He looked younger.
Lurielle didn’t understand how that could have been possible, but it was undeniable. He had a scabbed-over abrasion beneath his eye the size of a penny, a bruise around his neck that had reached the grotesque point of being nearly healed and thus at its peak ugliest, and more cuts and bruises all the way down his long arms, but he looked unmistakably younger, as if the five years he’d spent in absentia had shaved a decade or more from him.
Lurielle shuddered. He’d been on the other side of the veil.
Illegal, dangerous, forbidden.
She’d neverdisliked Tate, not the way Khash had, disliking Khash’s feelings about him more than the orc himself, but everything about the Otherworld terrified her. She’d read too many books as a child detailing the great war between the humans and the fae tonotbe afraid. The humans had been the aggressors, had started it all, but the leaders of the fae armies had been brutal and bloodthirsty, and even in her storybooks, the illustrations of the carnage wrought had given her nightmares.And they’re still out there, somewhere.
Lurielle shook her head, forcing the thought away.
You’re being stupid. That was like, seven hundred years ago. He was probably just visiting family or something. Her eyes slid to the pair once more as Tate gingerly lowered himself to a chair, the little girl still gripping his hand.Family that beat the shit out of him.
She was just close enough that she could hear them.
“Go on,” he encouraged the little girl in a gentler voice than Lurielle had been expecting from the spiky bartender. “This isn’t any different than playing at school.”
The little girl was a strange mix of him and Silva — soft lavender skin, long ears, and Silva’s shiny, chestnut-colored hair. Her features, though, were all her father’s — Tate’s angular face and long jaw, and his golden eyes. The girl looked tentatively around the room, vehemently shaking her head a moment later.
“There’s no teacher.”
“I don’t think you need a teacher to play, rabbit. Look, they have a tea set on the table.”
Lurielle listened as the little elf askedhimto play with her instead, listened as he gently attempted to redirect her several times, letting her sit on his knee and watch the other children when she was on the verge of tears.
There was something dangerous and electric in having a daughter, she was reminded, watching her own little kaiju approach serene Yanna’s equally serene toddler. Lurielle knew what was about to happen several heartbeats before it did. Kora pounded her feet as she approached, roaring as she did at home, and when the neatly stacked blocks went toppling over, Lurielle grinned, ducking her head.
It was a hard thing, to raise a little girl to know she was allowed to take up space in the world. But they were just kids, and blocks could be restacked.
“Remember what we talked about?” she asked her little menace, once she’d controlled herself enough to cross the room. “We ask permission first, before blocks go boom.”
“Boom!” Kora echoed, giggling.
Yanna smiled thinly.
When Kora sat to help the little selkie restack his blocks, serene no longer, Lurielle watched as he snatched them away from her, refusing to share. This was the teaching moment. Lurielle waited. This was what they’d practiced at home, the same thing she knew they worked on in the classroom. Collaborative play. Kael would let his sister help rebuild the towers she destroyed, working together, making the inevitable knocking down feel collaborative as well. Her grin stretched when no redirection was forthcoming, that competitive dragon within her putting a tally on the board she knew shouldn’t even exist.
“C’mon, Kora. I think that little girl would like to play tea party with you. This is her first time here. Why don’t you show her where the table is?”
She watched from a distance as Kora confidently approached Tate and the little elf on his lap, could see without hearing as he encouraged her to take Kora by the hand, grinning with satisfaction when they walked to the table together.Fucking crushing this.
Lurielle debated as she crossed back to where she’d been seated, relocating herself to a chair closer to the orc she’d sat across from during one of those ill-fated double dates, more than a dozen times before. The Otherworld terrified her, but she was happy to have Silva back. And ifthiswas the cost of having Silva back in their lives, Lurielle was willing to come to the table. Her daughter had taught her how to negotiate, and she didn’t want to lose Silva just as she returned.
For a long moment, they said nothing, not even acknowledging each other’s presence. Tate’s eyes never moved off the little elf with his face. She was offering Kora a choice of stuffed animals, her own little terror pointing imperiously at a stuffed monkey.
“Mine!”
Tate’s daughter took charge of pouring the tea, passing Kora a little plastic cup and saucer. She watched her daughter tip the cup back, pretending to drain it in a single gulp, crashing it down on the table when she was finished.
“More!” Both of the little girls giggled.
Beside her, Tate breathed an audible sigh of relief. Lurielle could see by the way his shoulders slumped, recognizing the relief that came when one received confirmation that one’s child was going to be okay.
“She’s adorable. She’s just starting school here?”
He nodded. “Just for a few weeks until the end of the term. I don’t think they had anything like this where they used to live. Silva claims it was nice enough, but it sounds to me like they relied on exclusion to take the place of enrichment. The whole enclave’s likely to be illiterate, but as long as they keep anyone else out, who’s to tell them different?”
Lurielle grinned to herself. He was the exact same arrogant, Elvish-adjacent snob she remembered.Just like old times.Tate himself was a strange mix of Elvish entitlement and spiky fae personality, but as a smartass herself, she had always appreciated his sarcasm.
