Chương 46: The More the Merrier?

POV: Evelisse Ardentia Mel set the fruit basket down on the ground, carefully, and then ran at me. The hug hit me before I'd braced for it, and I actually staggered half a step. My arms hung stupidly at my sides for a moment, not sure of what to do. She didn't say anything. She just held on, eyes shut, letting it land, and I could feel her breath against my shoulder, warm and uneven. I was suddenly, painfully aware that I hadn't washed since the fight with Ywain.

Despite having been healed, I still had forest dirt and dried blood on me somewhere, and I probably smelled pretty bad. I closed my eyes anyway, and put my arms around her.

"I was worried sick," she whispered. Something twisted in my chest. I hadn't told her I was going to see sis. I had just gone. Then Ywain had been made Hero, and for whatever reason, he had chosen not to bring her on the attack, so she'd been left in Astrea with no word from me at all, watching everything change around her and not knowing where I had gone or whether I was alive.

"... I'm sorry," I said. We stayed like that for a while. I suspected Sis was watching the whole thing with an insufferably pleased look on her face. Eventually, she herded us inside. I had decided to take a quick bath before we ended up around the dining table; the leftovers from breakfast still sitting out, bread and cold ham, half a wheel of cheese. Mel took the seat across from me. Sis dropped into the one beside her.

"So." Sis folded her hands.

"I take it you've come to say goodbye." She said it like she had already known and worked the whole thing out before I'd opened my mouth.

"What?" Mel's head snapped around.

"What do you mean, goodbye? Where are you going? You've only just got back!"

"Oh, she's running off with a boy, apparently." Sis leaned back, thoroughly enjoying herself.

"Met him about a week ago. Absolutely besotted." Oh, no. She did not just say that.

"WHAT?" Mel was halfway out of her chair.

"Who? How? Why didn't you—""No!" I said.

"We're, we're friends. It's…it's complicated."

"Who is he?" Mel's eyes were enormous.

"Is it Ywain?" Why is she so determined to put me together with Ywain? Though I suppose it followed. We had met him a week ago, and he was very likely the only man in my life that Mel even knew existed.

"No, Mel. It isn't him."

"Then who? If it's not him, then—" She faltered.

"Then it's someone shady!" She wasn't wrong. From where she was standing, Milo would be the least likely, most dangerous person in the entire world for me to be involved with. How was I supposed to say it? Could I say it?

"Why have you gone quiet?" Mel narrowed her eyes. Then she turned to sis.

"You know who it is, don't you?"

"Oh, I know exactly who he is." Sis took a slow, satisfied sip from her cup.

"Nasty piece of work." I stared at her. She wasn't wrong, strictly speaking. I still had no idea how she'd managed to say it with a straight face.

"Well, Eve?" Sis set the cup down, and her voice lost the teasing edge.

"You came here to tell us what you decided anyway, didn't you? I think Mel ought to hear it. She's your only friend, after all." A pause.

"Well. She was, until a few days ago." She was right. Mel had been at my side since my trainee days. She'd been kinder to me than I ever earned, stayed with me through every stretch where I was unbearable to be around, and never once asked for anything back. I still don't think I deserve a friend like her. And I remembered what she'd said to me, that first day, after the Cerberus, when I'd been carrying something I couldn't put into words and she'd seen it, and hadn't pushed. Tell me when you're ready to.

If I didn't tell her now, I would never be ready. I laid it out for them. Most of it, anyway. How Milo had driven off the Cerberus and saved me and Mel on the first day of the attack. How I had slipped out on my own to warn him about the second attack. The hesitations. How he seemed nothing like the Dark Lords I had been raised on; the ruthless ones that kill every single day. How, with every chance to end him, I hadn't been able to bring the blade down.

And how, somewhere in all of that, I had begun to feel something toward him I couldn't name. This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

"He—he must have put a love spell on you!" Mel was on her feet again.

"Eve, this doesn't make sense, he's—he's the Dark Lord!" Something in me went cold and then, absurdly, almost laughed. Because he had. He had tried. And it hadn't worked, or so he said, and so I had chosen to believe, because I had to. Because if I was wrong about that, then everything I had done since, every choice I had fought for, every line I had crossed, was a thing that had been done to me rather than a thing I had done. And if that were true, it would be the worst act of my life.

So I said nothing about the Eye of Love. I couldn't. If I put that on this table, everything would come apart, and I would never get another word out.

"Hush, Mel." Sis's voice was gentle but immovable.

"Let her finish." I watched Mel gather a retort, hold it, look at me, and swallow it back down.

"I was shocked too," I said.

"At first. It was..." I stopped, tried again.

"It was something I'd never imagined I could feel. And I refused to acknowledge it. For as long as I possibly could, which, pathetically, did not last long at all. It had gotten harder and harder to keep pretending it wasn't there, and then I simply couldn't do it anymore." I looked down at my hands on the table.

"I want to be honest with you, so I'm going to say this badly." My throat had gone tight.

