“Oh, Cole’s hysterical!” she agreed, and then they both turned toward the open nearby window to listen to Moriarty rattle on about how belligerent everyone around him was and how he’d had enough of all of it. “More the merrier,” she commented when it quieted down a bit. “Supposedly Moriarty’s wife’s a honey nymph. Wouldn’t that make her sort of devastatingly frightening to anyone who would be foolish enough to attack us here?”
Ashcroft looked at the ceiling and then thoughtfully replied, “Yes. And she is a witch, as well. The head of your faction, to be precise.”
“—of all the arrogant, foolish, idiotic!—” Moriarty’s voice continued to boom. “No wonder that boy’s got no sense in his head, he has you for a mother!”
She sipped her coffee. “I’m looking forward to meeting her,” she told Ashcroft calmly.
“—I will not calm!—” Moriarty boomed.
Ashcroft looked back down at his paper and said, “Yes, maybe later I’ll make the introductions…”
Chapter Nineteen
“Moriarty, don’t be so ridiculous.” Alice had a hard time recalling the last time Moriarty let himself get so worked up. He was a ball of fury, and really, he didn’t even look well.
“You shouldn’t have come up here with Daniel, especially! Have you gone mad? Wait and see as all the boys get sick now. Welcome to the biggest piss-hole in existence, Alice. Everyone is dying!”
“I know, they’re barely surviving,” Alice agreed. “But Cole doesn’t want to leave. He feels useful here. He knows enough to help some of the crops actually grow here, and he’s doing well. It’s good training for a young wizard. You’ve always wanted him to be more proactive.”
“The only reason he’s proactive now is because I’m against it this time! He fights against me tooth and claw whenever he can!” he said with frustration.
“He needs this,” she sighed, trying to be patient.
“What he needs is a good whipping!” Moriarty said, crossing his arms in front of his chest. “And so do you for coming.”
“You didn’t tell me not to come,” she reminded him with exasperation.
“Would you if I’d made that clear?” he demanded promptly.
“Well, no,” she replied honestly. “Cole has a good heart. I think you should be more patient. I think he’s setting a good example for Samuel right now.”
“He’s the reason they’re out here! You know he led Samuel right into a trap. The reason he wanted us out of the house was to go into the town to sow some of his oats, and the stupid prat let his brother follow along! I can’t even wonder how amazingly easy it was to lure him into capture. I’m guessing that elf princess who caught him was behind the whole thing. I don’t like it. Besides, he’s too young to dabble with the female sex, anyway.”
“When did you start chasing girls?” she asked, and it was impossible to keep a knowing grin off of his face.
He straightened. “I was a fox the first one hundred years of my life, Alice. It was far and wide different!”
“Oh, I’m sure he’d prefer being in his most base animal form too, Moriarty, but we won’t allow it. He still has that in him, and you should understand him more than anyone. You’re the same species. You’re both Huxians. Poor lad is part nymph, too! No wonder he has both energy and a sexual drive to put even yours to shame. You need to be patient with him, Moriarty. He’s too old now for whippings, in any case. He’s not a little boy anymore. He’s becoming a man with his own personality. He won’t be told what to do anymore; he’s as stubborn as you. He has to be shown. Now put up a good example!”
He didn’t seem very happy about showing a good example. She understood that—he had been desperately searching through the forest all week. He was tired, hungry, had been riding on an emotional roller coaster. She had been, as well. Riding in a carriage with an infant all day and night hadn’t been her idea of a fine time.
Still, Alice simply wasn’t going to ignore her son’s request that she come and try to talk his father into helping the wind elves out in their time of need. An extra healthy pair of hands, and perhaps swords, wouldn’t be amiss. Besides, she was so happy that her children were all alive and well that she was prepared to do anything for their happiness at this point.
“I brought you all sorts of things to help you feel better. Go bathe, change your clothes, and use some of your hair product and you’ll feel as right as rain,” she told him. “I even brought a few of your cigars.” She walked into the adjoining bath chamber and tapped on the side of the bathtub. Slowly but surely, the bathtub began to fill with help of a water spell. The pipes in the kingdom simply didn’t work; the kingdom had a very severe water shortage.
