women listen to him. When he couldn’t make himself look grand, he settled for making others look small.
“No longer much of a hero, either, by the looks of you,” Robert remarked loudly.
Uncomfortable laughter rippled over the room. Despite the arrow her ex-husband had successfully shot into one of her sorest spots, she didn’t let her features fall. “Well, sharing your bed for eight years certainly required heroics,” she replied.
When new laughter rang out, she watched Robert seethe. His features screwing up, he waved one finger forward, summoning guards.
Beatrice flung up her hands in surrender. “Don’t bother,” she said. “I’m leaving.”
“Beatrice—” she heard Clare say.
“I’m leaving,” she repeated harshly.
With whispers following her—damn “Claretrice,” gossip she knew every guest would eagerly share for probably months to come—she pushed her way through the crowd, head low.
The entry hallway was in sight, the cooling forgiveness of the night within reach—when, damn it, she felt a grip on her elbow. It could only be Clare’s. Frustrated, she whirled.
Leaving her caught off guard by the depth in his eyes. They looked . . . earnest. Sincere. Rogues weren’t supposed to look sincere. Men who hated you weren’t supposed to look sincere.
“Can we begin again?” he started, his voice rough, like he was inexperienced in the subject matter.
She laughed. “It’s ten years too late for that.”
His jaw tensed. “I mean tonight. Let’s have peace. People change. I’ve changed.”
“You’re standing in the middle of my husband’s divorce banquet,” she seethed, “saying you’ve changed? Why would you want peace with me anyway?”
The combative smolder in Clare’s eyes—this, she recognized. “Because we’ll have to see each other at the queen’s wedding soon. We should be civil,” he said.
Surprise left the half-drunk Beatrice without words.
Clare went on, sounding flustered and half frustrated with himself. “It’s—I—we shouldn’t mar the festivities with our discord,” he explained. Mar? Discord? She wondered why he was speaking like the fancy characters in shadow plays. “We must mend our . . . fighting, and go to the wedding properly. It’s what . . .” He faltered. “It’s the right thing to do,” he finished.
Beatrice narrowed her eyes. She could not understand why Clare Grandhart was offering this play of propriety.
However—drunk or not—she finally knew what to say.
“I decline your suggestion of peace,” she informed him, “on the grounds that I’m not going to the queen’s wedding.”
In the weeks since she had received the formal invitation to the wedding of Mythria’s Queen Thessia, she had not once stopped feeling horrible for discarding the heavy paper, deciding instantly she would not attend.
She wished Queen Thessia nothing but joy on her wedding day. While they hadn’t spoken in years—one more effect of Beatrice’s guilt, one more reason for it—she did consider the young queen one of her few real friends. Beatrice found the thirty-two-year-old ruler of Mythria uncommonly caring even despite everything she’d lost.
Nevertheless, Beatrice couldn’t stand to see her former friends, her former flame. Couldn’t stand to relive everything they went through. Worse, the wedding would coincide with the Festival of the Four, the upcoming celebration of ten years since the deeds of Beatrice, Galwell, Elowen, and Clare. Beatrice did not need magic to foresee scribes on every corner chasing them for interviews, fans screaming their names . . .
Just more commemoration of the worst thing that had ever happened to her. No, she would not be joining the festivities. She couldn’t.
Confusion contorted Clare’s eyes. “You have to go,” he said.
“I don’t, actually,” she informed him sharply. “Good night and have a good life!”
She strode for the door.
He gripped her arm once more, gently firm. Urgent. She shook off the heart-racing memories the contact left her with.
“You don’t want to forgive each other, fine,” Clare said, his voice low, his effete diction gone, the rogue she remembered leaping out in his whipcrack sentence. “But don’t rob Thessia of her happiness. Not after all she’s been through.”
The hurt of his reference stunned her. She lifted her eyes to his once more, feeling betrayed. It shouldn’t have surprised her, in hindsight. Betraying her was something of Clare Grandhart’s specialty. In the look they shared, of secret wounds, the hallway full of gossiping guests watching them disappeared.
“The Beatrice I knew would’ve come,” he pronounced.
She wrenched her arm from his grip.
“You were half right. I guess some people change,” she said.
Then she proceeded out of the house she once called home.
