Handmaidens!

Frost.

Creeping up the windowpanes. Tracing the contours of the twisted room. Fringing the very edge of the teapot's spout. Spreading in spurts, in delicate fractals.

"She did not, because she would not. Eclair Espoir?" In her eyes. In her fingers. In her teeth. "Eclair Espoir would not. Would never. Not unless all we hold dear was at stake, and then she would come back to us." She does not say: and I would hold her, and stroke her back as she sobbed, and reassure her that she had done the right thing, and that there were simple chores waiting for her precise touch. But that is what she means, in her heart. It is only frozen on the outside.

When she exhales her breath is visible. Like a dragon's own.

"If you are going to lie to start a war, pick better ones. It would not do for the Champion of Thellamie to bring ruin and to destroy a place that has done her no wrong over such a flimsy, threadbare one."

---

Eclair Espoir!

She takes your hand, Eclair. Not sweetly, not slipping her fingers between yours, but so firmly that it digs your fingers against your palm around that too-solid hilt. She is frightened; she is furious. She is all her feelings, and no way to let them spill out properly.

"You! Idiot!" She sobs, shaking your hand. Keep the sword away from her. You have enough strength for that. I believe in you. "Did you think I would just buy a tower in the middle of a ruined city? Swoop in, and, and twist someone's arm until they sold? The Syzerpaws Memorial Tower!! That, that would be throwing it all away, and I thought you'd want, and anyway, the fastest way to get all those tents, all those groceries, all those rocks from Kel was just..."

She tries to make a gesture with her shoulders which says: if my palms were open, I'd be gesturing with them to suggest letting money fall out of my hands. But she's not very good at it. Her face says: how dare you be angry with me when I've already been angry at myself. Her fingers' shaking says: how dare you hurt yourself over me. How dare you how dare you how dare you.

"...what does money mean if I live every day in a broken city knowing that I didn't help all of them when I had the chance? Do you think I'd ever be able to look one of you in the eye ever again?! Do you??" She doesn't ask to be answered. She asks to be heard.

She stands. She draws.

Her heartblade is the color just before dawn, shivering in the shape of a long knife. Not the weapon of a duelist at all.

"Now put that awful thing away and duel me. And when I win," she says, willing victory into her unpracticed hands, "you will never do that again, Eclair."

---

Yuki!

Perfectly answered. You know, that must be why you met my daughters so early on your journey: you've been one of mine all along, for all those Kelish spots on your coat. To have a heart like that, that is.

Purnima takes her coffee with a ridiculous amount of cream and sugar. Sweet and spicy. And, yes, that means yours also has a kick to it. Do you cough when drinking spicy coffee, Yuki? I bet you do. I bet it's just the cutest, most adorable thing in all the world. You take coffee together, there in the Den of Evil, with the guards blushing outside.

"And when I am Queen of Crevas everything will be perfect and wonderful forever," she says, preening at herself. She's always doing this sort of thing when not in public: running fingers through her hair to catch tangles, rubbing at her scales to make sure one's not loose, looking at herself in the nearest shiny object to make sure there's no blemish that she hasn't caught before showing herself off to others. "I will make statues of myself that also double as fountains which also double as vendor machines, like on Yukisearth, and everyone will look up at me when they get their vended food and they will think to themselves: she is the most beautiful woman who has ever lived and my life is so much better now that the Karn-Pana family is in charge instead of the sanctimonious puffed-up Arjus. I will now go enjoy being twice as wealthy and four times as happy. And maybe you'll get a little statuette somewhere! And you'll be looking up at my statue so that everyone knows how lucky you were to pleasure me!"

Her smile is beatific, as if a fire demon were to suddenly experience bliss.

---

Hazel!

There is dead silence. Olesya is staring off into the flames, her body taut. Keli and Seli are holding their breath between them, afraid to so much as twitch an ear. In one of the braziers, there is the snap of coal falling apart, and a curl of smoke rises. The temperature is oppressive. The shawl around your shoulders is itching at every place where it touches your skin.

The Khatun laughs, the once. Her smile is yellow with age and tea stains. Yellow like the heart of the fire.

"Oh, this is a brave boy! You picked well!" She toasts the unseen stars with her teacup, tail swishing to the left, then to the right. "A brave prince with a clever voice. If I were half my age I would be rolling you up in a carpet myself!" She lowers the cup, sets it back in the saucer.

"But I am not," she says. "No need to be afraid," she says. "We will all do our best to help you choose," she says.

The teapot whistles. She does not flinch. Her eyes are on you.

She hungers.

"Oh good!" Tsane! said. "Because now you've accepted the idea that ruin, destruction and war are what you are going to get if you do not comply with my perfectly reasonable demands for courtesy and hospitality. As the representative of the Civil Church and Princess Heron -"[1]

[1] Tsane was awful at pretending to be Princess Heron. She was extremely good, however, at pretending to be the Hero of Ages disguised as Tsane. That fire in her eyes, that unending determination, the confidence that there was nothing she could not bring to an end - all of it made her seem less like a mere handmaiden and more like an unconvincingly disguised comet.