“How I feel cannot just be fixed with a cigar and some hair gel!” he assured, filling up the doorframe.
Alice doubted it; in her experience, a cigar and a bath could fix all of his ails no matter what the situation. Alice loved Moriarty, but she knew better than anyone that Moriarty’s vanity, health, and happiness were all undoubtedly the same thing. “Moriarty,” she sighed, and gently pushed past him, reaching up on her toes to kiss his hard, pursed lips. “Take a bath. I’m going to make sure you didn’t make the baby deaf.”
She left Moriarty grumbling behind her.
“Did things go well?” Cole asked, who had been waiting outside of the door, apparently to see if he could get his mother to jump three feet in the air.
Well, good thing Moriarty didn’t spank her for traveling there! Her son would have certainly gotten an earful. “Cole, really,” she said, putting a hand over her heart to ease its beating, “you nearly scared me half to death!” She had thought he was still in the courtyard where he had met her when she had first come in.
“I don’t know how you got him to stop yelling,” Cole admitted, staring at the closed door. “You’re like a snake charmer. Did you use a flute or do you have some magic words?”
She gave him a chiding expression but then smiled and shook her head. She walked along and her son walked by her side. “Sometimes when he doesn’t get his way, he has to rant and rave a little bit. I think he sees that we’re needed here, though. And he’s a good man. Speaking of—I thought you were going to go into the field today and help the crops take root?”
“Just making sure he wasn’t wroth with you on my account,” Cole admitted simply, lifting his shoulders in a simple shrug.
“Cole, you really have to stop thinking your father is some sort of villain,” she lectured and then passed by a window and saw, entering a courtyard below, was Ashcroft and a petite black-haired women. “Oh, my goodness! Ashcroft!” she said with excitement. In another moment of watching, he could see Ashcroft take the girl’s fingers into his hands and speak softly to her. “Who is that?”
“Lady Maili DeHoel,” he replied. “I don’t know why father said that Ashcroft was a complete mess with women. He isn’t with her. She is married to Damen Vanguard, supposedly, but I wouldn’t hold that against her. I like her, though. We spent hours together yesterday off and on while I was avoiding father.”
“She’s the warlord’s wife and you wouldn’t hold that against her?”
He shrugged. “She’s very against the marriage. Supposedly it was done only by proxy, and she has a great theory that Damen Vanguard is some sort of evil wizard out to get her.” He pursed his lips together thoughtfully. “I fear she might be a bit insane, but not in a harmful way.”
“She’s Damen Vanguard’s… wife?” Alice asked again.
“Well, that’s not the amazing thing about her,” Cole assured, even waving his hand through the air as if that bit of information was only incidental, and not bizarre, given that her children were kidnapped due to that lunatic last week. “She’s a Byndian witch. Full-blooded, too. She might be a long-lost relative of ours or some such!” He paused and added, “Oh! And she was adopted by a couple of gods, so she is understandably very well connected. Perhaps you shouldn’t do what you’re obviously thinking.”
“What am I th
inking?” she demanded.
“You know, cause trouble. That look means you’re going to make some sort of scene. She can’t help who she’s married to, mother. Besides, in the least, she’s your only subject.”
He was referring to the fact that sometimes she was referred to—only by other witches or wizards—as Queen Alice DeMornay, simply because she was the head of the Byndian faction… which was always ridiculous to her, since she was really the only Byndian left, and even so, she wasn’t full-blooded. For all she knew, the girl with Ashcroft was older than her, and thus would be the new faction head.
She reached up and pressed her palm against her forehead as if worried that it might explode at any moment. It was simply too much to process, and she didn’t like to be forced not to hate an evil man’s wife, in any case. Still, she was a honey nymph and was neither a slut nor did she ever feel homicidal tendencies, so she understood that sometimes people weren’t what one might expect.