The manor’s front door closed behind her before she let hot tears sting her eyes. She hated how Clare had pushed on regrets he knew would hurt, which they did. She hated how true her ex-husband’s words rang. What was she left with? Just fame for something she did a decade ago, already drying up.
Fame, and guilt.
In the deepest part of her heart, Beatrice felt the prickle of scars from wounds of memory she refused to let close. Ones Clare had touched with familiarly effortless fingers.
Many in Mythria possessed magic of one of several types. Hand magic was useful in controlling the material world, whether in the form of culinary gifts, powers to shape metal, rock, or other materials, or gifts of manipulating the body. Heart magic pertained to understanding or controlling matters of emotion or inclination. Head magic related to gifts of memory or perception.
While some magical gifts were minor or specific enough that they weren’t much different from simple skill—intuition in the kitchen or resonance on the harp, for instance—others could yield considerable, rare power.
Beatrice possessed uncommon head magic. With her gift, she could revisit memories of her own, or others, like she was living or reliving them herself. Which she’d become obsessed with doing, immersing herself in just one memory, over and over. Robert de Noughton had grown impatient with her exhaustion, her irritability, her preoccupation.
She didn’t care.
For while everyone knew Beatrice had helped Galwell the Great defend the realm, no one knew he’d died because of her.
The guilt never let Beatrice go. Galwell was special. He wasn’t just her girlhood crush, her best friend’s brother, or her lover’s best friend.
He was . . . hope incarnate. In the eyes of many, he was the man on whose example Mythria could become kinder, stronger, nobler. He was their hero.
He was dead now. Because of Beatrice.
Every night in bed in the room she just revisited, she would return to the battlefield where she would relive the moment when he died before her. It was part masochism, part vain hope she might understand what she could’ve done differently. She’d found a hundred little things that could have prevented his death, and yet, still, she could not stop submerging herself in the memory, searching for respite.
Tonight, of course, would be the same.
Don’t rob Thessia of her happiness. Not after all she’s been through.
Beatrice clenched the tears from her eyes. Reminding herself she was no hero made her feel honest. Remembering whom she’d failed, however, just hurt.
It wasn’t just Elowen, who’d lost her brother, then eventually forsaken the entire fabric of her life. It wasn’t just Mythrians, whose idol was gone. Thessia had been betrothed to Galwell the Great. Oh, how she had loved him. Beatrice remembered the fawning look in the young royal’s eyes, full of feelings Beatrice fondly recognized from her own youth.
She remembered the princess’s scream when they returned from the final fight with the Order, the gutted sound of someone who’d known bad news was coming. It was pretty much the only thing Beatrice remembered from their day of victory.
She sighed out loud, hoping it would ease some of the pressure in her chest. No, she was not the hero the people of Mythria deserved. Still . . . Clare’s words rang in her head, consuming her completely in the way only he could. If she was not the hero the realm deserved, she did not have to be a coward, either.
Not when her cowardice would wound Thessia.
In the end, she came to the worst conclusion. She hated it when this happened. Infuriating or not—ridiculous or not, showing up here to her ex’s divorce party—posturing or not, Clare Grandhart was right.
This wedding was her chance to be part of letting light into Thessia’s life instead of darkness. If she were to hide from the celebration, she would close the door on sharing Thessia’s joy, maybe for the last time.
She couldn’t. She needed to go to this wedding. Guilt would weigh on her forever, but she could give her kindest efforts to one of her only friends in the world.
This time, she honestly didn’t know if she’d lived through worse. She just knew she’d live through this.
2
Elowen
Elowen True lived high above the ground, her dwelling built atop the most precarious branch of the tallest tree in the isolated woods she called home. Reaching Elowen required—among other things—traversing a cursed forest, climbing three formidable ladders, and pledging loyalty to a prickly brushwalker named Morritt. It was a nearly impossible task, getting to Elowen’s front door. Which meant Elowen never had human visitors.
Just the way she preferred it.
She did, however, have shadow plays. They were stories performed by the best actors in Mythria, conjurated for viewing five times a week via head magic. Elowen had begun watching them as a child. At thirty, they were the sole thing from her youth she’d held on to. Her favorite was called Desires of the Night. It followed a family who spent all of their time fighting with one another and romancing their various love interests.