"- I am going to get to the truth. Your argument hinges on would, and would is a question of motive. Is it impossible she gained a new one? After all, I just told you that the Fire In The Wood has returned - how would you describe Ms. Espoir's resistance to poison? The False Fire is still at large - does your companion have a heart of stone? Your organisation has been around for centuries, dutifully serving the lands of Thellamie - we heard such words from the outraged monks of Shindenbutai even as the mark of the Demon Queen burned upon their hearts and their teeth curled into the tusks of boars. You tell us that you deal with tasks beneath Heron's notice - well, you are now the subject of Heron's notice as she deals with threats above your station."

"Is there something here you need to keep secret?" asked Kalentia quietly. "Or are you trying to defend something? Because I am a healer; if I go in I would pose no threat."

There was kindness, but also firmness there. She wasn't contradicting Tsane. They had a duty, and some things could not be taken on trust.

"...Aha."

Eclair's summoned heartblade is a match for the one she pulled in Mayzie's presence back during the duel in Vespergift. Her second heartblade matches it, now mirroring the two she wielded against the Architect Knight. Her third and her fourth are new to anybody she has met since she ventured forth from the Manor on this ill-fated mission. These beautiful, curving, single-edged blades join seamlessly together to form a pair of double-bladed polearms, which she twirls with such adroit cleverness that they seem to slice the idea of sound from the air itself.

She tosses the pair of them up into the air and they separate back into swords once more before burying themselves into the floorboards down to the hilt. One in the North. One in the South. One in the East. One in the West. The floor of the room lights up like a stormy sky, flashing pearly and purple lightning across the meager bedroom and turning it into an arena of legends.

She pulls a fifth sword from her heart, this one as pliable as a whip, and wraps its edge around her left fist.

"A contest between heartblades is not a contest of skill or experience. It is merely an expression of willpower. If yours remains inviolate, then even if your entire body should fail you, victory is still possible. Conversely..."

There is some clever and possibly horrifying bit of Maid-Knight magic to the technique of Reduced Earth. Whatever that is, it is not to be revealed here. Still, Eclair is an adept student: in a single violet blur of motion she crosses all the distance between herself and Mayzie, and now looms large and imposing in her glittering dress and armor in front of her childhood friend.

"--If one heart is defeated..."

Her sword-hand grapples Mayzie around the wrist, seizing control of her dawn colored knife.

"--Before the fight begins..."

Their faces are touching now. Eclair plants the softest and sweetest of kisses on Mayzie's cheek.

"--There is no need..."

She pulls Mayzie's arm forward by the wrist and thrusts the dagger through the crack in her armor.

"To fight in the first place."

Eclair takes three slow steps backwards, pulling free from the kiss. Free from the knife. She stands there in silence with her back as straight and proud as can be, and everything about her stance and expression exuding the confidence and power of a Maid-Knight in full standing who truly believes she could fight the entire world and win. At least with preparation.

She snaps her fingers and all of her weapons dissolve into mist. Then she dips into a low curtsy.

"Once again I have underestimated you, Mayzie. I was all too aware that the money I had offered you could not be stretched far enough to repair a broken city and I confess that restricted my thinking. No wonder I found you working another service job. You fool, what was there to be embarrassed about? You should have been gloating!"

She reaches for a mop and begins to clean up after herself until the room is spotless, well beyond the level of clean she found it in. She glances often at Mayzie's reaction as she continues, most especially to make sure she's still standing there. With a single relieved huff, she finishes and draws out her tablet in its place.

"A moment, if you please. Your heart is as beautiful as you are, and I can only hope to match it. I am going to inform my Order of the current status of my investigation. I am also going to requisition time off to accompany you until the restoration of Vespergift is well in hand. To arrange the transport of all the food and materials a clever mind might have purchased will take more work days than you can possibly afford right now. But if you simply hire me, I can accomplish all of this trivially. Distribution, construction, and especially cleaning are also skills I possess at a passable level."

She turns her head away and blushes, visible despite her very valiant attempts at hiding it.

"I am... sorry that this means you will be forced to continue looking at my face. I can wear a mask if that will help. I have... mmf. Simply realized there is no honor or kindness in disappearing or in aiding your dreams if I do not at least fix the things that are holding your dreams hostage in the first place. So I will. Be there. To pay back all the pieces that loved me. And t-the... ones that hated me as well. If I wish for you to think well of the Aurorae it is my job to prove you should. Not yours."

