Page 115 of The Sundered Realms

Vhannor huffed out a laugh, then tugged her in front of him until she was surrounded by his warmth, and both of them could gaze out into the rain, alone in their own world.

And it didn’t feel confining. She suspected with anyone else this would, but at some point Liris had stopped wondering whether Vhannor was testing her and trusted him implicitly not to hold her back if she needed to go.

She was outside, but with protection she chose. It was hard to wrap her mind around how much her life had changed in the space of weeks.

“What are you thinking about?” Vhannor murmured against her ear.

Liris shivered. He solicitously tightened his arms around her.

“I’m not actually used to warmer surroundings, exactly,” she said. “I lived in a desert, but most of my time was spent in underground rooms climate-controlled to preserve paper records. I didn’t go outside much.”

“Not even to cultivate an appreciation of Serenthuar?” Vhannor asked. “As much as you love exploring, I’m sure you must have made that argument.”

“No.” Liris leaned back into his chest, contemplating where to begin, the rain a strange lullaby. “When I was a child, I made a serious mistake. Unforgivable, it turned out, but shortly afterward, the elders took me on a field trip outside. I saw Serenthuar’s people at work in all the fields you’d expect. It was like they were putting on a show just for me, to show how proud I should be of Serenthuar by showing me how proud all the people of Serenthuar were in their work, but they also made a point of drawing my attention just how hard that work, and life, is for the average person in Serenthuar.”

Vhannor ran his hands up and down Liris’ arms, warming them. Warming her.

And somehow it was easy to continue, “On the way back, they asked me what I’d learned. Of course by then I knew I was in trouble, and I told them I understood how hard everyone in Serenthuar works and that I’d make sure to work just as hard to serve them.”

“They were trying to scare you into submission by threatening you with a life of menial labor?” His breath was warm against her ear, but the rumble of his voice, both incredulous and outraged, was even better.

“More like work that would bore me. Plenty of it takes a great deal of skill, but it’s also very... repetitive.” Difficult to explain the sort of existential dread that filled her at the prospect of doing the same thing every day for the rest of her life, with no challenge to her mind. Plenty of people in the world managed, and yet—

“Ah,” Vhannor said. “Now I see.”

By his tone, Liris thought he did.

But she wasn’t finished. “I think that’s what they meant to do, but then I wondered why they’d kept it at a field trip rather than making me work with people, to really see what it was like, or abandoning me at a workshop and making me think I really was done so I’d be desperate.”

His arms tightened around her.

“But then I realized what they must have known I would, which is that it wouldn’t work. I was already too valuable—I’d outstripped the few other candidates, as well as comparable development of my predecessors. That’s why they were loath to lose me at all and hadn’t just culled me from training already, like they would have anybody else who thought they should change. Or, really, in retrospect, made things so unpleasant the candidates culled themselves, which I was too stubborn or oblivious to realize was a sign. I believed it was a test that I would pass, and then when I’d proven myself—and since I knew I wouldn’t give up, for years I really thought that was a ‘when’ and not an ‘if’—for me, there would be an end. Almost nobody in Serenthuar ever got the chance I did to try, so what I actually took from that day was that I had to make the most of mine.”

“But then there wasn’t an end for you,” Vhannor rumbled.

But he kissed her temple, taking the sting out of the reminder.

Liris sighed. “Yes. And eventually I cracked and decided what I wanted for myself was more valuable than serving Serenthuar.”

“Or,” he growled, “you decided to be true to serving Serenthuar even when they had strayed in their pride.”

Vhannor’s hands had ghosted up to her shoulders by that point, and he muttered a soft curse behind her at how tense they were.

“You are not going into battle like this,” he growled.

Liris scoffed. “Oh, like you’re any less rigid?”

The only reason she didn’t wiggle in his lap to make the point was because Vhannor dug his thumbs into the knots in her shoulders. Liris hissed.

“I’m flexible when I need to be,” he told her.

Like he had been with her.

Mostly.

Vhannor hit another knot. “Your turn next, then.”

It was a partnerly thing to do, after all. Making sure they were in good shape for battle.

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