Chapter 40: Fireside Confessions
The fence, as it turned out, was an excellent appetizer. Dawn made Cassian recite the four pages from memory, or as near to memory as he could get, and by the time he reached the appended recommendation for another fence she was wiping her eyes with the tail of one of her furs.
"Four pages," she said. "For a fence. Vi, are all his captains like this?"
"His captains are uniformly like this. I believe it's taught at the Ironveil officer school. Brevity is distrust."
"Brevity is distrust," Evander repeated, without looking up from the rotation report he had rescued from her abandoned pile. "I'll have that embroidered somewhere."
"He'll actually do it," Cassian said. "He had a feast day embroidered onto a tapestry once because I said it offhand. It took three weavers a year."
"It was a good feast day."
Dawn refilled her own coffee, then reached across and refilled Violet's without asking, which was a liberty from their Academy days that had apparently never expired. "Right. The fence was delightful. Now for the main course." She settled back, fur-wrapped shoulders against the chair, and her eyes went gleaming and historical. "The harvest revel. The border villages. The year the whole wine cellar was at stake."
"There is no main course," Violet said. "You've had this wrong for three hundred years. There was a wager. Mira lost. Mira always lost."
"Mira lost the wager," Dawn agreed. "The wager was who could get the fae emissary dancing first. You got him dancing. That part's true. What Mira lost was the wine cellar, and what you won was three hours of his attention, and what the rest of us got was the sight of you standing on the rim of the fountain in that green dress with the low back, singing a song that I have never once heard sung correctly since, because nobody remembers the words, they only remember you." She turned to the kings with the smooth inevitability of a performer who had rehearsed on horseback. "Your wife, gentlemen, before she was your wife, was the reason border villages barred witches from their harvest revels for a decade. Not for damage. For morale."
"For morale," Cassian said, delighted.
"They couldn't work the next day. Whole villages. Men wept."
"I sang the correct version," Violet said with dignity. "Everyone else has degraded it through transmission. That's a folk-song problem, not a Violet problem."
"And the fountain?"
"The fountain was the emissary's fault. He dipped me and misjudged the rim."
"He dipped you and dropped you," Dawn said, "and you came up still singing, which is the part I admire, and Mira was so shocked she fell in after you, and the emissary spent the rest of the night apologizing to both of you in two languages."
"She came up still singing," Evander said. He had set down his report. His blue eyes had gone somewhere that Violet couldn't read, and she felt through the bond a slow, banked heat, like a stove door opened a crack. "In the fountain. In the green dress."
"The green dress," Dawn confirmed, "had a back that was mostly a suggestion. She made it herself. It took her two weeks. She said it was for the revel, and it was, but I saw her practice the dip in the dormitory mirror first."
"Dawn."
"You practiced the dip," Dawn said to her, with tremendous tenderness, "in the mirror. Before you ever met the emissary. You choreographed your own catastrophe, sweetheart. That's not wildness, that's theater."
Cassian leaned back so far in his chair that the front legs left the floor, and Violet, from long and recent habit, put a hand on his arm and pushed him level. "There are two hundred years of stories," she said. "You've heard three. I want it understood that the ratio is unflattering to me."
"The ratio is why I'm here," Dawn said. She said it lightly, but she said it, and the table shifted a degree. "Fifty years at the Academy. Fifty years of this woman being the loudest thing in any room she entered, and then she graduates, and she takes the advisor post, and what does the world get? A very good braid. A filing system. A woman who answers every letter and attends every hearing and goes home alone to a windowsill of herbs, and when I write to her she tells me about the shelving." She looked at Violet, and the mischief banked itself, and what was underneath was a healer's clear, unhurried attention. "I didn't come down the mountain to interrogate you two. Well. Not only. I came because Mira's raven was the first letter in I don't know how long that mentioned Vi being somewhere on purpose, with witnesses, in the open air. I wanted to see it."
"You've seen it," Violet said. "I'm sorting a fence."
