Chapter 146:
– Haru –
The Great Pyramid of Meereen loomed against an Essosi sunset, and I had to admit the mortals of this world had done something genuinely impressive. Eight hundred feet of dark stone rising in tiered steps from the dusty plains. The sheer audacity of the thing struck me first. Then the scale.
"This is quite an impressive pyramid," I said, mostly to break my own thoughts up.
Hela stood beside me with her arms crossed beneath her breasts, the breeze pulling at the black silk of her traveling dress and lifting strands of her dark hair away from her pale neck. Her green eyes narrowed as she studied the structure, and I watched her nostrils flare the way they did when she was tasting something on the air that the rest of us couldn't perceive. "Impressive," she agreed, her voice low and thoughtful. "Though I confess I did not expect mortals in this world to construct something of such size without the aid of a god pouring strength into them. Asgardian slaves could not have laid this foundation."
"You say that like Asgardian slaves existed…"
"They did." Her mouth curved in a humorless line. "Odin called them servants, conscripts, and bondsmen. The terms that we were supposed to use when we all knew what our conquered enemies really were." Her eyes tracked up the side of the pyramid, higher and higher, and her expression tightened. "I admit, back then I didn't care about them much myself. But after being imprisoned for a thousand years, my opinion has obviously changed…"
My ears twitched forward, then flattened. "Can you sense it?"
"I can sense the death and pain that happened here, my handsome fox." Hela's voice dropped into something quieter and darker, the voice of the Goddess of Death rather than the woman who had spent the morning teasing me in my kitchen. "The stone reeks of it. Every block is soaked through with pain and blood magic. Not ritualized magic, either. The unintentional kind. The sort that builds up when thousands of mortals die screaming underneath a whip and no one bothers to consecrate the ground afterward."
My ears twitched involuntarily under the hood of my travel cloak, and three of my tails gave an irritated flick beneath the fabric. Evil spirits were the natural enemy of yokai. Their corrupted energy could drive lesser kitsune feral, twisting them into flesh eating demons.
I had seen it happen back in Kyoto when I was younger, and it was the kind of sight that stuck with you.
Of course, I had evolved well past the point where any normal evil spirit posed a threat to me. A few angry ghosts in the walls of a pyramid were about as dangerous to me as mosquitoes. But that was me. Daenerys was still mortal, and she was living in that pyramid. Ruling from it.
I frowned, my tails twitching again.
"Maybe we should have brought Frigga with us," I said, thinking out loud. "She's better with runework and spiritual cleansing than either of us. If there are any old blood runes baked into the foundations, she could rework them. Make sure the place isn't slowly poisoning Dany while she's trying to hold the city together."
Hela was quiet for a moment. Then she spoke, and her voice had a very particular edge to it.
"You are worried about your mortal queen who rules from here?"
I turned to look at her. Her face was composed, her tone almost casual, but I had been around enough jealous women in my life to recognize the signs. The slightly too neutral expression. The way her fingers had tightened just a fraction against her bicep. The faint green flicker behind her eyes.
Jealous goddess protocol, engaged. Proceed with extreme caution.
Hela had spent more than a thousand years imprisoned in Helheim, erased from history, forgotten by her own father, her very existence scrubbed from memory. Frigga had spent an equal span as Odin's mind-controlled puppet, her true self locked away behind a thousand years of false smiles. Neither of them had reclaimed Asgard yet.
I had offered, more than once, to march on that gaudy gilded palace and help them put Odin's head on a pike before breakfast. Hela kept telling me the time wasn't right. That she wanted Odin marshaling his forces when she took the throne, not cowering in some dwarven forge on Nidavellir. That her revenge had to be earned, not snatched.
I respected it. But I also understood what it meant. It meant that while every other woman in my life had a home to go back to (Rias had the Gremory estate, Milim had her floating tower, Aela had Jorrvaskr, Shepard had the Normandy, even Sansa and Catelyn had Winterfell), Hela had a guest room in my mother's palace. A beautiful guest room, admittedly, but still.
She was a queen without a kingdom, sleeping in borrowed sheets.