With a single, awkward glance at her friend she buries her nose in her tablet and begins writing with quick and feathery taps. For all her speed it's a thing that still takes quite a while, because in writing any missive to the entire Manor at once she will always find she has a lot to say. There isn't enough time or space to write down all the little bits of love and longing or every fastidious detail she copies from her notebooks, but the basic thrusts are these:

1. That Timtam is very decidedly not acting alone, though the full extent of her resources remains unclear
2. That she has employed multiple channels of misdirection, and that her sisters-in-arms to take care to scrutinize the rumors that filter in from the world
3. That even if she has betrayed the Order utterly, Timtam's heart remains her own. It is Eclair's recommendation in the meantime that the Maids and the Dreamers at the very least do not give up on her just yet.
4. That Timtam is limited enough after current events that Eclair feels comfortable prioritizing the wellbeing of Vespergift, recently destroyed by the sudden reemergence of the Rot Star.
5. If anybody from the Order wishes to criticize, chastise, or otherwise admonish her, they can find her in the city that fights the forest. Where there will evidently be a ball of some sort? She will be in attendance if there is any chance it could be mission relevant to either of her current goals.
6. Though owing to a mysterious and unprovoked aggression from the Civils, she may be forced to don a disguise or four. Send only Maid-Knights or couriers who could know her by her eyes.

It goes on like this, for endless paragraphs that name over six dozen individuals she wishes to send her love to. She asks if anybody knows whether Evening liked her picture. And for endless paragraphs more she begs everyone for their patience and understanding as she unwinds these unexpectedly complex threads. Then she (quite unnecessarily, given the... everything else about it) puts her signature on the bottom in her usual idiom.

As if anyone at the Manor wouldn't know the title she gave to herself when she was barely more than a squire.

He would really like that cup of tea now please. On account of his throat forgetting it wasn’t a desert.

Frankly, it is a clerical error on an unimaginable scale that Hazel Valentine Fletcher should even be sitting before the Khatun, much less talking to her, and don’t get him started about her talking about him. To him. The cold, iron fist of the Khaganate, now that, that he could wrap his head around. At least then he could be angry, and afraid, and feel like standing up to her was the right thing to do.

Now.

Prince?

Now?

Khatun?

Now,

Clever, prince?

(Khagan?!)

it’s getting tricky.

The shawl’s too hot. The shawl’s too prickly. They’re too close to the fires. There’s too many fires. There’s too much quiet. There’s too little sense. The tiara doesn’t fit. The teacup’s still empty. There’s nobody between him and the Khatun. There’s several twisting hallways, very big sluzhankas, and very big huntresses between him and the exit. The charm is right where he left it; beneath the shawl, pressing against his shoulder. He doesn’t know what he’d say. Only that he’d have to say it quickly.

She’s still looking.

She’s still waiting.

“Thank you, Khatun. I appreciate the help and also not being rolled up in a carpet.”

He doesn’t laugh. You don’t react when you do something silly. You do not pull a face unless the audience is right. You do not look away you do not look away you do not look away you do not look away you do not

“Though, to be clear, there won’t be any competing outside of the contests, for anybody. I’m, not saying any of your hospitality is meant to be competing. I haven’t taken it that way at all. Really, it’s been nice to rest after all the running around. But if there is to be any helping, it has to be done in the contests. Thellamie needs a Queen, but I don’t want it tearing itself apart to get one.”

The steam builds. The whistle rises higher, ever higher.

”I just wanted to tell you, up front, in case of…carpets. And if you hadn’t heard already. Avoid any misunderstandings.”

The flush builds. The red rises higher, ever higher.

[Oh no it’s a conversation now and that means it’s Friendly Benefits: The Khatun takes a String, and says one thing she finds attractive about clever, clever Hazel.]

Yuki doesn't cough right off the bat, but she also doesn't pace herself, and so after a few sips there's too much spiciness in her mouth and she has to stop and cough. They're cute little coughs, and she smiles in chagrin and to let Purnima know that she's enjoying it even though it's making her cough.

Once she collects herself (following a very hoarse "I'm fine...no really") she slows her pace to drink the coffee, she gives Purnima a thoughtful look. "See, I'd kind of like that because you'd be the one building a statue of me. And even if it's a little statue, it's pretty special to think that you'd want to build a statue of me because of tonight, y'know?"

She takes another very small sip, thinking about how to say this. "Back on Earth, Yukisworld, there are lots of people who build...statues of themselves. Or stuff like statues. Sometimes they make stuff, like clothes with their names on it. And...so I guess I understand why you'd want to do that. But, well, my friends and I all make fun of those people on Earth. Like, it's actually kinda lame to want a statue of yourself. Kind of...uh...well...it makes people think you're insecure. It's like, if you get a statue, it should be cuz somebody else thinks you're worth a statue. And if you're so rich that you can build statues of yourself, you should use your riches to do cool stuff for the people that really need help instead. So then they'll think you're cool enough to build a statue of."