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dai_stihoTitle: Ladies of the Lands of the Sun
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
readingredhead
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 14,500
Pairings: background Nelaid/Miril and Kit/Nita, semi-sort-of-implied Dairine/Roshaun
Prompt: 41. Nelaid/Miril: With the apparent death of Roshaun, Wellakh is changing—and so is Dairine.
Summary: In the summer following Roshaun’s disappearance, Dairine spends more and more time on Wellakh, while Miril struggles to control the political unrest that’s forcing her to remember some parts of her past she would rather forget.
Notes: Great and bountiful thanks are due toaraine, who, in addition to acting as a beta for this story and responding to my frantic “this isn’t working!” emails with cool logic and common sense, has severely influenced my Wellakh-related headcanon with her YW forums post on Wellakhit society (as has input from the forums members who responded to this post). Without her, this story would have foundered and died long ago.
Part 1
Between her Ordeal, her sister’s funeral, and her betrothal celebrations, Miril hadn’t had a moment’s rest in weeks, so when she entered her private sitting room to find Nelaid sitting straight-backed in a leather armchair, she cared less about what he might be doing there and more about getting him to leave her in peace.
He stood when she entered, and bowed to her. “My lady.”
Miril returned his bow. “Your father wouldn’t approve of you coming to see me,” she said, keeping her tone neutral, regulating her expression.
“My father,” Nelaid said, “is a bastard.”
In anyone else, Miril might have expected this was a trick to draw her out into treason, but this soon after their betrothal, anything she said would reflect as poorly upon the royal family as it would upon her own. And she did not think that Nelaid was counterfeiting the anger that she heard in his voice and saw on his face.
Still choosing her words carefully, she said, “Is this what brings you here?”
“After a fashion,” Nelaid said. “I wanted to apologize for his callousness the other day—and to assure you that I do not share it.”
“I thank you for your sympathy,” Miril said, sinking into the nearest armchair. The last thing she wanted to do at this moment was talk with the prince. But they would seek unionbond together someday, and it would do no good to push him away now. “You can sit down if you like,” she said, half expecting him to remain standing.
He sat down across from her, his posture losing some of its tension. “I know what it feels like to lose a sibling,” he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “My younger brother was also the victim of an assassination.”
Somewhere in the back of her mind, Miril had known this, but in the chaos and exhaustion of her grief, the facts hadn’t connected. “I’m sorry,” she said, letting her own sorrow creep into her voice. She had a vague memory of Auren ke Seriv as a feisty boy with a wicked grin and a penchant for playing practical jokes on the palace staff. “You must miss him.”
“It feels like ages ago,” he said, looking down at where his hands were folded in his lap. “Father never speaks of him. Mother doesn’t dare. They found the man who pulled the trigger, and they had him arrested, but he hanged himself in prison before he could be questioned. The investigators suspected he had ties to a group that calls itself the Brotherhood of the Sun—anarchists, mostly, but willing to be bought if the price is high enough and the objectives in line with their own.” He sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. “Tomorrow, I suspect you will learn from the Sunlord that a man has been imprisoned for your sister’s murder. I suspect he will not tell you that this man is also connected to the Brotherhood, and that the chances of his leading us back to them are slim to none.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Miril said.
“I want to find the people responsible for killing Auren. You want to find the people responsible for killing Sephiri. We both want them to be stopped, and we’re young enough that we just might have the kind of power we need to do it.”
Miril’s eyes widened as she began to realize the extent of what she had gotten herself into. Beneath that regal exterior, there lived a vendetta that burned as hot and as strong as hers, coupled with an incisive mind powered by a demanding logic. “No one would ever approve—”
“No one would ever have to know.” There was a pause, and Nelaid must have sensed her reluctance. “Sometimes,” he said, leaning forward and softening his voice, “it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission. And in this case, doing this ourselves might be the only way to get it done.”
“This Brotherhood,” Miril said, still trying to take everything in. “What exactly are their objectives?”
“They want to democratize the distribution of wizardry on this planet,” Nelaid said, “and they are convinced that the complete extermination of the First Families is the only way to achieve this goal.”
“So they’ll try to kill us, too?”
Nelaid’s face was grim as he said, “They’ve already tried to kill me. But I don’t intend to give them the satisfaction of succeeding.” He met her gaze and held out his hand.
“Neither do I,” Miril said, and she took it.
*
On a hunch, Dairine had asked Spot to give her a list of places of interest near permanent gate locations. The hunch was validated when she discovered that all of the major gates on the planet were meant to be located near some memorial to the burning. It made some strange kind of sense—the kinds of places where population pressure could spawn worldgates were also generally places of cultural value, making them perfect places to erect monuments.
She’d sent this discovery to Joreph along with her schedule, and received a message in return, telling her that it did not appear she would be needed for the intervention, but thanking her for her observations and wishing her luck with her own projects. He had also informed her, with apologies, that the process of shifting the gates would require them all to be offline for a period of three days prior to the transfer, but although it inconvenienced Dairine, it certainly didn’t change her plans. Between losing a few days’ work, and having to transit home under her own steam at the end of it, she would always choose the latter—even if she was getting worse and worse headaches lately, the kind that even a couple of aspirin couldn’t cure. She was sleeping poorly, too, sneaking coffee in order to stay awake in front of her dad and Nita, but at least she wasn’t having any more nightmares, or if she was, they vanished with the sound of her alarm when she woke up.
And all of these were minor nuisances, anyway, considering that she was beginning to feel like she was making real progress with the Sunstone. Nelaid had her working with the model of Thahit, simulating more and more complex intervention scenarios, instructing her primarily about how to draw additional power and focus from the stone. But as Dairine funneled more power through it and from it, she began to get a feel for the flavor it left in her mind, and she was starting to suspect it could be used to do more than Nelaid knew how to teach her—that perhaps this was something that Roshaun had been beginning to figure out before his disappearance—and that maybe, just maybe, their last joint working had left some kind of trace in the stone itself that Dairine could follow back to Roshaun.
She did not tell Nelaid. I wouldn’t want to get his hopes up, she told herself sternly, even though she knew that was only a part of it. She was afraid that if she told him her plans, he would tell her that they were impossible. It would not have kept her from following through with them—but that sliver of doubt might have kept her from succeeding.
On the third and final day of the worldgate shut-down, Dairine instructed Spot to alert her an hour before her usual curfew. When his alarm sounded, she had just finished the last task that Nelaid had set her, and was standing back while he evaluated the diagrams she’d drawn out on the ground. She bent over and rested her hands on her knees, and felt a droplet of sweat slide from her forehead down her cheek. Even in miniature, commanding the attention of a star and imposing her will on it was hard work, and she was not looking forward to gating home. One thing at a time, she thought, as Nelaid took his time circling the simulation.
“You’re getting better,” he said. His voice was flat, but coming from him, Dairine knew it amounted to real praise. He turned to look at her, and she straightened up to look back at him. “I will see you again tomorrow?”