“I have to meet Princess Anna out in the fields,” Cole said, and immediately got a raised eyebrow from his mother. He looked at the ceiling and assured in a groan, “To work, mother.”
“It better be to work in the fields,” Alice corrected, getting another groan from her son, who had to know by now that he was not to be trusted around females.
“Honestly, mother…” he sighed, giving one of his most dramatic eye rolls that he used when he wanted to imply he was completely misunderstood, but he didn’t further argue with her. He merely went on his way, leaving her alone at the window.
She looked out at Ashcroft talking to the black-haired girl, who she was beginning to feel was extraordinarily familiar.
It took a whole three minutes to be reminded of her own half-sister, and she was absolutely certain that the only reason it took even that long is because she hadn’t known her half-sister for more than a half a year, and because her sister had died twenty years ago.
Cole was right; this girl was absolutely a relative of hers. Moreover, she seemed to have the exact same knack for frustrating Ashcroft.
“Maili, it is far too soon after breakfast to argue with you,” Ashcroft was huffing with exasperation. “Your form is all wrong. You’ll never be able to use your full power like that! You need your full attention, perfect posture, perfect positioning! There are thousands of rules for you to follow to reach your full potential, and to create rain in a dry place like this, you better believe you’ll need to be at your best. Stop pretending you know better.”
“Just because I asked you to help doesn’t mean I asked you to bully me!” the girl said, putting her hands on her hips. Her accent was incredibly strange and choppy, but her voice was very similar to Charlotte, who had a sort of smoky tone, nearly kittenish.
Even Charlotte’s common arguing posture was exactly the same. It made her miss the girl like crazy, and also Alice remembered how nice it was to have someone to get into mischief with. She had only known her sister when they were both full-grown, but they fell in with each other instantly as best friends.
Just as she anticipated Ashcroft to say something that was also quite bullying, he stepped back and visibly checked himself, even taking a deep, calming breath. “You’re right. I should check my tone. I don’t mean to bully, I mean to simply teach you. Now, please, allow me to position you?”
Maili straightened, accepted his apology, and then she loosened her body and arms and let him position her body the way he wanted it, and he moved her posture and arm as if he was teaching her how to dance.
He was moving in a surprisingly romantic style for a man she’d personally seen swear off women, and most specifically love, multiple times in the last couple of decades. She wondered if this girl was breaking the mold simply because she was so much like Charlotte… Or maybe she was looking too deeply into things?
“I feel dumb. It’s like I’m more like a wizard in a play than one in real life,” Maili complained with her hand up in the air and the other down low as if she was weighing something on an invisible scale. “All I need to feel complete is a pointy hat!”
“If that would make you feel better about it. That’s why I used to wear one. Eventually I let go of theatrics…” Ashcroft teased her, then stepped behind her body and took a giant step back. “Alright, clear your mind.”
She wasn’t clearing her mind; Alice could tell even from one story up that she was now focusing on a bird chirping across the courtyard.
“Maili…” Ashcroft reached over her shoulder and put his hand on Maili’s chin. “You can do this. Listen to my voice, alright? Close your eyes. Don’t focus on anything else…”
Ashcroft proceeded to do what could arguably be construed as hypnotism—Alice, in fact, wouldn’t have called it anything less—to his beautiful, petite pupil. Alice thought it wouldn’t work; Maili’s posture and stance was rigid, ungraceful, and uncomfortable.
Eventually, right around the words of the incantation, which Maili pronounced extremely poorly, Alice thought the girl was going to give up. Ashcroft stepped forward and put his hands around her waist, and then began to talk into her ear. Alice couldn’t hear what he was saying, but light began to manifest from Maili’s open palm.
Alice’s bottom lip dropped. Was it actually working?
Light was beginning to pan out and interweave from Maili’s fingertips, beginning to filter toward the sky like a searchlight. Alice could see servants stopping in their place to watch with awe…
But then Maili dropped her hands and huffed as she spun from Ashcroft’s hands. “It’s not working!”
