1st Draft Fridays - A Fistful of ... (#6)

Grehafen

Aidan realizes he's wandering, mentally speaking, and drags his attention back to the room. The fire's out, and Ferrel's coughs are settling. He's rinsing put his mouth with some water and a basin provided by the little pregnant server whose name isn't elvish.

Evonalé is hunched over, shoulders drawn inwards. Her skin would surely be hot to the touch, since she's elf enough that her emotions can affect her body temperature and human enough to lack control over it.

"Sorry!" she squeaks.

He sighs. Times like this suggest he's being generous when he thinks of her as 'not the best' at ruling, but she steps up and even makes the hard choices when it's necessary. She's just truly horrible at navigating the psychological games of internal politics. Like the basics of encouraging others to trust your competence.

The fact that this castle is where she experienced severe abuse as a child doesn't help. She still sometimes trails off or freezes up while speaking, staring at the site of some memory he never asks about.

He's suggested she build another castle—Grehafen can afford a small one, even with the reparations and the social support programs she's implemented, and he has his own funds that he would gladly provide for the project.

Evonalé, true to form, stared at him in confusion for the suggestion that she take care of herself...much as she's looking at him now.

"Aidan?" she asks tentatively.

He sighs. "Yes, I know, I just went unresponsive and then returned with a rock the size of a dog."

It's by his foot, too, and... actually shaped kind of like one, crouching and waiting for the person's attention. Now, doesn't that open all sorts of questions about what the rocks actually are?

"What—?" Kitra glances at Ferrel's expression, which has cleared at Aidan's summary. "Oh! Oh by the black fires—"

Ferrel winces, the years and marriage apparently not changing his inclination to prudery. "Kitra."

"What? That's the nice, sanitized mountaineer version. This is that Three thing?"

"What?" Evonalé echoes her, but for a different reason. "What three thing?"

Ferrel winces again.

Kitra's eyes widen. "You lived in Salles for how long, now?"

"The Three are actually not common knowledge," Aidan cuts in, before the conversation gets Evonalé panicking yet again due to the things she doesn't know but 'should'. "Thus why I am officially the crown heir of Salles although the magic named me the spare."

"Wait, what?" Evonalé's voice is rising in volume, not pitch, so that's temper flaring, not panic. "You're not actually heir to Salles?"

...In hindsight, that is something he should have bothered to mention at some point. "I wasn't while my father was alive, no."

His voice keeps light, but then his throat closes up.

"Curse it," Ferrel mutters. "Your father is the one dead. That's...not good."

Aidan's father is the most experienced and capable of them at self-defense. Several of the family have died, over the years—most in the plague that took Grandmother's brother—but most who remain are civilians, and that's if you're only counting the legal or openly acknowledged relatives. Aidan's grandfather sired an alarming number of illegitimate children.