“Yes,” she said, and bowed to him. He gave her a curt nod, and vanished.
Spot scurried out from under the simulation of Thahit and popped a few eyestalks up in her direction. Should I begin setting up the return transit?
“Not quite yet,” Dairine said. “There’s something else I want to try first.”
Her legs weren’t as steady as she would have liked, so she lowered herself to the floor in front of the simulation. She was tired—maybe too tired to try this—but she had to know. Her hands, at least, did not shake as she reached up and removed the Sunstone from her neck, setting the gold collar down on the floor in front of her. The light from the model sun seemed to burn through the gem, darkening its usually paler fire with a hint of Thahit’s red.
Dairine took a deep breath, focused her mind, and stared into the heart of the Sunstone.
The heat hit her like a wave, buffeting her focus and stealing the breath from her lungs, but Dairine was prepared. She had worked with Sol, she had worked with Thahit, she knew what the stars felt like from the inside out, and she should be able to separate their signatures within the Sunstone from whatever else Roshaun might have left behind, and when she did that she could find him. She fought the dizziness and pushed further through the roiling tongues of flame, listening to the rhythms that underlay the chaos, letting them surge and fall and carry her along with them, down in to the heart of the memories of the stone, delving deeper through the fires it had seen and survived. She felt her body tip over, sprawling on the floor of the simulation room, but her mind was still with the stone, sorting out the threads of its memory, reaching into the midst of it all—
—and seeing a shadow, a glint of white gold, a lock of that utterly ridiculous hair—
—and reaching out to grasp it, and missing, and falling—
Roshaun!
The world was dark, but Dairine heard voices at the edge of things. “I had worried about this. Why did you leave her alone?”
“She said she was leaving. I did not believe she required babysitting.”
A pause, followed by a cool hand on her forehead. “You are too much like her. And right now, that is not a compliment.”
Dairine tried to say something, but what came out was more like a whimper.
A sigh. “Well, she’s not going home tonight.” The hand was removed from her forehead. A pair of strong arms lifted her up, and she gave in to unconsciousness.
*
Dairine woke up in the middle of the night and wondered for a moment if she was still dreaming. She lay on her back in a bed too large and too soft to be hers, staring out at a large chamber dimly lit by a series of tiny blue-white bulbs that peeked out of the crease where the wall met the ceiling. She shifted over to one side and felt a smooth, gauzy fabric against her skin. She wasn’t even wearing her own pajamas. The Sunstone sat on a table at the bedside, and without thinking, Dairine reached out for it and clasped it once again around her neck.
The clasp clicked shut and with a sudden rush of embarrassment, Dairine remembered exactly what she’d done. She winced. How was Nelaid going to trust her with the model again if she couldn’t even tell when she was pushing herself too far? And her own father—
A sudden thud startled Dairine out of her post-sleep haze. In a flush of adrenaline, she reached into the back of her mind and began to recite the first syllables of her favorite self-defense spell, but common sense stopped her from deploying it. She was in the royal palace on Wellakh, the most secure place on the entire planet. She probably had a billion guards keeping watch outside her door. Not to mention she was still so worn out that the mere thought of attempting another spell gave her a headache. She relaxed her muscles, settled back down into the bedcovers, and tried not to think about what Nelaid would say when she saw him again…or what her dad would say when she told him. God, he’s going to kill me, she thought. She didn’t even have the energy to be anything other than resigned about it. All she wanted to do at this point was to go back to sleep and forget that all of this had happened.
She rolled over, intending to do just that, and saw a black-clad figure step out of the shadows. The small lights glittered off of the blade of a knife easily ten inches long and held easily in the figure’s right hand, and Dairine barely had time to gasp in shock before he was on her, pinning her to the bed with his weight and angling his weapon at her throat.
In her head, Dairine raced through the syllables of a basic shield wizardry, but instead of feeling the world go quiet around her, the words in the Speech felt like a series of foreign sounds inside her head. “Let me go!” she yelled, the panic overcoming her. “You’ve got the wrong room! I haven’t done anything!”
She heard a chuckle, and a deep voice said, “For someone who’s smart enough to figure out what we did to the gates, you’re really awfully stupid.”
“What you did—?” Dairine stammered, heart pounding. Not a dream. The gates had been deliberately destabilized—why, she didn’t know, but figuring it out had made her a liability—
Dairine flinched away from the assassin’s laugh, which reminded her of another she’d heard on her Ordeal, and in the worst of the nightmares that came after. “Wellakh belongs to the Wellakhit,” he said. “We do not need aliens making use of our gates, invading our planet with their strange cultures and their wrongheaded alliances.”
Again, Dairine reached for the wizardry, but felt the words fall like water through her fingers.
“I’ve put a damper on all personal wizardries in this suite of rooms,” the shadow said. “So it’s no use trying to get out, or hoping that someone will come to save you.”
She felt the edge of the knife slide along the upper edge of the Sunstone’s gold torc, millimeters from her jugular. A strange clarity came over Dairine. I am about to be assassinated, she thought.
“I would have to disagree with that,” a voice said from the other side of the room.
The assassin took a shocked look over his shoulder, relaxing his grip on Dairine for just a moment—but even though she’d stopped getting beaten up years back, she had never forgotten her jujitsu lessons. The first rule of close combat was to strike when your opponent was distracted. Before he could turn back, Dairine batted his knife away with her free hand and lunged forward, headbutting him solidly in the jaw. Her head exploded in pain, and she fell back onto the bed, stars swimming before her eyes, her lower body still pinned beneath her attacker. She really hoped the owner of that voice would help her out of this one, because otherwise she’d hardly done anything other than make her murderer angry.
Dairine felt the weight lifted from her legs as someone hurled the attacker off the bed, and flinched at the thud of his impact. Still woozy, incapable of lifting her head, she heard the sounds of the struggle that was playing out mere feet from her. Then, suddenly, the sounds stopped. Dairine took a moment to summon her strength, and slowly pulled herself upright—to see the Lady of the Lands of Wellakh hog-tying the unconscious attacker with a pair of curtain ties pulled from the nearest window. She was in pajamas, her hair in a single braid that had fallen over her shoulder as she worked.
She turned and saw Dairine sitting up in her bed. “Are you alright?” she asked, finishing off one knot and beginning on another.
“I—uh, yeah,” Dairine said, head still spinning from all that had happened to her in the last five minutes. “How did you get here—?”
“The palace is worked through with old wizardries to allow the rulers of Wellakh clandestine access to many of its suites,” she said, sitting back on her heels and surveying her handiwork. “In the past the network has mostly been used for espionage, but it’s old enough that your attacker’s spell didn’t disable it.”
“Oh,” Dairine said. Then, “You know how to fight?”
In answer, Miril held up the knife that Dairine had knocked out of her attacker’s hand, and balanced it along her index finger. “Before I became queen,” she said, “Nelaid and I spend several years tracking down an organization known as the Brotherhood of the Sun. They’d killed people we loved, so we learned how to fight back—sometimes with wizardry, sometimes without.” She shrugged.