"I still don't know what it is. I've turned it over so many times, and I can't make it fit any shape I recognize. And I've told myself," I shook my head.

"No, I keep telling myself, that it can't be love. Because love doesn't arrive like this. Not in a day or a week. Not for someone who's spent fifteen years being told exactly what to feel and when. It shouldn't be that easy. I shouldn't fall that easily. It feels obscene, honestly, that something like that could grow in me that fast, and toward him, of all people in this world." Mel's face was doing something I couldn't look at directly.

"But I can't dismiss it, either." My voice steadied, a little.

"I've tried. Believe me, I have tried. I told myself he was manipulating me. I told myself I was exhausted, grieving, broken from the war and grasping at whatever kindness came near me. I told myself every version of it that let me off the hook." I made myself lift my head.

"None of them held, because every time I actually look at what happened—not what I'm supposed to think of it, but what actually happened—it isn't what I was told it would be. He listened to me. He asked what I wanted, more than once, when very few people in my life ever have. He put himself between me and something that would have killed me. He tried his best to not kill. He is not what the Church says he is." My hands had curled into each other.

"And that terrifies me more than anything else. Because if he isn't, then I don't know what I've been my whole life."

"I'm not asking you to understand it," I said, quieter.

"I don't even understand it myself. I'm not even asking you to forgive it. I just—I couldn't leave without telling you the truth. You've never once lied to me, Mel. I wasn't going to start." I didn't wipe my eyes. I don't think there was anything there yet. It just felt as though there might be.

"So that's what it is. Whatever it is. I don't have a better word for it, and I'm not going to lie and pretend I do." I went on from there; that I had come to Eremiah a few days back to talk to sis about this feeling I couldn't name, and that, by some absurdity of timing, Milo had crossed her path as well. Sis picked up the thread and filled in her half; how Milo had run off the adventurers wrecking Mr.

Aldric's stall, and how he'd escorted her out to Arkhay, and put himself between her and a band of mercenaries on the road.

"But Eremiah is—" Mel gestured helplessly at the window, at the charred timbers and the people still shovelling ash out in the street.

"It's ruined."

"It is, and I haven't forgiven him for it." Sis said it evenly, without heat.

"But Eve tells me it was a miscalculation on his part, and that he had rather less choice in it than one might assume." Her eyes moved to me.

"I take it the two of you have discussed the matter?" I nodded. My mind went back to the clearing, to Milo standing in the wrecked dirt apologizing until the words wore thin.

"Yes. He said he'd do whatever it took to make it right." A beat.

"He also said he'd get on his knees in front of you, if that's what you wanted." Sis let out a delighted little laugh, clearly savoring the image.

"The Dark Lord, on his knees, apologizing to a human? Now that's a fun sight."

"Sis, I—""Oh, relax. I'm not going to make him do it." She waved a hand.

"What I'd actually like is for him to rebuild Eremiah, but given the state of things, I don't imagine that's remotely possible for him at the moment." She tapped one finger against the tabletop, thinking, and then her mouth curved into something distinctly businesslike.

"It's fine. Tell him I'll take an IOU." She said it exactly as she'd say it across a negotiating table.

"He'll owe me one favor. A large one, and I'll be calling it in when I decide it's needed." Of course she'd turn an apology into a debt. I glanced at Mel. She hadn't moved. She was sitting very still, the way people do when they've been handed more than they can put away.

"So... what happens now?" she said finally.

"I can see it. That this Dark Lord isn't like the others, sure. But what does that actually mean, Eve? Are you—are you just going over to the dark side? Going off with him?" Her voice thinned.

"Are you leaving the Church?"

"About that." I set my hands flat on the table.

"There's something else I need to tell you." So I told them the rest. That I had come here straight from Aniaros Forest, straight from a battle with Ywain. That Ywain had been given powers I had never seen in any Hero, holy fire on his fists, the Lumiere Wings without the Mooncleaver, a Holy Flash that shouldn't be possible, and that he had summoned the Mooncleaver itself out of empty air. And that he had spoken as though Lord Luminaryn spoke back to him.

"That—" Mel's brow furrowed hard.

"That makes no sense. Why would Lord Luminaryn hand him all of that? Why not the Heroes before him? Why not you?"

"I don't know," I said.

"And if you fought Ywain—" Her eyes widened as she got there.

"Eve. Then does that mean the Church has branded you a traitor? They'll come for you?" Across the table, something went hard in sis's face.

"I don't know that either," I admitted.

"But that's why I'm here. I'll find a way to make sure neither of you—""Why don't you take us with you?" I stopped.

"... Sis, what are you—""You're joining the Dark Lord's side, aren't you?" She said it like she was discussing the weather.

"Then I'd say the more the merrier." And she reached over, caught Mel by the arm, and hauled her—chair and all—a good foot closer across the floorboards.

"So." Sis smiled at me.

"How about Mel and I come and help?" Mel looked at sis. Then at me. Then at the hand still clamped around her arm. Her mouth opened, closed, and opened again, and what eventually came out was a very small "... what?"