"I've seen a fence." Dawn leaned forward, elbows on the table, rings clicking against the wood. "Here's what I want to know, husbands. Not whether you keep her safe, anyone can see that, it's coming off you three like steam off a kettle. What I want to know is whether you've thought about this. That the quiet one isn't the real one underneath, waiting to be excavated. They're the same woman. The loud one didn't die when she took the post. She just got sent to her room. And my worry, for three years now, has been that whoever finally caught her would like the room better."
The parlor held still. Outside the tall windows a gardener's shears clicked somewhere on the grounds, small and ordinary.
Cassian set his coffee down. He took his time about it, which meant the answer had weight.
"When we found the notes in her desk," he said, "she was mortified. For about a minute. Then she started correcting our summaries. That file, she had an opinion on every name in it, and by the third page she was standing on her side of the desk arguing case law on her own love life." His mouth curved. "I've been trying to get that version out since. We had a dance at the festival. She danced like the bonfire was the border village."
"She sang in front of the packs," Evander said. His voice was level and quiet, the weight underneath it not. "She stood in the rain at her own wedding and explained the blessing of it to two thousand wolves. The loud one is not sent to her room, Lady Bjorn. The loud one lives here. She runs this court from the head of a breakfast table in a borrowed shirt, and both of us are better rulers for it, and I will tell you the part you actually want to hear." He paused, and Violet watched him decide to say it. "She gave us her yes before sunset. There was never a cage. There was only a woman who'd been told, for decades, that the world wanted the braid. We are telling her, daily and through multiple channels, that the world can have both."
Dawn sat back. She looked at the three of them for a long moment, and then at Violet, and her eyes had gone bright in a way that was not mischief at all.
"Well," she said. "That's the answer, then." She picked up her coffee and pointed it at Violet like a verdict. "And you. My Lone Nightingale. Sitting there letting your husbands answer for you, which is new and I don't like it. Say something."
Violet had been quiet too long, and she knew it, and she knew Dawn knew it. She set down her cup.
"They're right," she said. "That's the unbearable part. I want to dispute it and I can't. The braid was real and the notes were real and the fountain was real and the shelving system is real, and I spent thirty years deciding which ones were permitted at work." She turned the cup a slow half-circle on the oak. "The belt thing was real too, before you tell it."
"The belt thing," Cassian said immediately.
"The belt thing," Dawn confirmed, and the room's weather lifted. "A revel in Aneara's realm. A warlock, very full of himself, kept stepping on the hem of Mira's gown and apologizing to his own companions instead of her. So Vi reaches across the crowd, no incantation, no visible anything, and his belt buckles itself shut in a knot I have personally examined and cannot reproduce. Nine knots. Interlocking."
"He spent the evening hopping," Violet said. "Mira spent the evening unhopping him. By agreement. There was a fee."
"There was a fee," Dawn told the kings, "and the fee was that he apologize to Mira by name in front of the revel, and he did, weeping slightly, and then your wife unhexed him and bought him a drink, because she is not cruel, she is theatrical. There's a difference that courts never seem to learn."
"It's an important difference," Evander said gravely, and Cassian's laugh went off like a porch roof collapsing.
The morning stretched on in that key. Dawn told the Midsummer bonfire story over Violet's formal objection, and the elderflower wine story over her stronger objection, and a third story that she opened with "and this one's about a lute" and that Violet prevented by threatening her friend with a warming charm at close range. The correspondence piles grew. The fish disappeared. At some point a butler came and went with more coffee and a fresh pot of jam, and Dawn interrogated him about the kitchens on his way out and got, Violet noted, a full answer, because apparently everyone in the palace was susceptible.
It was near midday, the sun having swung past the arched windows to land on the third satchel, that the window did the thing.
A raven hit the glass. Not gently.
Feathers, an indignant croak, and then a second inspection of the arches, after which it came down the length of the parlor and landed on the table between the cheese and the Goldenpine petitions with the entitlement of a returning officer. It wore a leg band, plain and dark, and it fixed Dawn with one black eye.
"Magnus," Dawn said, and her whole face did something complicated and fond and exasperated all at once, the face of one hundred sixty eight years of marriage compressed into a second. "He's tracked me. Two days. I left a note."