“The Brotherhood?” Dairine said. She’d read about them, back when she had devoured everything the manual would tell her about Wellakh. They had been responsible for thousands of assassinations, going back almost a hundred years, but about thirty years ago they’d been forced into hiding by a series of perfectly-executed counterattacks. Speculation ran rampant as to who, exactly, had been responsible for decommissioning the organization, and even the manual was silent on the matter. “You took down the Brotherhood?” Dairine squeaked.
“Not so loud,” Nelaid said, having suddenly appeared beside Miril. Dairine jumped at his appearance, but the knife Miril was balancing didn’t even waver. “I’ve disabled his spell,” he told his wife. “Our wizardries will work now. I’ve scanned the place, but it looks like he was alone.”
Miril nodded, handed the dagger off to Nelaid, and walked over to the side of Dairine’s bed. “We don’t exactly go around advertising the fact,” she said, flipping her braid back over her shoulder, “but yes—we took down the Brotherhood.”
“Though we don’t appear to have done as good of a job as we thought,” Nelaid said, examining the knife. “This man’s dagger bears their insignia.”
“Oh god,” Dairine said, letting out a shaky breath, “this is just too much.” She hated to admit weakness in any form, but her head was alternating between pounding and throbbing, and not just from her well-timed headbutt. There was just too much information swimming around, bits and pieces of it colliding with each other and ricocheting off the walls of her seriously overworked brain.
“Rest,” Miril said, laying a cool hand on Dairine’s forehead. “I’ll be right here, and we can talk more about all of this when you wake up.”
Dairine wanted to protest that she was far too amped up to sleep, but her head felt heavy, and against her will she found herself sinking down against the pillows. She felt Miril rearrange them beneath her head and pull the light covers up under her chin, and then she fell asleep.
*
Miril had kept her word and stayed at Dairine’s bedside while Nelaid transported the man who had attacked her to the palace’s holding facilities. In the coming months they would mount a more thorough official investigation, but Miril already knew with a disgusting certainty what they would find. How could they have been so foolish, to imagine that two young wizards had been able to utterly destroy an organization that had existed for generations? How much should she and Nelaid reveal to the Council about their involvement with the Brotherhood thirty years before? What would they do, now that the Brotherhood was back? There was only one thing she knew for sure: the calm was over, and the storm was headed their way.
“You should get some rest.” She turned to see Nelaid standing in the threshold. “I’ve got a contingent of guards around this room, more of them monitoring remotely, and I’ve set up a few wizardries, just in case.”
“You think they’ll come back?”
“No,” Nelaid said. “But I know you won’t look after yourself until you’re sure she’s safe.” He put a hand on her shoulder, and for a moment they both stood beside the bed of the alien girl who had caused them both so much grief in the past months. But she wasn’t the cause, Miril thought, watching her sleep. She was just there. All of our grief, she shares with us, as much as she can…and she has a grief of her own, beyond what we have known.
She bent down and gently pressed her forehead against Dairine’s, before rising and following Nelaid back to their rooms.
*
When Miril reentered Dairine’s room several hours later, she was surprised to find her awake, sitting at one end of the large plush couch and staring at her backpack on the ground in front of her.
“Going somewhere?”
Dairine looked up slowly, entirely unsurprised by Miril’s presence. “I need to tell my dad what’s happened,” she said. “He’ll probably think it’s best if I stay at home for a while.”
Miril nodded. “He isn’t the only one,” she said, crossing the room and taking a seat next to Dairine on the couch.
Dairine let out a long sigh. “I’ve been so stupid,” she said. “I was so focused on figuring out the Sunstone—using it to find Roshaun—I didn’t even think about what having me here would mean for Wellakhit politics.” She shook her head. “I hope I haven’t screwed up too much.”
“Nothing that can’t be fixed,” Miril said, leaning forward and resting her elbows on her knees. “This was always going to be a difficult period to navigate, politically speaking, and we’re not out of it yet, not by a long shot. But having you here”—and she reached out to lay a hand on Dairine’s shoulder—“was never about politics.”
“What was it about?”
Miril took a deep breath in, felt the tears forming, and for once didn’t try to hide them. She turned her head, looked Dairine in the eye, and said, “It was about doing the right thing…for you, and for us. It was about grieving. But it was also about recovery.”
Dairine looked at Miril, her expression full of pain and fear and hope. “He isn’t dead, you know,” she whispered, broken-voiced. “It’s not in the manual, and the manual doesn’t lie. I’m going to find him.”
Miril shook her head and said, with a small smile, “I don’t doubt you for a minute. But I want you to know it’s not just about that. You are important, Dairine. Nelaid and I, we grew up in this world, we walk around in it every day, and we see the same things over and over again without taking notice. But you’ve helped us see some of it differently.”
“Like what?” Dairine asked, sounding doubtful.
“Like our own xenophobia,” Miril admitted. “Before you were here, I never realized what a mess our gating system was in. I never needed to use it, so it didn’t matter. But you made it matter—and you made me see that a gate is more than just a gate. Wellakh was once at the center of trade, technology, even tourism in this part of the galaxy, but we’ve isolated ourselves so thoroughly that we’ve stopped caring that we’re all alone. The impulse to withdraw, to pull inward—these are the signs of a Power with whom I would have no dealings.”
Dairine’s expression was a little to grim to count as a smile, but her eyes had regained some of her fire. “From what I hear, That One has had every reason to be afraid of you for ages,” she said.
“From what I hear,” Miril replied, “the same goes for you. I may have met the Lone One before, but I certainly didn’t prompt his Reconfiguration.”
Dairine’s cheeks reddened a bit. “That was mostly an accident,” she said, “and it was all over before I could get scared enough to bail out. But you and Nelaid—what you did, going out and hunting down the members of the Brotherhood—that took years.” She looked down at her lap and said, “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
“Not at all.”
“When you gave it up—when you became the queen—was it hard? Do you miss it?”
Miril looked at Dairine, and in a flash realized that her comparisons of this girl to her husband or her son had been all wrong. Here, sitting next to her, was someone eerily similar to the person she had been around this age: thrust into responsibilities she didn’t entirely understand and certainly hadn’t asked for, hiding her sense of weakness and inadequacy behind a series of jobs well done, always afraid that one day it wouldn’t be enough and the fire would die out and leave her all burnt up with nothing to show for her pain but a trail of ashes.
“Of course it was hard,” Miril said slowly. “But it got a lot easier when I stopped thinking about it as giving something up and started to see it as achieving old goals in new ways. Two upstart young wizards might have managed to scare one illegal organization into hiding, but the Lord and Lady of Wellakh could tackle the problems that encouraged societies like the Brotherhood to form in the first place. It’s the same fight now as it was then. We’re just working with modified techniques—and with slightly different resources. They might not be what we’re used to, but I like to think we’re still getting the job done.”
