Chapter 58: The Dinner at Aneara's Manor
The portal opened into a hallway that smelled of rosemary and woodsmoke, and the iridescent windows threw slabs of rainbow light across the marble floor. Violet stepped through first, her hand still caught in Cassian's, and felt the fae realm's air settle over her skin like warm water. Behind her, Evander came last, turning once to watch the portal fold itself shut.
"Three days late," Mira said from the far end of the hall, arms crossed, silk the color of dark wine pooling at her ankles. "I counted."
"You threatened to portal-crash our wing," Violet said. "We came willingly. There should be credit for that."
"There will be credit. It's called wine."
Aneara appeared beside her wife the way she always did, without footfall or warning, in a gown of powder blue that caught the window light and scattered it. She pressed a kiss to Violet's cheek, then regarded the two kings with the mild interest of someone appraising furniture.
"They clean up reasonably well," she said.
"I scrubbed behind my ears and everything," Cassian said.
"Visible improvement. Come through. Dinner's nearly ready, and Mira has been insufferable about a surprise all week."
The dining room sat under a dome of glass that showed a violet-tinged fae dusk, stars already needling through. The table was long and over-set with food: braised roots in dark gravy, bread still steaming, a roasted bird glazed with something that smelled of honey and pine. Evander paused at the threshold, and Violet caught the small tension in his jaw easing. He liked order. He liked knowing what a room expected of him. This room expected nothing but appetite.
They ate first. Mira demanded a full report on the rings and made Cassian describe his citrine twice, once for the stone and once for the look on Violet's face when he chose it. Aneara refilled cups without being asked and offered dry commentary on Ondrel, whom she had met when he made a circlet for a fae earl three centuries back.
"He kept your sketches," she noted. "That's a compliment from that man deeper than most marriages."
When the plates had been cleared to bare bone and the second bottle was open, Mira pushed back her chair and stood. There was a gleam in her light brown eyes that Violet knew, and had known for three hundred years, and it had never once meant anything mild.
"Right," Mira said. "You two. Husbands. Kings. Come here."
Evander raised an eyebrow. Cassian was already up.
Mira led them all into her workroom, the one crowded with jars and slate tables and bundles of dried things hanging from the rafters, and went to a low cabinet against the far wall. The warding on it hummed as her hand passed. She drew out two albums. Old leather, scarred corners, spines reinforced with wire. Violet's stomach did something complicated.
"You've told us about them," Evander said slowly, standing by the door with his arms folded.
"I've told you they exist. Telling you about a thing and showing you are different animals." Mira set the albums on the slate table and opened the first one flat under a lamp. "These are the first two. Fifty years of shrinking is in the third one, and that one's not on tonight's menu. Tonight is her before anything. Tonight is the good part."
The first page stirred. A moving photograph, a girl with dark curls barely past her shoulders, laughing at something outside the frame, one hand raised in a gesture of pure, careless defiance. Young. Not a child, a young woman of fifty-odd, sharp and glowing, and Violet felt her husbands go very still on either side of her.
"That's the Academy," Violet said. "First week. Someone had enchanted the fountain to sing, badly."
"You sang back," Mira said. "Louder. With worse words."
Cassian leaned in until his nose nearly touched the page. The girl in it turned, as if she'd heard him, and stuck her tongue out at the lens. He made a sound that was half laugh, half growl. "She's got freckles even there."
"More of them. She never covered them back then," Mira said.
They turned pages slowly. Violet dancing on a table with her shoes in her hand. Violet arm in arm with Dawn, both of them muddy to the knees. Violet asleep in a library chair with an open book tented over her face, the pages fluttering with her breath. Mira narrating each one in the flat, merciless tone of a lifelong co-conspirator, and every so often Aneara, perched on a stool near the shelf, adding a single precise detail that proved she'd heard these stories a hundred times and still found them funny.
Evander said very little. But Violet watched him, and his eyes never left the pages. His hands had come unfolded. When the photo showed Violet, maybe sixty, standing in a forge with her sleeves rolled and a hammer raised, hair tied up and escaping in all directions, Evander's breath left him audibly.
"You had forge muscle at sixty," he said.
"I'd had it since forty. Davii's father let me work the bellows before he'd let me touch a hammer."
"Magnificent," Evander said, quietly, and meant it with his whole chest, and Violet felt her face go hot.