Ashcroft crumpled with vexation, putting his head in his hands. Even Alice wanted to throw something at the girl. “Maili,” Ashcroft groaned, “you have to be patient!”
Patient was apparently a foreign word. Maili cocked her head and squinted before stepping forward. “Patient?” she echoed with confusion. In the next sentence she threw her arms up in the air. If Alice didn’t know better, she’d say that Maili was trying to give her best impression of how Moriarty was trying to act that morning. “There’s no time for patience! I don’t know how much longer I can stay here! If papa comes—if he doesn’t believe that Damen was behind kidnapping those children and holding this whole city up for ransom, then I have no idea what will happen, to me or to anyone else! How can you forget about that for more than a minute?”
“I can control my thoughts and feelings, and you need to figure out a way too, Maili! It’s not like this is the first time in a thousand years that I’ve felt a little stressed! You need to focus—”
Plop.
Alice put her hand over her mouth, a giggle worming its way up her throat. She eventually let go as all the elves who’d been watching also started to giggle, amazed that a giant raindrop—probably one the size of a bathtub, fell right on Ashcroft and Maili’s heads, drenching them like cats who’d been caught in the rain.
Neither of them seemed to know how to react to the sudden wetness, because for easily five seconds, they just stared at each other with incredulous, and then humiliated, expressions. The courtyard was filled with laugher all around them.
“See?” Ashcroft said, finally breaking his stillness and reaching into his pocket. “You’re doing better than you think. You just have to…” he pulled a wet handkerchief out of his pocket, immediately realized how useless it was, and wrung it out, “…uh, you just have to learn to be patient, as I said.” He put that wet handkerchief back into his wet pocket.
“I hate the rain,” Maili pouted, hugging herself and apparently freezing cold.
Alice was sure Ashcroft was grinning now. “We definitely have to work on some of your pronunciations of that chant, apparently… hopefully before you catch cold.” He pulled her body close to his own and tugged her through the crowd of elves, who probably hadn’t laughed so hard in a decade, and out of the courtyard.
Alice turned, grinning, and walked toward where she’d left an elf servant to watch her younger sons. Cole’s quite right, she decided; the young wi
tch was nothing to fear. In fact, if she was lucky, she was the answer to Alice’s prayers.
* * *
Although the morning hadn’t been quite as successful as Ashcroft would have liked, it actually hadn’t been too horrible. He’d prefer not having gotten hit by a dozen or so gallons of cold water, but it was better than no water at all.
Maili seemed to be a want-it-all-or-nothing type of woman, because she seemed only embarrassed and miserable. He escorted her to her rooms immediately. “Get some dry clothes on you,” he told her. “And we’ll start again, eh?”
“Can’t wait…” she muttered dryly.
Sighing, he assured her, “Maili—you’re doing far better than anticipated. I feel actually quite good about this. Everybody takes baby steps. It’s better than going backward. Besides, that is merely water, stop acting like you were spat on by a sky god or something.”
She pushed her wet hair off her face a little and admitted in a grumble, “I suppose you’re right…” She shook her head. “Ever have a bad feeling?”
Ashcroft’s face fell into a frown. “What kind of a bad feeling?”
She shrugged and shook her head. “I just… I don’t know. You know that feeling you get right when there’s a storm picking up?” she explained, rolling her hand through the air in a somewhat royal way.
“No,” he replied, thinking immediately back to the last time someone he cared about had a bad feeling. They ended up dead by the end of the day. “I don’t know that feeling, but I don’t doubt it exists. Do you think you’re in a bad mood, or you actually feel differently than you should?”
She seemed to consider this, and her uncertainty mollified his worries a bit. “I might be in just a bad mood,” she admitted, stopping as they reached the front of her door. “I think I’ll change into something dry and maybe take a quick, warm bath and see how I feel, I guess…”
“Excellent idea,” he praised, but he was feeling awkward suddenly. He didn’t actually want to step away from her at all, now. He wanted to kiss her.
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