Dairine sighed. “That sounds like the last thing I’ll be doing for a while. Dad’ll have my head for this one, and that’s before my own Seniors get started with me. I’ll be lucky if I get clearance to come back here anytime in the next year.” The frustration was palpable in her voice, but so was something a lot more like resignation.
“I don’t think I would blame them,” Miril said delicately. She didn’t want to scare Dairine away, but the girl had to understand that what she’d done wasn’t something she could afford to do again. “It’s not your fault that you didn’t think through the political ramifications of being here—that’s Nelaid’s and my responsibility—but the way you were throwing your power around? You can’t keep it up.”
“I know,” Dairine said. “I’ve always known. But sometimes it doesn’t seem all that important. I’ve always been good at pushing myself. Not so good at figuring out how far I can push before something breaks.” She turned and looked at Miril with a fierce light behind her eyes. “And I care about Wellakh,” she said. “I want to find Roshaun, and I want to bring him back to the throne, but it’s more than that. There’s work for me here. I can feel it. And I hate feeling like I don’t have what it takes to get the job done.” She slumped back against the couch cushions and sighed.
Miril remembered those summers at the house by the lake, and what her sister had always told her to get her through the times when she had felt like she was busy letting everyone down. “You have enough, you do enough, you are enough,” she said, softly. “Seph would tell me that when things got hard. I’d say it applies to your situation, too.”
Dairine smiled—a small smile, but genuine, and one of the few Miril had seen since Roshaun’s disappearance. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll remember that.”
“It would be nice, though, to be able to transit from place to place with the blink of an eye,” Miril said with a wry grin, “or the push of a button.”
Beside her, Dairine sat up in shock. “Oh my god,” she said.
“Are you alright?” Miril asked, trying to get a look at Dairine’s expression, since her tone had been unreadable.
“Oh my god,” Dairine repeated, “I have been so stupid!” But she sounded more excited than frustrated, and there was a great big smile on her face. She turned to Miril and said, “You are so right. About everything.”
Dairine grabbed her backpack and stood up. Miril stood too, wondering what sudden brainstorm she had just witnessed. “Going home?” she asked.
Dairine grinned. “I’m going to see a girl about a worldgate.”
*
Dairine found Carmela lounging on the couch in the Rodriguez family living room, simultaneously watching the TV and talking at it in the Speech.
“Oh, don’t go into the building unarmed!” Carmela yelled at the TV, where a multi-legged alien form was climbing through a triangular window. A second later, her comment appeared on the lower third of the screen, transcribed in the Speech and echoing a number of other comments.
“Hey, Carmela,” Dairine said. “What are you doing?”
“Live-tweeting this TV show!” she said.
Dairine raised an eyebrow. “Aliens have Twitter?”
“Same concept,” Carmela said, turning over to look at Dairine over the back of the couch. “But I doubt you’re here to discuss the intricacies of comparative intergalactic social networking.”
“Maybe some other time,” Dairine said—finding that she was, against her will, a little bit interested, and smiling, not just at Mela’s infectious good nature, but at how good it felt to be interested in something other than her work. “But first,” she said, reminding herself that she’d need to keep this quick if she wanted to keep her dad from freaking out even more than he already was, “I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about your closet.”
“Ooh, are they having some kind of party at the palace you need to get all dolled up for?” Carmela was on her feet in an instant.
Dairine laughed. “Sorry, I should have been more specific—this is less about the normal contents of your closet, more about the abnormal ones.”
“Less fun,” Carmela pouted. “But you would come to see me, if you did need to dress up for a fancy alien shindig?”
“Of course, but that’s not what’s important right now,” Dairine said. “Theoretically, if I were to use your worldgate to go somewhere that didn’t have a gate of its own already installed, would I be able to get back?”
“Oh, sure,” Carmela said, “you can take the remote with you and just press a few buttons. If you couldn’t, then what use would that be? Well, for me, anyway,” she amended. “Of course you could just hit a few keys on this lovely little guy,” and she bent down to pat Spot’s outer casing, “and wham, back where you started!”
Dairine found that she couldn’t stop smiling. Sure, she’d been wrong a lot lately—but she’d also, at least on occasion, been right, and this was starting to look like one of those times. “It’s not always so easy,” she said. “Would you mind if I use your gate to transit to and from Wellakh for a bit? At least until they get their gating system back up and running.”
“You may do whatever you like with my gate,” Carmela said, “on one condition,” and she held up a single slim finger, inches from Dairine’s face.
“What’s that?”
Carmela looked around, as if checking to see if the coast was clear, and then said, “Get your sister and my brother to finally tell our parents that they’re dating!” She rolled her eyes. “I promised Kit I wouldn’t tell on him, but not being able to humiliate him with impunity over dinner every night is really starting to cramp my style.”
Dairine smiled. “Done,” she said. After all, she would need something to amuse herself with while she waited out her inevitable grounding.
*
When Miril found Nelaid, he was leaning against a railing at the edge of one of the balconies near the top of the palace spire. For a minute, she saw another there, sitting and dangling his legs through the gaps in the railing, and looking out across the lands that would one day be his…
She shook her head free of this memory of her son, and walked over to stand beside her husband.
“We will have to go to the Council about this,” she said, laying a hand on top of Nelaid’s where it rested on the railing’s edge. “They must be informed that the Brotherhood is at work again, and that they have been behind the problems with the worldgates.”
Nelaid sighed. “I thought you wanted to minimize the chaos of this transition,” he said.
“That strategy,” Miril said, leaning up against him and looking out over the long, flat plain, “doesn’t seem to be an option anymore.”
“So what do we do?”
“What we do best,” Miril said. “We fight.”
“We win,” Nelaid corrected.
Miril smiled.
They stood and watched as the bottom of Thahit’s red-gold disc disappeared beneath the horizon, briefly gilding the Burnt Side plains with its fiery light. For a moment, in the brightness, Miril could almost see Wellakh as it had been—large plains covered in swathes of red grass, dotted with mountain ranges, subject to the infinitesimal movements of the great glaciers at the pole—and as it could be—inhabited by a people who had endured hardships, but come out ahead, and who would keep up the pattern, even if it took them a little bit longer this time around.
Together Miril and Nelaid turned away from the dying light and toward the work that would help them remake the world in the image they had dreamed.
Or, read the whole thing on Archive of Our Own.
Author:
readingredheadRating: PG-13
Word count: 14,500
Pairings: background Nelaid/Miril and Kit/Nita, semi-sort-of-implied Dairine/Roshaun
Prompt: 41. Nelaid/Miril: With the apparent death of Roshaun, Wellakh is changing—and so is Dairine.
Summary: In the summer following Roshaun’s disappearance, Dairine spends more and more time on Wellakh, while Miril struggles to control the political unrest that’s forcing her to remember some parts of her past she would rather forget.
