Chapter VI | A Lone Lily & the Wolven Woods

Year 694 a.S., Winter | City Pyraleia, the Capital

“And he keeps going on and on about the Church, but there hasn’t been a lick of evidence to question their loyalty. It’s these damned endwolves…”

Lana stared at Claude curiously and admired how the dust swirled around him in the dusk light, through the rotting wooden frame of this place. Ever since he learned how the people gossiped of their meetings, they decided to limit many of them to here. A quiet site that leaned off the edge of the Midtown, on the verge of falling into the ocean to be lost forever. It was a wooden house that was never finished, where only the foundations and the frame stood, somehow yet to be taken up by the hungry animals that yearned to move up layers. “You’re talkative today,” she decided to say. “How’s Lilya? Any injuries?

The king loosened his tie and wiped the sweat from his neck. “No, they always run when we try and catch them.”

“And they haven’t hurt a single knight or guard?”

“Well no, but—”

“Only JANITORs. And they’ve only stolen from them too. Them and the Church.”

“That’s right…” Claude confirmed, suddenly suspicious. “How do you—”

Lana put a finger to her own lips to hush him, and they fell silent together. Her lips were smooth and slick with chapstick, he noticed, and they trembled into a smile. A smile more nervous than he’d ever seen the confident Lana in the years he’d known her. But he didn’t really know her, he realized. He’d been strung along like a puppet, to this lucky he should’ve never come to trust.

“I am one,” she said. “An endwolf.”

A murder of crows erupted from the forest nearby, their shadows splashing across the king’s face as his lips parted and froze in place. He considered grabbing her then and there to throw in an iron cell, but for some reason, his body reacted first. A foot backwards, like he were to slip from the truth and run. Him? Run? And before he could do anything else, she lifted her skirt a touch to reveal a thigh holster, where she unsheathed an ironpale dagger, identical in all but material to the one he took four years ago when they first met. She held the blade to her own neck, drawing a thin line of blood across it, harmless but deep red. 

“They’re my family.” Her eyes were locked onto his, and he couldn’t look away. Just a simple hazel, trembling in the light and dust. “I’ll take you to them. I’ll take you if you promise not to hurt them. If you listen to them.”

Strangely, he smiled then. Lana’s brow crinkled in a brief confusion until the Claude who stood a few feet away stood then not even a breath’s distance apart, and the knife was gone, shattered into pieces and thrown out through the empty window and down into the ocean several thousand feet below.

“I’ll promise,” he said, breath like saffron. His hand gripped hers so tight she thought it might break, and her eyes tinged with tears. “But what makes you so sure I won’t break that promise?

From his wrist, she noticed, still dangled that woven bracelet she had given to him the week they met. How did that make her feel? Happy? Or disappointed? “Why are you still wearing that raggedy thing,” she wanted to say. “How can you trust me so little, yet so much at the same time?” Instead, she kept her smile, and the tears left. “Would you really kill a pretty girl like me?”

“Maybe not, but I could kill everyone else.”

Standing so close, she was all too conscious of his warmth. His knee pressed against her stomach and pinned her to the pine balustrade behind her. He had already loosened his grip on her wrist, but it still ached, and she could tell it would bruise. And the skin of her neck stung where she had cut herself. “If that ever comes to pass, Your Grace, then I would kill myself to join them.”