Vol.5 Ch.34.2 – Foreshadowing II

I didn't want to just leave Anna after dropping that idea on her so I did the thing I knew for sure could always be counted on to distract her.

“So, what have you found about the mystic fruits?” I asked and her face immediately lit up.

Then she looked at me, frowned at me to show me she had noticed the attempt to change the subject and then immediately brightened back up again as she happily used the change of subject I had provided.

“I started with the fruits from the first floor,” she began, her words getting progressively faster the longer she spoke. “Normally they give mages a dual affinity or even out their affinities if they already have two but when you refine them you get something totally different. If I treat the rind with acid and lime I can turn it into a powder that should let mages switch their elemental affinities for a little while but I'm not sure about the dosage or the side effects yet. If I chop up the flesh and use alcohol as a solvent I can make a potion that cures a mage's exhaustion. And that's just the first fruit. I've barely even started on the body forging fruits but if my hypothesis is right I can turn those into a potion that encourages muscle development...” She paused. “I'm boring you, aren't I?”

“No,” I said, though mentally I was still catching up with what she'd said. “A powder that changes elemental affinity. That could be useful.”

“It might,” she said. “It might also be hallucinogenic. Or highly addictive. Or both.”

“Oh.”

“And I'd need about a hundred fruits to refine a spoonful of it.”

I frowned. “How would you even know that?”

She smiled. “You think you're the only one with useful magic items, right?” She tapped a little monocle on her workbench. “This lets me see the effects an ingredient can have depending on how I treat it. It doesn't tell me what treatment will give which effect but that's what those are for.” 'Those' were an entire shelf of thick books about herb lore.

“So how do you know that a hundred fruits will get you a spoonful?”

“The process is wasteful,” she said. “You chop it up and treat it with acid until it dissolves. You dry that liquid out until it turns into a gel. You then treat that gel with lime and a few other substances until it becomes a powder. And by the time you're done you've reduced it by two orders of magnitude.”

“And what does that do that making a solution with alcohol doesn't?”

“There are certain active ingredients in herbs and fruits that are only found in very small quantities. With this method I create a concentrate of that specific substance. You'd drown yourself in the solution before it gave you the same effect as the powder.”

“Wouldn't that also give you the effect of the potion but far more concentrated?” I asked.

“No, because the acid dissolves that particular substance.”

“Yeah, this is beyond me,” I admitted.

“That's alright,” she said, not a hint of condescension to her voice. “If it was easy I wouldn't have had to study it for ten years.”

I conceded the point, then asked: “And what was that about a potion for muscle development?”

She looked at me dubiously. “It makes muscle training more effective. You don't want to take that, do you?”

“I'm as strong as I need to be,” I said. I was perfectly alright not looking like a brick outhouse. “But I was thinking that there might be a buyer for these in the near future. How many can you make of those?”

“With the ingredients I have here?” she asked. “Maybe three dozen bottles. If we go on a quick trip down to the second floor's treasure room I could make over a hundred. What are you planning?”

I told her.

She smiled. “I'll make sure they're ready when we need them then.”

**

I eventually left Anna to her work and went back to the kitchen, where I found Alisha preparing dinner.

“Do you want some help?” I asked.

“If you want to,” she said, almost sounding like a question.

“Sure,” I said and she pointed me at a parcel of wax paper. I unwrapped it and found chicken thighs, a whole bunch of them. “What do you want me to do with them?”

“Can you cut out the bones and then cube the meat?” she asked as she busied herself with a small mountain of peppers, tomatoes, onions, garlic cloves and olives.

“Sure,” I said and got right to it. “You want me to toss the bones or...”

“Keep them,” she said. “I'm making a stock later.”

And so I busied myself, slowly deboning all the chicken and dropping the bones into a stock pot, then cubing the meat. We worked in companionable silence for a while, with her telling me what to do. And so I added salt, pepper and a bit of flour to the meat, then fried it off in a pan until the flour had turned a nice golden brown.

While I did Alisha chopped up her mountain of veggies and then placed it on an oven tray.

“So, what's this going to be?” I asked.

“I don't actually know,” she said. “It's in this cookbook your mom and her sister wives gave me last time we were there. Apparently it's something from their part of the kingdom.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Are you making this for me?” I asked.

“Maybe...” she said quietly.

I wasn't a picky eater by any stretch of the imagination. While I did have a bit of nostalgia for the cuisine I grew up eating I could generally arrange myself with everything. But if she was making something like this for me, then...

“You know I'm not upset with you anymore, right?”

She froze. Evidently I'd hit the nail on the head.

“Am I so scary that you feel the need to appease me?” I asked gently.

“No,” she said, too quickly. “It's just...”

I stepped in and pulled her into a hug. Not a tight one, one she could pull away from if she wanted to, but a hug nevertheless.

“I don't ever want you to be upset with me,” she finally said. “I'm not scared of you, I'm scared of the idea of you not wanting me anymore.”

I reached for her right hand and then slowly, deliberately, kissed each knuckle of it. “That will never happen. I'll never stop wanting you. I'll never stop loving you. And you never need to ingratiate yourself to me. I'll tell you when you do something stupid, just as I want you to tell me when I do, but that's because I care, not because I don't care.”