Notes: Great and bountiful thanks are due to
araine, who, in addition to acting as a beta for this story and responding to my frantic “this isn’t working!” emails with cool logic and common sense, has severely influenced my Wellakh-related headcanon with her YW forums post on Wellakhit society (as has input from the forums members who responded to this post). Without her, this story would have foundered and died long ago.Part 1
Between her Ordeal, her sister’s funeral, and her betrothal celebrations, Miril hadn’t had a moment’s rest in weeks, so when she entered her private sitting room to find Nelaid sitting straight-backed in a leather armchair, she cared less about what he might be doing there and more about getting him to leave her in peace.
He stood when she entered, and bowed to her. “My lady.”
Miril returned his bow. “Your father wouldn’t approve of you coming to see me,” she said, keeping her tone neutral, regulating her expression.
“My father,” Nelaid said, “is a bastard.”
In anyone else, Miril might have expected this was a trick to draw her out into treason, but this soon after their betrothal, anything she said would reflect as poorly upon the royal family as it would upon her own. And she did not think that Nelaid was counterfeiting the anger that she heard in his voice and saw on his face.
Still choosing her words carefully, she said, “Is this what brings you here?”
“After a fashion,” Nelaid said. “I wanted to apologize for his callousness the other day—and to assure you that I do not share it.”
“I thank you for your sympathy,” Miril said, sinking into the nearest armchair. The last thing she wanted to do at this moment was talk with the prince. But they would seek unionbond together someday, and it would do no good to push him away now. “You can sit down if you like,” she said, half expecting him to remain standing.
He sat down across from her, his posture losing some of its tension. “I know what it feels like to lose a sibling,” he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “My younger brother was also the victim of an assassination.”
Somewhere in the back of her mind, Miril had known this, but in the chaos and exhaustion of her grief, the facts hadn’t connected. “I’m sorry,” she said, letting her own sorrow creep into her voice. She had a vague memory of Auren ke Seriv as a feisty boy with a wicked grin and a penchant for playing practical jokes on the palace staff. “You must miss him.”
“It feels like ages ago,” he said, looking down at where his hands were folded in his lap. “Father never speaks of him. Mother doesn’t dare. They found the man who pulled the trigger, and they had him arrested, but he hanged himself in prison before he could be questioned. The investigators suspected he had ties to a group that calls itself the Brotherhood of the Sun—anarchists, mostly, but willing to be bought if the price is high enough and the objectives in line with their own.” He sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. “Tomorrow, I suspect you will learn from the Sunlord that a man has been imprisoned for your sister’s murder. I suspect he will not tell you that this man is also connected to the Brotherhood, and that the chances of his leading us back to them are slim to none.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Miril said.
“I want to find the people responsible for killing Auren. You want to find the people responsible for killing Sephiri. We both want them to be stopped, and we’re young enough that we just might have the kind of power we need to do it.”
Miril’s eyes widened as she began to realize the extent of what she had gotten herself into. Beneath that regal exterior, there lived a vendetta that burned as hot and as strong as hers, coupled with an incisive mind powered by a demanding logic. “No one would ever approve—”
“No one would ever have to know.” There was a pause, and Nelaid must have sensed her reluctance. “Sometimes,” he said, leaning forward and softening his voice, “it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission. And in this case, doing this ourselves might be the only way to get it done.”
“This Brotherhood,” Miril said, still trying to take everything in. “What exactly are their objectives?”
“They want to democratize the distribution of wizardry on this planet,” Nelaid said, “and they are convinced that the complete extermination of the First Families is the only way to achieve this goal.”
“So they’ll try to kill us, too?”
Nelaid’s face was grim as he said, “They’ve already tried to kill me. But I don’t intend to give them the satisfaction of succeeding.” He met her gaze and held out his hand.
“Neither do I,” Miril said, and she took it.
*
On a hunch, Dairine had asked Spot to give her a list of places of interest near permanent gate locations. The hunch was validated when she discovered that all of the major gates on the planet were meant to be located near some memorial to the burning. It made some strange kind of sense—the kinds of places where population pressure could spawn worldgates were also generally places of cultural value, making them perfect places to erect monuments.
She’d sent this discovery to Joreph along with her schedule, and received a message in return, telling her that it did not appear she would be needed for the intervention, but thanking her for her observations and wishing her luck with her own projects. He had also informed her, with apologies, that the process of shifting the gates would require them all to be offline for a period of three days prior to the transfer, but although it inconvenienced Dairine, it certainly didn’t change her plans. Between losing a few days’ work, and having to transit home under her own steam at the end of it, she would always choose the latter—even if she was getting worse and worse headaches lately, the kind that even a couple of aspirin couldn’t cure. She was sleeping poorly, too, sneaking coffee in order to stay awake in front of her dad and Nita, but at least she wasn’t having any more nightmares, or if she was, they vanished with the sound of her alarm when she woke up.
And all of these were minor nuisances, anyway, considering that she was beginning to feel like she was making real progress with the Sunstone. Nelaid had her working with the model of Thahit, simulating more and more complex intervention scenarios, instructing her primarily about how to draw additional power and focus from the stone. But as Dairine funneled more power through it and from it, she began to get a feel for the flavor it left in her mind, and she was starting to suspect it could be used to do more than Nelaid knew how to teach her—that perhaps this was something that Roshaun had been beginning to figure out before his disappearance—and that maybe, just maybe, their last joint working had left some kind of trace in the stone itself that Dairine could follow back to Roshaun.
She did not tell Nelaid. I wouldn’t want to get his hopes up, she told herself sternly, even though she knew that was only a part of it. She was afraid that if she told him her plans, he would tell her that they were impossible. It would not have kept her from following through with them—but that sliver of doubt might have kept her from succeeding.
On the third and final day of the worldgate shut-down, Dairine instructed Spot to alert her an hour before her usual curfew. When his alarm sounded, she had just finished the last task that Nelaid had set her, and was standing back while he evaluated the diagrams she’d drawn out on the ground. She bent over and rested her hands on her knees, and felt a droplet of sweat slide from her forehead down her cheek. Even in miniature, commanding the attention of a star and imposing her will on it was hard work, and she was not looking forward to gating home. One thing at a time, she thought, as Nelaid took his time circling the simulation.
“You’re getting better,” he said. His voice was flat, but coming from him, Dairine knew it amounted to real praise. He turned to look at her, and she straightened up to look back at him. “I will see you again tomorrow?”
“Yes,” she said, and bowed to him. He gave her a curt nod, and vanished.
Spot scurried out from under the simulation of Thahit and popped a few eyestalks up in her direction. Should I begin setting up the return transit?
“Not quite yet,” Dairine said. “There’s something else I want to try first.”
Her legs weren’t as steady as she would have liked, so she lowered herself to the floor in front of the simulation. She was tired—maybe too tired to try this—but she had to know. Her hands, at least, did not shake as she reached up and removed the Sunstone from her neck, setting the gold collar down on the floor in front of her. The light from the model sun seemed to burn through the gem, darkening its usually paler fire with a hint of Thahit’s red.
Dairine took a deep breath, focused her mind, and stared into the heart of the Sunstone.
