Ima’riel had explained that the sweetbriar festival was meant to go all through the night and the flowers of the thorny bushes would bloom with the dawn if her hard work succeeded. Indeed, it looked like none of the villagers were winding down as nighttime closed in. On the contrary, more food was brought out, and louder music was played, and ale flowed freely. Halfrida kept attempting to tend to the food, but Fitz and the other hunters wouldn’t allow it, instead taking turns pulling her off to dance. Even Kori was having a good time as she broke out a hidden skill, dagger juggling, that Baylen was keen to learn as a close-to-exhausted Ima’riel stood by with healing at the ready.
Reeve and Celeste lingered a short while longer, but eased their way to the edges of where the lights reached, and eventually they climbed atop Earlylyte again and silently returned to North Road.
“That was fun,” said Celeste, though her voice was weary. “I’m sorry we have to leave early.”
“You’re lying,” he teased. “I know you’re actually relieved.”
She chuckled and leaned back against him. “I couldn’t do that every evening, no, but I could be persuaded to make an exception on occasion.”
Reeve grinned, knowing he would be just as content remaining at home in the quiet, provided he was with her.
Earlylyte’s walk was slow, and they reached Ima’riel’s in a darkness that would have been much deeper without the brightness of Lo and Ero. The cottage loomed in the clearing, standing silent and empty, and the two hesitantly went inside. Celeste pulled out a loaf of bread from her satchel and placed it on the table. “Since we are sort of trespassing,” she explained, “and there’s a high likelihood we may break something, I thought I’d apologize ahead of time.”
The cottage was small, and despite their thorough search of it, clearly didn’t contain the sieve. This wasn’t a surprise to either of them—it was much more likely that the final sieve was buried somewhere in the greenhouses, but at least they had the ward from Geezer which they could now use to seal it in once they found it. Celeste insisted Reeve carry it because he was clearly good with wards, but he could see the sadness hidden at the corners of her features at the prospect of locking away the sieve for good.
As there were two greenhouses and two of them, they split the task, Reeve casting his ball of light, and Celeste calling up a black flame that she carried on a stick. How black fire could shine was rough on Reeve’s brain, but he was used to not fully understanding things, happy enough that she would be easy to spot through the glass.
Alone in the greenhouse, Sid spoke up for the first time all day, his low voice cutting into the quiet of the plants, “So?”
Reeve pushed aside the massive leaves of a cabbage to inspect the dark soil beneath. “So, what?”
“I guess you’ll want to plight your troth with her now?”
Reeve screwed up his face at the sword’s crassness, about to sheepishly proclaim he already had, then straightened as he realized what Sid meant, the idea bursting brilliantly in his mind. “Marry her? Well, yes, of course, but I need to ask first, don’t I?”
“Youneedto think,” snapped the sword. “She touches your cock once—”
“—more than once—”
“—and you’ve gone dumber than you’ve ever been!”
Reeve pushed past a trellis of peas and knocked a vine loose in his frustration. He apologized to the plant as he tucked it back in with its crop. “This is not a matter of thinking, Sid—I know how I feel.”
“Right, how you feel. Is this just like how you felt you needed to investigate the sound of that supposedly crying child in the Sanctuary of the Usurper? Or how about when you felt you should hand feed that griffin cub?”
“I still have all my fingers,” he groaned, “and those times were different anyway.”
“Different from when you brainlessly opened that crate in the Viscardi Crypts and it turned out to be a living beast disguised as a chest with teeth and a taste for exceptionally dim-witted knights? How, pray tell, isthisreally all that different?”
“Because now I’m in love.” The word came out clearer and quicker than Reeve had expected. He’d never heard himself say it before,love, not likethat.
He knew the priests and priestesses loved him, though it was implied rather than said, and he shared with the other knights a kind of unspoken love that was better expressed through manly nods and grunts. But this was simple and unhindered. It should have been complex, made difficult by his duty to his god and Celeste’s ties to dark arcana, but those things didn’t seem to matter when faced with how his heart swelled at just the thought of her name.
“I hate that I have to convince you of this.” He peered through the greenhouse glass to see Celeste’s black flame flicker across the way. “Can’t you feel it too?” As he wrapped a hand around the hilt of the Obsidian Widow Maker, the sword fell quiet. There was no arcana in his hold, magic unneeded, only the honesty in his heart.
“Fine,” the sword eventually sighed, “but at least let her wield me.”
Reeve grimaced down at a patch of rather ordinary carrots. “Now youwanther to do that?”
“No, but I want you to be safe. I do know how you feel, bud, I’ve always known, but the way you feel and the truth aren’t necessarily the same. Look at yourself, skulking through someone else’s property without permission, searching for a secretly hidden, ancient elven arcana you intend to dowhatwith when it’s found? This isnotlike you, not like a Holy Knight of Valcord.”
“But I am—” Reeve swallowed down the title. A Holy Knight of Valcord was all he had ever been, before that a child, thrown away and unneeded, but now?
He glanced back up through the greenhouse glass to watch Celeste inspect a flowering bush. She so carefully pushed back its leaves, a shadowy arm of dark arcana assisting her with an equally delicate care. As she leaned forward, she spotted something and took away her hand, and the plant’s limb swung back and thwacked her in the nose. She reeled and then was laughing at herself silently on the glass’s other side, and Reeve chuckled quietly too.
“Make her wield me,” Sid cut in. “If I don’t turn, then you’re assured to be safe, but if I do, you can still vanquish her. That ward Geezer gave you will help.”
Reeve’s stomach churned as anger burned in his chest, not just at the sword but at himself for once having the same thought. “I don’t need to test her. I trust Celeste, and you should too.”
