Lior’s patience extended beyond Canelle’s expectation. 

By their third reading session, she could say with confidence that she retained more in her lessons with Lior than the pursuit on her own. It helped that she recognized a lot of the letters and their respective sounds. And with the promise of adventure waiting for her on the other side, she was incentivized to see the effort through.

Imagine she hated adventuring. That would be unfortunate and ironic, much in the way her life had been so far. Imagine it was terrifying. She had a pattern of walking face-first into her deepest fears.

She knocked on the open doorway to Liorit’s study before poking her head in to see the woman working at her desk. Canelle was embarrassed to admit that she didn’t know Lior played a role in helping Prince Valkom do… whatever it was Prince Valkom did. Neither of them were very responsible from what she knew of the two. 

Lacking the context to give the work a name, Canelle observed that Lior read a lot of newspapers, and would sometimes have lunch with the heir. 

“You’re early today,” The red-haired woman noted without glancing up. 

“Yes, the Lord and Lady left early this morning for the long weekend,” explained Canelle. “Should I wait downstairs?” 

“No, I’m just about done wrapping this up. But if you’re bored, you can grab the books on my nightstand and bring them here.” 

“You got it.”

Canelle had never gotten a formal ‘tour’ of Liorit’s wing, but the residences surrounding the palace were all built using similar layouts. She found the room without difficulty and noted that the room was a tad bigger than the Vouvern’s own master bedroom. 

Since she hadn’t grown up in Gaidos, she didn’t know the families or their histories as well as some of her fellow workers. There seemed to be tiers of wealth even among the rich, and she hadn’t quite sorted it out yet. A hint given to her by her peers was to mind the distance between the residence and the main palace. The richer the family was, the closer they were to the colossal monument. 

She walked over to the nightstand and collected the short stack of books, idling. Outside of Liorit’s tall windows, the garish construct stood gleaming, defying the approaching evening with its manufactured brilliance. This was the view that Liorit woke up to every morning. 

She was brought out of her idling by the sound of Lior’s distant voice.

“Ahnhila, where are you going?” 

A tall, bronze-haired woman rounded the corner into the room, walking past Canelle and opening a wardrobe. 

“To take my things, what else?” she yelled over her shoulder, before beckoning Canelle over. “You girl, come here.”

Canelle was in what she thought was her civilian wear, but she could see how the muted grays of her personal attire could be mistaken for the muted grays of the staff uniforms. As she approached, the woman began pulling out random garments out of the wardrobe and tossing them into Canelle’s occupied arms. 

“Those aren’t yours,” Liorit said leaning against the doorway, hands in her pocket, one leg crossed over the other. “I told you, you didn’t leave anything here.”

“Then how does he know?” Ahnhila whirled back at the woman with a hard frown. Angry tears were forming in the corners of her eyes. 

She looked at Canelle then, or beyond Canelle, weighing her options. Emitting a long steady sigh and walking past her again.

“Liorit, it’s blackmail. What am I supposed to do?”

Canelle, unable to leave the room, created the illusion of privacy by sorting the garments in her hand and hanging them back up in the closet.

“I’ll handle it. Don’t worry about it.”

“Goddamnit Lior, you can say that because you don’t know what’s on the line for me. I’m not a miscreant like you. I have kids, a family—”

“Oh, a what?” Liorit scoffed, and her voice stiffened. “From what I remember you invited yourself here, who is the true miscreant?” 

First, there were no words. The pause was too long to be comforting or understanding. Then, a fury ignited in the stranger, and she became hostile with her words.

“I have my faith, Liorit, what do you have?”

“You mean the god you just damned?”

“You’re going to hell.” 

Behind the door of the wardrobe, Canelle’s eyes widened at the near comic irony of the woman’s tone. She said it so unabashedly. Like it could be a period to her sentence. Like it could win an argument. Like it could give her immunity.

The last sentiment made Canelle feel sad for the woman, but not enough to stop her from mentally working up a couple of clever retorts in the imaginary conversation she was having with the woman. 

Liorit’s response was frustrated, done, and less wordy than the Canelle’s hypothetical ones. 

“Whatever, you’re going to hell. Get out of my house.” It sounded like she had turned away from the woman and began to walk away.

“Don’t walk away from me…” The woman scampered after her out the door. Canelle could stop holding her breath. 

She closed the wardrobe and waited for the door to slam downstairs before poking her head out and loitering in the hallway. She considered leaving, as Liorit had pressing matters to deal with now. 

Ideally, she would leave without saying anything, although she would run into Liorit regardless. The front door and the staff exit were both downstairs. 

In her mindless twirling, she spotted the window, and the impulsive side of her brain implored her to crawl out. 

“What are you doing?” Lior asked behind her, having come up the stairs soundlessly. 

Canelle’s circle of prompts stuttered, landing neither on ‘waiting for you’ nor ‘where should I go?’. Instead, she turned around to say, “I got the books.”

“Right…” said Lior. “Let’s do the lesson in the sitting room instead, I’m starving.”

On their way down the stairs, Canelle asked her the actual question on her mind: “Is it better if I leave?”

“Why would that be better?” The woman glanced back at her and changed the subject. “How far did you get in the bear book?”

Canelle related to her the extent of her practice that week and answered the questions that followed. 

In the sitting room, she turned down Liorit’s invitation to eat with her, citing the inappropriateness of it. Her mentor rolled her eyes at the comment, but didn’t fight her on it. 

A little further into the lesson, she uttered an apology that was so off the cuff that Canelle for a second thought she was apologizing for something she was about to say rather than the incident.

“She was disrespectful to you,” Lior clarified. “You are here as my visitor, and I didn’t say anything to her.”

Canelle replayed the interaction in her head for the sake of figuring out what ‘disrespectful’ meant to Liorit. She hadn’t felt disrespected, she was regarded as the help because she was the help. Even if Lior was treating her as a ‘visitor’, that didn’t change her social class. 

Instead, she felt that the woman had been disrespectful towards Liorit, who was no saint by any definition of the word. She had done many things Canelle didn’t like, holding her own secret over her being one of them, but she didn’t deny being that person either. 

Because of her train of thought, she asked aloud, “Are you okay?” 

Across the table, Liorit’s mouth tightened and the color of the air around her Canelle imagined as a laurel green. Enough silence passed between them that she accepted it as her answer. 

“Yeah,” Lior said belatedly. “Believe it or not, it happens often. It blows over, we’ll be gone soon, and there will be some other court drama to take its place.” 

Maybe Canelle was giving her too much credit. She was putting her own queerness on Liorit. They were different people. Even if they stood on the same plane of existence, an unstable, violently shifting, translucent structure.