Page 63 of Nightingale

He snapped his fingers and the men carried Rian away, lifting his feet so that he didn’t drag on the ground the entire length of the journey.

Vrea watched with an unsettling feeling that chewed through her gut, unsure of why he had so much of an effect on her. When she saw his red hair disappear into the striped medical tent, she jammed her heel into the flank of the horse and rode off after him.

The tent was precisely as she remembered from the last time she’d been stationed here, a little over five years ago by her mother’s direct order. According to Queen Casta, each of her children had to have fought in the war at least once, in order to fight side by side with the people that they would be ruling over. In order to show their people that they were with them, regardless of station. None of her children would be above getting their hands stained with blood and dirt and sweat.

All except Tessa had.

Now she stood in the same spot, nearing six years older thanthe last time, eyeing the decorations that had been set up for a visiting royal. It was the largest tent of them all, in the dead center of the field. There were two banners on either side with the garnet backing that dipped into a curved point with a dangling tassel, bearing the Greenvass symbol of a badger with growling fangs. Bronze trimmed the sides, embedded with sapphire blue that reflected the single gem that made up the animal’s eye.

As a child, she hated the symbol.

It looked like nothing fierce, not in comparison to the wide-spread hawk of the Moordians that she admired. It was a clever, cunning, quick-witted creature that had the ability to fly, to swoop out of the sky on its unsuspecting prey with taloned claws and devour them whole with a snap of its vicious beak.

There were a few instances where she’d tried to convince her mother to change the banner to something more wild, untamable, beastly.

A lion would have been regal, she insisted.

A wolf would have been threatening, she said.

A serpent would have been wicked, she tried to convince her mother.

Casta had refused, declaring that a badger was a vengeful animal, one that wasn’t to be overlooked just as they were. Vrea hadn’t been happy but there wasn’t anything she’d been able to do. She made the mistake of turning to Eamin and complaining about it, about how much it bothered her that the badger didn’t seem to have anything special about it.

The wrong brother to confide in.

That night, Eamin had set a rogue badger free in her room, allowing her to learn just what made the animal the creature represented on the banner. It was impossible to tell who was more surprised at the other’s unexpected presence- the badger, or Vrea.

She hadn’t screamed, because that wouldn’t have done anything. There was a high probability that her brother had paid the guards off for the evening to teach her a valuable lesson. One she did learn, whether she wanted to or not.

The creature had hissed and the coat had puffed up to make it look twice its size.

In the end, Vrea emerged.

She’d skinned the beast and dropped the insides on Eamin’s bed, in the middle of the night as he slept soundly. He’d startled awake as she held it up, wriggled the bloody corpse in front of his face, and dropped it directly into his lap. He’d looked horrified, as if he’d thought the badger would win.

It was an image that would never leave her mind.

Vrea no longer hated it as the sigil of their strong house after her fight with it. She’d given the striped fur to her seamstress, asking for it to be made into a fur-lined cape for when the weather grew dismal. The woman obeyed, and two weeks later an azure cloak appeared in her room, a collar of badger fur proudly displayed with a Greenvass sigil pin to latch it.

She wore it whenever she needed an extra boost of strength, tenacity and ferocity. Not that she needed a reminder of the beast’s temper, when it left a jagged scar down her right thigh, from the top of her hipbone to her near knee.

But the shocked look it earned from Eamin whenever she proudly wore it was satisfaction enough that she kept it around. Enough for it to become one of her prized possessions. It rarely grew cold enough in Niroula for her to ever need it, but there were occasional times that she pulled it out of her closet.

As Vrea paced around the room, shuffling through the small chest for a change of clothes, she inhaled the rich scent of sand and river, of her homeland that she’d sorely missed. She’d been away for far too long and the absence of her country had gotten to her after a while. Was she the sort to cry, tears might havepricked the corners of her eyes.

There were six chests lined against the farthest wall of the large tent, one for each of the remaining royals that came to visit. Her mother’s was the biggest, stuffed with her armour and a few regal pieces such as a crowned headpiece that she wore into battle, a greatsword that was heavier than Vrea, and a crossbow that could fire from yards away with deadly precision. A crown marked hers, with ruby indents in a diamond shape.

Alpheus’s came next to it, jade triangles pressed into the leather work that wrapped around it. She was sure that if she snuck a peek into it, she’d find nothing but simple tunics and trousers, loaded with weapons to the brim. Her eldest brother was fond of the tools of death, finding blood-letting to be fun in any form, as long as it was against the Moordians.

She moved past his to find Eamin’s, with a scoff and roll of her eyes in his direction. Undoubtedly, there were poisons within. He shared that trait with the King of Carylim.

Marked with saffron circles, Teminos’s held silks and satins, one that she opened and borrowed from. There was no way that any of her old clothes would fit her in the five years that had flown by since she’d last stepped foot on the war field. Her body had filled out in her chest, her hips, even if not by much.

Vrea grabbed a cerulean top that fluttered with a ruffled collar, one that plunged a little lower than she would have liked, but it was all that she could find for now. The sleeves billowed and tapered in at the wrists, ones that she contemplated cutting off for better access.

She tossed the top on the risen bedroll, far fancier than anything she’d slept on in the last three weeks. A bath was required before she changed clothes, lest she dirty up another ensemble before long. A pair of chestnut trousers landed on the bed next to it, and she ambled over to her mother’s trunk to search for a new pair of boots. There wasn’t anything trulywrong with hers, but they were a bit tight on the toe if a complaint had to be made.

And with another week or so on the road, switching them out for something slightly more accommodating was a preferable idea to keeping her old shoes and letting them pinch. They’d be riding for the majority of it and resting for the evenings.

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