The heat hit her like a wave, buffeting her focus and stealing the breath from her lungs, but Dairine was prepared. She had worked with Sol, she had worked with Thahit, she knew what the stars felt like from the inside out, and she should be able to separate their signatures within the Sunstone from whatever else Roshaun might have left behind, and when she did that she could find him. She fought the dizziness and pushed further through the roiling tongues of flame, listening to the rhythms that underlay the chaos, letting them surge and fall and carry her along with them, down in to the heart of the memories of the stone, delving deeper through the fires it had seen and survived. She felt her body tip over, sprawling on the floor of the simulation room, but her mind was still with the stone, sorting out the threads of its memory, reaching into the midst of it all—
—and seeing a shadow, a glint of white gold, a lock of that utterly ridiculous hair—
—and reaching out to grasp it, and missing, and falling—
Roshaun!
The world was dark, but Dairine heard voices at the edge of things. “I had worried about this. Why did you leave her alone?”
“She said she was leaving. I did not believe she required babysitting.”
A pause, followed by a cool hand on her forehead. “You are too much like her. And right now, that is not a compliment.”
Dairine tried to say something, but what came out was more like a whimper.
A sigh. “Well, she’s not going home tonight.” The hand was removed from her forehead. A pair of strong arms lifted her up, and she gave in to unconsciousness.
*
Dairine woke up in the middle of the night and wondered for a moment if she was still dreaming. She lay on her back in a bed too large and too soft to be hers, staring out at a large chamber dimly lit by a series of tiny blue-white bulbs that peeked out of the crease where the wall met the ceiling. She shifted over to one side and felt a smooth, gauzy fabric against her skin. She wasn’t even wearing her own pajamas. The Sunstone sat on a table at the bedside, and without thinking, Dairine reached out for it and clasped it once again around her neck.
The clasp clicked shut and with a sudden rush of embarrassment, Dairine remembered exactly what she’d done. She winced. How was Nelaid going to trust her with the model again if she couldn’t even tell when she was pushing herself too far? And her own father—
A sudden thud startled Dairine out of her post-sleep haze. In a flush of adrenaline, she reached into the back of her mind and began to recite the first syllables of her favorite self-defense spell, but common sense stopped her from deploying it. She was in the royal palace on Wellakh, the most secure place on the entire planet. She probably had a billion guards keeping watch outside her door. Not to mention she was still so worn out that the mere thought of attempting another spell gave her a headache. She relaxed her muscles, settled back down into the bedcovers, and tried not to think about what Nelaid would say when she saw him again…or what her dad would say when she told him. God, he’s going to kill me, she thought. She didn’t even have the energy to be anything other than resigned about it. All she wanted to do at this point was to go back to sleep and forget that all of this had happened.
She rolled over, intending to do just that, and saw a black-clad figure step out of the shadows. The small lights glittered off of the blade of a knife easily ten inches long and held easily in the figure’s right hand, and Dairine barely had time to gasp in shock before he was on her, pinning her to the bed with his weight and angling his weapon at her throat.
In her head, Dairine raced through the syllables of a basic shield wizardry, but instead of feeling the world go quiet around her, the words in the Speech felt like a series of foreign sounds inside her head. “Let me go!” she yelled, the panic overcoming her. “You’ve got the wrong room! I haven’t done anything!”
She heard a chuckle, and a deep voice said, “For someone who’s smart enough to figure out what we did to the gates, you’re really awfully stupid.”
“What you did—?” Dairine stammered, heart pounding. Not a dream. The gates had been deliberately destabilized—why, she didn’t know, but figuring it out had made her a liability—
Dairine flinched away from the assassin’s laugh, which reminded her of another she’d heard on her Ordeal, and in the worst of the nightmares that came after. “Wellakh belongs to the Wellakhit,” he said. “We do not need aliens making use of our gates, invading our planet with their strange cultures and their wrongheaded alliances.”
Again, Dairine reached for the wizardry, but felt the words fall like water through her fingers.
“I’ve put a damper on all personal wizardries in this suite of rooms,” the shadow said. “So it’s no use trying to get out, or hoping that someone will come to save you.”
She felt the edge of the knife slide along the upper edge of the Sunstone’s gold torc, millimeters from her jugular. A strange clarity came over Dairine. I am about to be assassinated, she thought.
“I would have to disagree with that,” a voice said from the other side of the room.
The assassin took a shocked look over his shoulder, relaxing his grip on Dairine for just a moment—but even though she’d stopped getting beaten up years back, she had never forgotten her jujitsu lessons. The first rule of close combat was to strike when your opponent was distracted. Before he could turn back, Dairine batted his knife away with her free hand and lunged forward, headbutting him solidly in the jaw. Her head exploded in pain, and she fell back onto the bed, stars swimming before her eyes, her lower body still pinned beneath her attacker. She really hoped the owner of that voice would help her out of this one, because otherwise she’d hardly done anything other than make her murderer angry.
Dairine felt the weight lifted from her legs as someone hurled the attacker off the bed, and flinched at the thud of his impact. Still woozy, incapable of lifting her head, she heard the sounds of the struggle that was playing out mere feet from her. Then, suddenly, the sounds stopped. Dairine took a moment to summon her strength, and slowly pulled herself upright—to see the Lady of the Lands of Wellakh hog-tying the unconscious attacker with a pair of curtain ties pulled from the nearest window. She was in pajamas, her hair in a single braid that had fallen over her shoulder as she worked.
She turned and saw Dairine sitting up in her bed. “Are you alright?” she asked, finishing off one knot and beginning on another.
“I—uh, yeah,” Dairine said, head still spinning from all that had happened to her in the last five minutes. “How did you get here—?”
“The palace is worked through with old wizardries to allow the rulers of Wellakh clandestine access to many of its suites,” she said, sitting back on her heels and surveying her handiwork. “In the past the network has mostly been used for espionage, but it’s old enough that your attacker’s spell didn’t disable it.”
“Oh,” Dairine said. Then, “You know how to fight?”
In answer, Miril held up the knife that Dairine had knocked out of her attacker’s hand, and balanced it along her index finger. “Before I became queen,” she said, “Nelaid and I spend several years tracking down an organization known as the Brotherhood of the Sun. They’d killed people we loved, so we learned how to fight back—sometimes with wizardry, sometimes without.” She shrugged.
“The Brotherhood?” Dairine said. She’d read about them, back when she had devoured everything the manual would tell her about Wellakh. They had been responsible for thousands of assassinations, going back almost a hundred years, but about thirty years ago they’d been forced into hiding by a series of perfectly-executed counterattacks. Speculation ran rampant as to who, exactly, had been responsible for decommissioning the organization, and even the manual was silent on the matter. “You took down the Brotherhood?” Dairine squeaked.
“Not so loud,” Nelaid said, having suddenly appeared beside Miril. Dairine jumped at his appearance, but the knife Miril was balancing didn’t even waver. “I’ve disabled his spell,” he told his wife. “Our wizardries will work now. I’ve scanned the place, but it looks like he was alone.”