Yeah. Yeah, I get it.
I stepped closer and caught her hand before she could pull it away. Her skin was cool, the way it always was, and her fingers twitched once against mine before slowly lacing through. "Hey," I said softly.
"Do not 'hey' me, fox prince."
"Hey."
Her mouth twitched despite herself.
I brought her knuckles up to my lips and kissed them, one at a time, nice and slow, while holding her gaze. By the third knuckle the tension in her jaw had started to ease. By the fourth she was actively trying not to smile.
"I'm worried about Daenerys because like you said she's a fragile mortal, and I don't want her or any of my future children being threatened by anything," I said against her fingers.
"Mmhm."
"You, on the other hand," I murmured, turning her hand over and pressing a kiss to the soft skin of her wrist, "I'm not worried about. I am fairly sure a poltergeist would take one look at you and file a formal request to be reincarnated somewhere else."
A quiet laugh escaped her nose. "Flatterer…"
"Just being honest," I pointed out.
"It's both, I suspect." She turned her hand in mine so her fingers curled around my palm, and her thumb stroked once across my knuckles. "You are a terrible, terrible man, Haru of the Yokai. You say just the right thing at just the right moment, and it is deeply unfair."
I kissed her wrist one more time and let her hand drop to hang between us, still laced through mine. Her shoulders had relaxed by a visible inch. Her mouth had softened. The dangerous edge in her eyes had dulled back into the usual wry amusement she carried when she wasn't actively plotting patricide.
Crisis averted. Barely.
"For the record," I added as we started walking toward the distant city gates, "the moment you tell me the time is right, we're going to Asgard and I'm letting you carve your fathers heart out with a spoon."
"A spoon?" Hela tilted her head.
"It's dull—it'll hurt more..."
Her laugh this time was full and genuine. "You are going to make me a very happy queen one day, my fox!"
"That's the plan…"
The walls of Meereen rose up ahead of us as we approached, tall and sun-baked and patrolled by men in leather armor. The unsullied. I watched one of them yawn openly and lean his spear against the gatehouse wall.
I let a small ripple of illusion magic flow out from my tails. Nothing fancy. Just a gentle suggestion that Hela and I were uninteresting, that their eyes should slide right past us, that whatever their minds decided to fill in for the two strangers walking up to the gate should be deeply forgettable. A merchant and his wife. A pilgrim and his servant. A couple of nobodies from a caravan.
The guard's gaze swept right over us without registering anything at all.
"Subtle," Hela murmured approvingly.
"I don't want to cause a scene until we're standing in front of Daenerys," I said.
I kept the illusion rolling off my shoulders as Hela and I slipped through the entrance to the throne room. Guards in boiled leather stood at attention along the sides of the chamber. Courtiers and minor nobles clustered in loose knots, fanning themselves with painted silk fans.
And at the far end of the hall, on a raised dais beneath a pair of crossed dragon banners, sat my silver-haired queen.
She looks tired…
Daenerys Targaryen was wearing a flowing dress the color of desert sand, belted at the waist with a silver dragon-chain that glinted in the torchlight. Her platinum hair was pulled back into an elaborate braid that fell over one shoulder, threaded through with tiny silver rings. A thin circlet rested on her brow. She was doing the whole Queen of Meereen routine with her spine straight and her chin lifted and her hands folded in her lap, but I could see the tightness around her violet eyes from halfway across the room. She was rubbing two fingers against her temple in small slow circles.
In front of her dais stood two men, and they were both yelling. They were arguing about a baby cow. Apparently one of the man's cows mated with another's bull and now they both wanted the calf…
"Your Grace, the calf belongs to me by right of property! My cow, my land, my calf!"
"His bull jumped the fence, Your Grace! The beast was loose on my pasture for three days before I caught it, and if a bull is loose on a man's land then the seed of that bull belongs to the land it walked upon, as my father taught me and his father before him!"
"That is the most ridiculous custom I have ever heard! There is no such law!"
"It is our law! It is the law of the villages along the Skahazadhan!"