Mira flipped a page, paused, and smiled in a way that promised violence. "Ah. Here we are. Cassian. Evander. You asked once how the name happened. The Valkyrie."
Both kings straightened.
"This is term three of year two," Mira said, tapping a photograph that showed a courtyard and a crowd ringed around two figures. "Defensive grounds. Practical assessment. That man there, the big one, is Bramholt. Seven feet of defensive warding prodigy. The instructors paired students at random. They paired my Vi, all five-foot-four of her, against a man she could have walked under his arm."
The photograph moved. The giant, rune-shield flaring blue around him, came forward. Violet in the image stood loose and easy, weight on her back foot, corset laced tight, sleeves shoved past her elbows. Then the frame blurred with speed, and there was a flash of runes colliding, and Bramholt's shield shattered in a spray of blue-white sparks and the man himself went over backward, all seven feet of him, and hit the dirt flat on his ass hard enough to bounce.
The whole room broke. Cassian roared. Evander made a low, startled sound that was nearly a laugh, hand pressed briefly over his mouth.
"Watch the next three seconds," Mira said. "Watch."
In the photograph, Bramholt sat in the churned dirt, dazed, sparks crawling over him like fireflies, backlash dancing in his eyes. He looked up. And the image held on what he saw: Violet walking toward him through the settling sparks. Corseted, all that soft and hard at once, cleavage full and shameless above the lacing. A hawk feather worked into her curls at her ear. Arms bare, back straight, forge muscle moving under her skin as she reached down and extended one hand to help him up.
The photograph, of course, had no sound. Mira supplied it anyway, pitching her voice down into a dazed rumble. "'I swear on my grandmother's bones, I've died and gone to Valhalla.'"
The room went again. Cassian had to brace a hand on the table. Evander shook his head slowly, and the corner of his mouth had escaped entirely from under his composure.
"And there were forty students watching," Mira said. "And by dinner, the whole Academy had heard it. A woman puts a giant on his back, drags him to his feet, and he thinks he's died and come to the feast hall of the slain." She turned to Violet. "The Valkyrie. Born right there. You answered to it for two hundred years."
Violet looked at the frozen frame. Herself, young and enormous in spirit, hand out, feather in her hair.
"I'd forgotten the feather," she said. "I stole it off a hawk that dive-bombed me on the morning hike. Wore it for a month out of spite."
"Four months," Mira said. "It's in half the album."
Cassian leaned close to Violet's ear. His voice came out roughened. "You put a man double your size on the ground and he saw a vision of the afterlife."
"He saw a corset and good posture," Violet said.
"He saw you," Evander said. Everyone turned. Evander's blue eyes were fixed on the photograph, and his voice was steady and very low. "That's what he saw. That's what all of them saw. That's what we were too late to meet by fifty years, and too stubborn to find for another fifty after that."
The room quieted. Aneara rose from her stool and, without ceremony, steered Mira toward the door with a hand at her elbow.
"We'll see about dessert," Aneara said, which fooled no one, and the door closed on the two of them.
Left alone with the album and her kings, Violet sat down on the workroom stool. Cassian pulled another up beside her, close enough that their knees knocked. Evander dragged a third around to her other side, facing her.
"I hated those fifty years," Violet said, to the photograph. "And I know you both wish you'd found me sooner. But look at her." Her finger rested on the frame's edge. "She was never gone. She was just waiting to be loud again."
Cassian turned the page, gently, like turning a leaf he didn't want to bruise. More photographs spilled into the lamplight: Violet laughing at a harvest bonfire, Violet with her sleeves rolled in the forge again, Violet mid-song with her head thrown back and the whole frame shaking with it.
"Evander," Cassian said. "We're getting the third album before we leave."
"You said tonight is not its night," Evander said to Cassian, but his eyes were on his wife.
"I know what Mira said. I'm saying it before we leave anyway."
Mira's voice came back through the door, dry as sand. "I heard that, Thorn. Bring wine and I'll consider it."
Evander reached out and took Violet's hand, the one not holding her cup, and pressed his thumb across her knuckles where a wedding band would sit in a week. "The feather," he said. "I want to see it again. In your hair. Not for the memory."
"For what, then?"
His mouth did the rare, full thing it did. "For looking at you now and seeing all of her at once."
Violet looked from him to Cassian, who was already eyeing the shelf of dried herbs with the expression of a wolf planning a theft, and found she was smiling the way the girl in the photograph smiled, deep in the belly and pure.