Miril nodded, handed the dagger off to Nelaid, and walked over to the side of Dairine’s bed. “We don’t exactly go around advertising the fact,” she said, flipping her braid back over her shoulder, “but yes—we took down the Brotherhood.”
“Though we don’t appear to have done as good of a job as we thought,” Nelaid said, examining the knife. “This man’s dagger bears their insignia.”
“Oh god,” Dairine said, letting out a shaky breath, “this is just too much.” She hated to admit weakness in any form, but her head was alternating between pounding and throbbing, and not just from her well-timed headbutt. There was just too much information swimming around, bits and pieces of it colliding with each other and ricocheting off the walls of her seriously overworked brain.
“Rest,” Miril said, laying a cool hand on Dairine’s forehead. “I’ll be right here, and we can talk more about all of this when you wake up.”
Dairine wanted to protest that she was far too amped up to sleep, but her head felt heavy, and against her will she found herself sinking down against the pillows. She felt Miril rearrange them beneath her head and pull the light covers up under her chin, and then she fell asleep.
*
Miril had kept her word and stayed at Dairine’s bedside while Nelaid transported the man who had attacked her to the palace’s holding facilities. In the coming months they would mount a more thorough official investigation, but Miril already knew with a disgusting certainty what they would find. How could they have been so foolish, to imagine that two young wizards had been able to utterly destroy an organization that had existed for generations? How much should she and Nelaid reveal to the Council about their involvement with the Brotherhood thirty years before? What would they do, now that the Brotherhood was back? There was only one thing she knew for sure: the calm was over, and the storm was headed their way.
“You should get some rest.” She turned to see Nelaid standing in the threshold. “I’ve got a contingent of guards around this room, more of them monitoring remotely, and I’ve set up a few wizardries, just in case.”
“You think they’ll come back?”
“No,” Nelaid said. “But I know you won’t look after yourself until you’re sure she’s safe.” He put a hand on her shoulder, and for a moment they both stood beside the bed of the alien girl who had caused them both so much grief in the past months. But she wasn’t the cause, Miril thought, watching her sleep. She was just there. All of our grief, she shares with us, as much as she can…and she has a grief of her own, beyond what we have known.
She bent down and gently pressed her forehead against Dairine’s, before rising and following Nelaid back to their rooms.
*
When Miril reentered Dairine’s room several hours later, she was surprised to find her awake, sitting at one end of the large plush couch and staring at her backpack on the ground in front of her.
“Going somewhere?”
Dairine looked up slowly, entirely unsurprised by Miril’s presence. “I need to tell my dad what’s happened,” she said. “He’ll probably think it’s best if I stay at home for a while.”
Miril nodded. “He isn’t the only one,” she said, crossing the room and taking a seat next to Dairine on the couch.
Dairine let out a long sigh. “I’ve been so stupid,” she said. “I was so focused on figuring out the Sunstone—using it to find Roshaun—I didn’t even think about what having me here would mean for Wellakhit politics.” She shook her head. “I hope I haven’t screwed up too much.”
“Nothing that can’t be fixed,” Miril said, leaning forward and resting her elbows on her knees. “This was always going to be a difficult period to navigate, politically speaking, and we’re not out of it yet, not by a long shot. But having you here”—and she reached out to lay a hand on Dairine’s shoulder—“was never about politics.”
“What was it about?”
Miril took a deep breath in, felt the tears forming, and for once didn’t try to hide them. She turned her head, looked Dairine in the eye, and said, “It was about doing the right thing…for you, and for us. It was about grieving. But it was also about recovery.”
Dairine looked at Miril, her expression full of pain and fear and hope. “He isn’t dead, you know,” she whispered, broken-voiced. “It’s not in the manual, and the manual doesn’t lie. I’m going to find him.”
Miril shook her head and said, with a small smile, “I don’t doubt you for a minute. But I want you to know it’s not just about that. You are important, Dairine. Nelaid and I, we grew up in this world, we walk around in it every day, and we see the same things over and over again without taking notice. But you’ve helped us see some of it differently.”
“Like what?” Dairine asked, sounding doubtful.
“Like our own xenophobia,” Miril admitted. “Before you were here, I never realized what a mess our gating system was in. I never needed to use it, so it didn’t matter. But you made it matter—and you made me see that a gate is more than just a gate. Wellakh was once at the center of trade, technology, even tourism in this part of the galaxy, but we’ve isolated ourselves so thoroughly that we’ve stopped caring that we’re all alone. The impulse to withdraw, to pull inward—these are the signs of a Power with whom I would have no dealings.”
Dairine’s expression was a little to grim to count as a smile, but her eyes had regained some of her fire. “From what I hear, That One has had every reason to be afraid of you for ages,” she said.
“From what I hear,” Miril replied, “the same goes for you. I may have met the Lone One before, but I certainly didn’t prompt his Reconfiguration.”
Dairine’s cheeks reddened a bit. “That was mostly an accident,” she said, “and it was all over before I could get scared enough to bail out. But you and Nelaid—what you did, going out and hunting down the members of the Brotherhood—that took years.” She looked down at her lap and said, “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
“Not at all.”
“When you gave it up—when you became the queen—was it hard? Do you miss it?”
Miril looked at Dairine, and in a flash realized that her comparisons of this girl to her husband or her son had been all wrong. Here, sitting next to her, was someone eerily similar to the person she had been around this age: thrust into responsibilities she didn’t entirely understand and certainly hadn’t asked for, hiding her sense of weakness and inadequacy behind a series of jobs well done, always afraid that one day it wouldn’t be enough and the fire would die out and leave her all burnt up with nothing to show for her pain but a trail of ashes.
“Of course it was hard,” Miril said slowly. “But it got a lot easier when I stopped thinking about it as giving something up and started to see it as achieving old goals in new ways. Two upstart young wizards might have managed to scare one illegal organization into hiding, but the Lord and Lady of Wellakh could tackle the problems that encouraged societies like the Brotherhood to form in the first place. It’s the same fight now as it was then. We’re just working with modified techniques—and with slightly different resources. They might not be what we’re used to, but I like to think we’re still getting the job done.”
Dairine sighed. “That sounds like the last thing I’ll be doing for a while. Dad’ll have my head for this one, and that’s before my own Seniors get started with me. I’ll be lucky if I get clearance to come back here anytime in the next year.” The frustration was palpable in her voice, but so was something a lot more like resignation.
“I don’t think I would blame them,” Miril said delicately. She didn’t want to scare Dairine away, but the girl had to understand that what she’d done wasn’t something she could afford to do again. “It’s not your fault that you didn’t think through the political ramifications of being here—that’s Nelaid’s and my responsibility—but the way you were throwing your power around? You can’t keep it up.”