"You are making it up right now!"
"I am not!"
Dany's fingers pressed a little harder against her temple.
I glanced around the throne room, looking for her advisors. Looking for anyone who should have been stepping in to handle this kind of small-claims nonsense so their queen could focus on actual matters of state. Surely there had to be someone. A steward. A seneschal. A chief magister. Anyone.
There was nothing. No one was around to help her and I realized that a lot of the people she'd grown to rely on in her life were either dead or probably too busy managing other parts of her growing kingdom to help her. She needed more people, reliable ones that would be loyal to her and not betray her.
I didn't want to saddle her with Yokai advisors immediately after we first slept together, she might have thought I was trying to control her. Now, though, it might be a good idea to bring it up.
I reached up and pulled back the hood of my traveling cloak. The illusion rolled off me in the same motion, peeling away like smoke in a sudden wind. Beside me, Hela dropped her own veil with a flick of her fingers and stepped forward a half pace, one hand resting casually on her hip.
The reaction rippled through the throne room in stages.
The nearest courtier saw us first. A portly man in pale yellow silks who'd been fanning himself lazily with a painted fan. The fan stopped moving. His mouth dropped open. The woman next to him followed his gaze, saw my ten tails fanning out behind me in slow lazy arcs, and made a noise like she'd been punched in the stomach.
"Aaghh!"
A ripple of gasps spread outward from us in a widening circle. Silk fans fluttered and dropped. A wine cup clattered against the marble floor. The two arguing farmers both stopped mid-shout and turned to stare. The guard closest to our pillar went completely rigid and his hand twitched toward the hilt of his sword before his brain caught up with his eyes and he realized he had absolutely no idea what he was looking at.
"Demon!" someone shrieked from the left side of the hall. "A demon in the queen's court!"
"Seize them!" A tall man in layered green robes with a gold chain of office around his neck jabbed a finger at us, his voice pitching up into a furious bark. "Guards! Guards, I command you, seize the intruders before they profane the court of the Mother of Dragons!"
"By whose authority do they enter here armed?"
"Look at his ear! Look at those slitted golden eyes!"
"Seize them!"
Two of the guards along the wall actually started moving, spears lowering into a ready position. Hela's smile sharpened into something that could have opened a vein, and I felt the air around her drop three degrees as her divine presence began to unspool from its leash. I caught her wrist gently with the tip of one tail before she could do anything permanent.
"Wait for it," I murmured.
"HARU!" Dany's voice cut across the throne room like a whip-crack, loud enough to silence every other sound in the chamber instantly. Every head in the room snapped toward the dais.
Silver hair streamed behind her as she crossed the marble floor in quick light steps, weaving around a frozen farmer and sidestepping a petrified magister and ignoring the shocked exclamations of her entire court. The handmaiden at the foot of the dais almost dropped her pitcher. The guards who'd started advancing stopped in place, completely uncertain what to do now that their queen was sprinting toward the alleged demon like a girl running to meet her lover at a harvest fair.
I opened my arms on instinct and caught her as she slammed into my chest.
"Oof."
"You came," she breathed. Her body pressed flush against mine with the scent of her hair filling my nose. "I was starting to think you had forgotten about me with all your other women."
"That's never going to happen..." I closed my arms around her and hugged her properly, letting two of my tails curl around her waist in a gesture that was half possessive and half apologetic for the weeks since I'd last held her. She made a soft happy sound against my chest and burrowed deeper.
Then my senses registered something they hadn't been expecting.
Wait.
I hugged her a little more carefully, letting my hands skim down her back to settle lightly at her hips. My fingertips pressed just a fraction inward against the front of her belly through the soft fabric of her dress. The kind of thing that absolutely had not been there the last time I'd had her naked underneath me in my bedroom in Yasaka's palace.
Her stomach. Her normally perfectly flat, taut, toned little dancer's stomach. Had a bump on it.
I blinked down at the top of her silver head.