She pulled the little cylinder off the bird's leg and unrolled the scrap within, holding it near the window light, and Violet watched her read it and watched the reading go from annoyance to something softer by the last line.
"'Come home,'" Dawn read aloud, because of course she did, she had no discretion and had never claimed any. "'The greenhouse misting system has developed an opinion. I have fixed it twice. It has reverted twice. Also the bed is cold and I have been informed by the household that I am poor company when you travel, which I dispute. Come home. M.'"
"He fixed it twice," Violet said. "The misting system."
"He's an emperor. He reads treatises on irrigation for pleasure." Dawn re-rolled the note and tucked it into her furs, next to Mira's raven, a small archive of her own. "He'll deny the second sentence. I'll be presenting it at intervals for the next century."
Cassian reached over and, with great ceremony, relieved the raven of the last of the smoked fish, which the bird accepted as tribute. "You'll ride back tonight?"
"I'll ride back when I've extracted what I came for." Dawn turned in her chair to face the whole table, and Violet recognized the posture from Academy debate chambers, the setup before the close. "A visit. Proper. All three of you, up to the Clave. Not a diplomatic procession, I'll warn you now, if you come with banners I'm sending them back. Magnus and I celebrate at home, fire and furs, as I said. So: come as guests, not as two kings and a queen. Come in the winter, our winter is the good one, the passes snow over and the whole mountain goes quiet and the sky does things at night that I will not describe because you have to see them."
"The Clave in winter," Evander said. He was doing the math she could see him doing, the passes, the escort, the season's councils. "After the solstice courts settle."
"After the solstice courts settle," Dawn agreed. "You see, this is why I like him, he negotiates like a tired spouse." She looked at Violet. "Well, Nightingale. Nearly two hundred years and you've never seen my home in the good season. Say yes."
"Yes," Violet said. It came out before the part of her that drafted qualifications could reach it, and she felt both kings register that through the bond, the small private pleasure of it. "But I'm bringing the Academy letters for the library, there's a acquisition I've been meaning to deliver in person, so it will be a working visit."
"It will be whatever it is," Dawn said, "on one condition, and the condition is non-negotiable and I will hold the gate for it."
"Which is?"
"You pack something that isn't a braid." Dawn looked her over, top to bottom, cataloguing again, and this time the look ended in a challenge. "The green dress is thirty years gone, I checked, I asked Mira. Fine. Something in that spirit, then. Something that walks into my mountain hall and reminds Magnus and me, and you, and those two, which woman they're all getting. Something for morale." She sipped her coffee. "The gate guards up there are Clave veterans, ten feet of winter muscle, they don't blush at anything. I'd like to see it proven otherwise."
"Blush the gate guards," Cassian repeated. He turned to Evander. "We're bringing her."
"I heard the terms," Evander said. "I accept the terms." And through the bond, dry as paper, he sent Violet the image of her own fitting-room mirror, the black silk, the plunge of it, the woman she had practiced being in the glass. He sent no commentary with it. He never needed to.
Violet looked at her husband's impassive face, then at her oldest friend, then at the raven, which was eating cheese rind now with no shame whatsoever.
"One dress," she said. "That I choose. And if the guards blush, I want it noted that it was my idea, my timing, and my dress, and that I practiced nothing in any mirror."
"Of course," said Dawn, and the three of them, witch and empress and the two kings who had learned her tells, all understood the promise for exactly the lie it was, and let it stand, because some stories are better for the telling than the correcting.
The raven finished the cheese and screamed once, imperiously, at the whole table.
"He does that when I'm enjoying myself," Dawn said. "Fine, fine, you great feathered bailiff." She stood, gathering furs, rings clicking, and looked around the parlor one last time: the sorted piles, the emptied plates, the head of the table that nobody had assigned. "Solstice courts first, then the mountain. I'll tell Magnus to expect the worst houseguests he's ever had." She paused at the door, and her grin went wide and bright as her own fire. "And Nightingale. When you pack. Think green."