She didn't let herself sob but I saw the tears welling up in her eyes before she buried her face in my chest. I just held her, swaying gently, until she had calmed down.

I knelt down before her, deliberately making myself smaller than her. “My little fairy queen,” I said gently.

In response she let the butterfly wings of her aura come out to play. Lately they'd gotten so dense they were nearly solid. Huge, gorgeous gray-green butterfly wings that, combined with her white dress, made her look like a fairy queen of legend.

“Your fairy queen,” she said with a smile.

“Forever,” I said and kissed her. The angle made me kiss upward, kissing her top lip more than her bottom lip. It felt alien but also perfect.

**

We managed to finish making dinner without any more emotional outbursts, back to our normal routine, bumping each other's hips and looking over each other's shoulder as we worked, and soon we had the dish ready that Alisha had intended to make. It was a thick red gravy made from tomatoes and peppers and garlic and onions cooked down, with halved olives and the chicken pieces swimming around in it, and the whole thing finished with a frankly obscene amount of butter.

Alisha had served it with some crusty bread and the whole thing was really rather amazing. It was like the food I'd grown up eating but far more indulgent than I was used to, the king's version of the peasant food I was used to. I wouldn't admit it, especially not after the talk we'd just had, but I was always thrilled when Alisha made a dish like this. And not just because it was a nice change of pace from the heavy stews we often had.

**

After the morning we'd had I wasn't too surprised when everyone retired to their own bedrooms. Well, mostly. I was certain I'd seen Anna walk into Selene's room. Not that I could blame her, given that her own bed sheets were still in dire need of cleaning.

I went to bed with Alisha and Yume, though sleeping was all we did. I fell asleep with a gorgeous little elf resting on one bicep and a gorgeous fox curled up against my other side. It would have been a nice way to sleep through the night but evidently fate had other plans for me.

In the middle of the night I woke up, feeling a bit breezy on one side, and realized that Yume was no longer on the bed with us. I extricated myself from the bed gently, doing my best not to wake Alisha up, and as I stood up I saw Yume out the window.

The roof had a gentle slope, gentle enough that one could climb up and sit on it. And that's where Yume was, a thin blanket over the shingles as she sat there and watched the stars. I climbed out of the window, trying not to startle her, but a slight twitch of one of her ears told me she'd noticed me.

And so I simply sat down beside her, not saying anything.

“They're beautiful,” she finally said.

“The stars?” I asked.

“Yes. When I first started living with you I thought you couldn't see the stars from the capital.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, “it's too bright over there.”

The Plucked Cockatrice was in one of the busier parts of the city, the part that never slept, not even at night. It wasn't in the red light district or anything but it wasn't far away from it and in those parts of the city the lamps kept burning deep into the night. It blotted out the stars in the sky. But here, in the noble district, there was nothing like it. The nobles could afford to travel far to get food and so this was wholly a residential district, with no taverns or other establishments to make noise and light. From here you could see all the stars in the sky, as well as the two moons having their never-ending dance.

“You're used to seeing the stars, aren't you?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I spent much of my life in the mountains and in rural areas. The stars in the sky were always a constant.”

“You never really talk about your time in your homeland,” I said.

She hesitated. “It's not as if I'm hiding it but...”

I stayed quiet.

“Much of it was bad and what was good about it isn't coming back,” she finally said.

“What about your childhood?” I asked. “I know you loved your father.”

“I did. He gave me all the love a child could hope for.”

“What about your mother?” I asked. She'd mentioned her before, but only in the most oblique of terms.

“Mother is... everything I hope I won't become.”

I didn't say anything, just waiting for her to elaborate.

“Mother has eight tails,” she finally said. “She is only a few years away from growing her ninth. She has lived for centuries. And like all of us who grow to that age, she has become jaded. While my father was still alive she was the perfect mother and wife. She loved me, she loved my father, she doted on us, she taught me everything I would need to know. But when he died...”

I kept quiet.

“I was devastated,” she said. “Father had lived a long life, much longer than average for a human, but he was still gone. But mother didn't grieve. I confronted her about it, furious with her, and she explained her reasoning to me. For her, this chapter of her life had come to a close, just like all the other chapters of her life before it. She had loved father, really and truly, but she had loved him knowing that she would survive him, that she would have eternity left after he was dead and gone. And she simply moved on, looking for the next thing to catch her interest. That is how kitsune are. Our vast lifespans make it impossible for us to bind ourselves to a single other mortal.” She paused, then said with emphasis: “But I don't want that life. I want real love, real connections, ones that last. Whenever Alisha pushes you all to eat things that expand your lifetime, I feel relief knowing that we'll be able to spend that much more time together.”

I pulled her into a hug. “I didn't know this was eating at you like that. I'm sorry.”

“I don't want you to worry on my behalf,” she said. “I'll survive you. I need to worry about you.”

“Sorry,” I said. “You picked the wrong mate if you don't want me to worry about you.”

She giggled. She would have called it a chuckle but it was definitely a giggle.

“We'll have a good long while left,” I said. “But if that worries you then I'll make sure we keep eating our dragon berry rations.”

“Thank you,” she said softly, then scooted closer to me.

I wanted to talk to her about Ares, about how she felt after everything we'd learned on Mount Olympus, but when she scooted closer to me and I could feel the warmth between her thighs all thoughts of that bastard fled my mind.