No way…
Dany tilted her chin up and looked at me through her lashes, and the smirk on her lips was so sly and so smug and so deeply pleased with herself that I nearly choked on my own tongue. Her violet eyes glittered up at me with the look of a woman who'd been sitting on a secret for weeks and had been waiting very patiently for exactly this moment to spring it.
Her smirk widened. Then she turned in the circle of my arms, keeping one hand firmly locked with mine as if she was worried I might evaporate if she let go, and faced her court. The handmaiden had finally set the pitcher down. The two farmers were still frozen in place, their cow dispute utterly forgotten. The magister in the green robes had gone a strange shade of gray. The portly courtier in yellow silks had somehow sunk into a half-crouch of instinctive terror without realizing he was doing it. Every single pair of eyes in the throne room was locked on me and Hela and their queen clutching my hand.
Dany squared her small shoulders. "My lords and ladies of Meereen. My loyal subjects. My court." She paused long enough to let the silence stretch. "I present to you King Haru, my husband-to-be, ruler of the North and the Riverlands, liberator of the Twins, slayer of the Drowned God, Prince of the Yokai, and the true king of Westeros by the abdication of Jaime Lannister himself."
Somebody in the back made a noise like they were trying very hard not to faint.
"He is also," Dany continued, her voice rising just slightly, "the future king of Essos once we conquer this continent. He will rule beside me, and our children will inherit two continents."
The magister in the green robes made a strangled sound. "Your Grace, this is... this creature is..."
"King Haru," Dany corrected with narrowed eyes. "You will address him as King Haru or you will not address him at all. Is that clear, Magister Rhallo?"
"Your Grace, surely you cannot mean to..."
"I said, is that clear?"
"The people will not accept..."
"Enough," She said flatly. She didn't raise her voice. She didn't need to.
Magister Rhallo's protest died in his throat like someone had reached down it and squeezed.
Dany swept her gaze across the assembled court, slow and deliberate, making eye contact with every pale stunned face in the chamber.
"Court is adjourned for the day," she announced. "Any petitions, disputes, grievances, or matters of state that remain unresolved will be heard tomorrow morning at the ninth bell. The cow matter..." Her eyes flicked briefly to the two farmers, who both flinched. "...will be settled then. I suggest the two of you use the intervening hours to remember that you are both grown men arguing about a calf in front of a queen who has better and more important things to be doing!"
The taller farmer's mouth opened. He took one look at Hela standing behind me with her cold smile, and closed it again.
The throne room began to empty.
Dany exhaled slowly through her nose. She let her head tip forward until her forehead bumped lightly against my chest. "Thank the gods you showed up when you did," she muttered into my shirt. "One more hour of cow law and I was going to feed both of them to Drogon."
I laughed and kissed the top of her silver head. "Hi, Dany."
"Hello, my king."
Behind us, Hela cleared her throat softly. The sound carried a very specific edge of do not forget I am standing right here. I turned, keeping Dany tucked against my side, and watched Hela step forward with her hands clasped behind her back and her chin slightly raised in that regal way she had when she was meeting another woman in my life for the first time.
"Dany." I squeezed her hip gently. "I want you to meet someone important."
Her violet eyes lifted and locked onto the green-eyed death goddess standing in the middle of her throne room.
A couple of minutes later, I was sitting on the Targaryen throne of Meereen with a queen on each thigh, and I was honestly not sure how my life kept arriving at situations like this.
The throne itself was just barely wide enough to accommodate what was currently happening, which was Daenerys Stormborn perched primly on my right thigh with her sand-colored skirt bunched slightly at her hips, and Hela of Helheim sprawled elegantly across my left thigh with one arm looped loose around my shoulders.
My hands had settled at the small of each of their backs. My tails had spread out along the arms of the throne and draped down toward the floor like ten lazy golden banners. A handmaiden had brought a small bottle of chilled wine for Hela and a cup of water for Daenarys since she couldn't have wine.
The two of them were becoming friends at an alarming rate.