“I know,” Dairine said. “I’ve always known. But sometimes it doesn’t seem all that important. I’ve always been good at pushing myself. Not so good at figuring out how far I can push before something breaks.” She turned and looked at Miril with a fierce light behind her eyes. “And I care about Wellakh,” she said. “I want to find Roshaun, and I want to bring him back to the throne, but it’s more than that. There’s work for me here. I can feel it. And I hate feeling like I don’t have what it takes to get the job done.” She slumped back against the couch cushions and sighed.
Miril remembered those summers at the house by the lake, and what her sister had always told her to get her through the times when she had felt like she was busy letting everyone down. “You have enough, you do enough, you are enough,” she said, softly. “Seph would tell me that when things got hard. I’d say it applies to your situation, too.”
Dairine smiled—a small smile, but genuine, and one of the few Miril had seen since Roshaun’s disappearance. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll remember that.”
“It would be nice, though, to be able to transit from place to place with the blink of an eye,” Miril said with a wry grin, “or the push of a button.”
Beside her, Dairine sat up in shock. “Oh my god,” she said.
“Are you alright?” Miril asked, trying to get a look at Dairine’s expression, since her tone had been unreadable.
“Oh my god,” Dairine repeated, “I have been so stupid!” But she sounded more excited than frustrated, and there was a great big smile on her face. She turned to Miril and said, “You are so right. About everything.”
Dairine grabbed her backpack and stood up. Miril stood too, wondering what sudden brainstorm she had just witnessed. “Going home?” she asked.
Dairine grinned. “I’m going to see a girl about a worldgate.”
*
Dairine found Carmela lounging on the couch in the Rodriguez family living room, simultaneously watching the TV and talking at it in the Speech.
“Oh, don’t go into the building unarmed!” Carmela yelled at the TV, where a multi-legged alien form was climbing through a triangular window. A second later, her comment appeared on the lower third of the screen, transcribed in the Speech and echoing a number of other comments.
“Hey, Carmela,” Dairine said. “What are you doing?”
“Live-tweeting this TV show!” she said.
Dairine raised an eyebrow. “Aliens have Twitter?”
“Same concept,” Carmela said, turning over to look at Dairine over the back of the couch. “But I doubt you’re here to discuss the intricacies of comparative intergalactic social networking.”
“Maybe some other time,” Dairine said—finding that she was, against her will, a little bit interested, and smiling, not just at Mela’s infectious good nature, but at how good it felt to be interested in something other than her work. “But first,” she said, reminding herself that she’d need to keep this quick if she wanted to keep her dad from freaking out even more than he already was, “I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about your closet.”
“Ooh, are they having some kind of party at the palace you need to get all dolled up for?” Carmela was on her feet in an instant.
Dairine laughed. “Sorry, I should have been more specific—this is less about the normal contents of your closet, more about the abnormal ones.”
“Less fun,” Carmela pouted. “But you would come to see me, if you did need to dress up for a fancy alien shindig?”
“Of course, but that’s not what’s important right now,” Dairine said. “Theoretically, if I were to use your worldgate to go somewhere that didn’t have a gate of its own already installed, would I be able to get back?”
“Oh, sure,” Carmela said, “you can take the remote with you and just press a few buttons. If you couldn’t, then what use would that be? Well, for me, anyway,” she amended. “Of course you could just hit a few keys on this lovely little guy,” and she bent down to pat Spot’s outer casing, “and wham, back where you started!”
Dairine found that she couldn’t stop smiling. Sure, she’d been wrong a lot lately—but she’d also, at least on occasion, been right, and this was starting to look like one of those times. “It’s not always so easy,” she said. “Would you mind if I use your gate to transit to and from Wellakh for a bit? At least until they get their gating system back up and running.”
“You may do whatever you like with my gate,” Carmela said, “on one condition,” and she held up a single slim finger, inches from Dairine’s face.
“What’s that?”
Carmela looked around, as if checking to see if the coast was clear, and then said, “Get your sister and my brother to finally tell our parents that they’re dating!” She rolled her eyes. “I promised Kit I wouldn’t tell on him, but not being able to humiliate him with impunity over dinner every night is really starting to cramp my style.”
Dairine smiled. “Done,” she said. After all, she would need something to amuse herself with while she waited out her inevitable grounding.
*
When Miril found Nelaid, he was leaning against a railing at the edge of one of the balconies near the top of the palace spire. For a minute, she saw another there, sitting and dangling his legs through the gaps in the railing, and looking out across the lands that would one day be his…
She shook her head free of this memory of her son, and walked over to stand beside her husband.
“We will have to go to the Council about this,” she said, laying a hand on top of Nelaid’s where it rested on the railing’s edge. “They must be informed that the Brotherhood is at work again, and that they have been behind the problems with the worldgates.”
Nelaid sighed. “I thought you wanted to minimize the chaos of this transition,” he said.
“That strategy,” Miril said, leaning up against him and looking out over the long, flat plain, “doesn’t seem to be an option anymore.”
“So what do we do?”
“What we do best,” Miril said. “We fight.”
“We win,” Nelaid corrected.
Miril smiled.
They stood and watched as the bottom of Thahit’s red-gold disc disappeared beneath the horizon, briefly gilding the Burnt Side plains with its fiery light. For a moment, in the brightness, Miril could almost see Wellakh as it had been—large plains covered in swathes of red grass, dotted with mountain ranges, subject to the infinitesimal movements of the great glaciers at the pole—and as it could be—inhabited by a people who had endured hardships, but come out ahead, and who would keep up the pattern, even if it took them a little bit longer this time around.
Together Miril and Nelaid turned away from the dying light and toward the work that would help them remake the world in the image they had dreamed.
Or, read the whole thing on Archive of Our Own.
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Date: 2011-07-14 12:30 am (UTC)JUST. GORGEOUS. AND AMAZING. AND WONDERFUL.
“What we do best,” Miril said. “We fight.”
“We win,” Nelaid corrected.
I LOVE THEM SO WHOLEHEARTEDLY. UGH UGH UGH UGH YOU WROTE THEM AMAZINGLY.
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Date: 2011-07-14 06:13 am (UTC)I'm actually surprised at how little this fic turned out to be about finding Roshaun? But the more I think about it, the more I feel like that's the least interesting of all of the problems Dairine could help Wellakh solve...so from my perspective, at least, he can stay gone for a little while longer (as long as we get to see what Dairine's doing in the meantime!)
Aw, and I am so glad you like Nelaid and Miril. I wanted to pepper this with scenes of them taking down bad guys and falling in love in the process, but you were right to say that it ended up becoming more of Dairine's story, and I didn't want to bog that down.
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Date: 2011-07-14 02:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-14 05:02 pm (UTC)Initially I wanted to show scenes of Miril and Nelaid being kickass wizards taking down the Brotherhood and falling in love, but the story seemed to be more about how their relationship has changed since it began (and about how Roshaun's absence and Dairine's presence have changed it). Though I have a feeling I will still eventually write out all the epic escapades that made Dairine so impressed. :)
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Date: 2011-07-20 06:58 am (UTC)A lovely addition to this fest!
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Date: 2011-07-20 05:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-29 08:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-29 10:05 pm (UTC)