"...and the worst part," Dany was saying with exaggerated hand motions, "is that I never even met him. He died screaming in the Red Keep months before I was born, and yet everything that has ever gone wrong in my life traces back in a straight line to him. My mother died fleeing from the consequences of his madness. My brother sold me to a Dothraki warlord because of the debts and the exile his madness created. I grew up hungry and frightened in cities whose names I cannot pronounce anymore, and all of it, every single piece of it, was because of my father the Mad King..."
Hela made a soft sympathetic sound and took a long drink from her own cup. "Mad fathers are a very particular kind of curse."
"Yours?" Dany asked.
"Mine." Hela's eyes went distant for a moment, focused on some middle distance that was neither the throne room nor this century. "Mine was not mad in the way yours was. Mine was cold. He built an empire of conquest across the Nine Realms with my sword arm at his side, and when he decided the conquering was finished and he wanted to pretend he had always been a peaceful and wise king, he found his warrior daughter to be an inconvenience." Her fingers tightened a fraction on the stem of her cup. "So he erased me. He locked me in a realm of the dead and scrubbed my name from every history book and every tapestry and every song. My own mother did not remember I existed. My own brothers grew up believing they had no older sister."
Dany had gone very still beside me. "For how long?"
"A little over a thousand years," Hela said.
Dany gaped at the number, and even I still found it to be absurd.
"Oh, Hela!" Dany reached out sympathetically.
They held hands. "It is not so bad now." Hela's mouth curved into something that was trying to be a smirk and almost succeeded. "I am out. I am getting fed properly again. I have a handsome consort who cooks better than any servant in all of Asgard ever did," she paused and smiled at me, "And I cannot wait for the day I take Odin's head off his shoulders and mount it on a pike above the gates of the palace I built and he took credit for!"
"Can I watch?" Dany asked, she sounded completely serious.
"Darling, I will sell tickets!" Hela replied fondly.
Dany laughed and I felt her relax against me by a full inch. She leaned her silver head against my shoulder. My hand at the small of her back moved slowly, slid forward along the curve of her waist, and settled very lightly against the front of her belly through the soft fabric of her dress.
The bump pressed back against my palm, warm and impossibly small and impossibly solid. My throat did something complicated.
Dany noticed immediately and glanced up at me with that sly smirk tugging at the corners of her mouth. She didn't say anything. She just pressed her small hand on top of mine and held it there.
Hela's eyes flickered down, and her conversation pivoted. "How far along are you?"
Dany blinked. "I am sorry?"
"The baby." Hela tilted her chin toward our joined hands on Dany's stomach, and a small knowing smile played at her lips. "How far along. And why is our beloved fox only finding out about it by accident in the middle of your throne room instead of being informed earlier?"
Dany's cheeks pinked. She looked down at my hand, then up at me, then back to Hela, and the smirk returned. "I wanted it to be a surprise."
"Mission accomplished, sweetheart," I muttered nervously.
Yasaka was going to lose her mind about this…
"Hush, you." She patted my hand fondly. "I did not exactly plan it, you understand. I had been told, very firmly and by a woman who knew the old blood magics, that I could never bear another child. A witch laid a curse upon me years ago, after terrible things happened to me, and for a very long time I believed that part of my life was simply closed. I had made peace with it. I had decided that if I wanted children, I would adopt orphans from the cities I freed, and that would be enough." Her violet eyes softened as she looked up at me. "And then you happened to me. And about a moon ago I started feeling strange, and my handmaiden noticed before I did, and when she asked me certain questions and counted certain days I realized that whatever a Demon Lord's seed is made of, it is evidently strong enough to kick a blood curse in the teeth."
"A moon along," Hela murmured, doing the math. "So perhaps four weeks, give or take?"
"That is what my handmaiden estimates, yes. I wanted to see Haru's face when I told him in person." Dany's smirk turned positively devilish. "And I was correct to wait. The face was worth every day of the secret."
I spread my fingers a little wider against Dany's stomach, feeling the small warm curve of her under my palm, and something in my chest did a slow somersault. Another one. Naruko and Kushina and now Dany. Three. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to laugh or cry or go kiss every one of my girls right now. Maybe all three at once. Maybe in alphabetical order, which would start with Aela and honestly that was a pretty good place to start any kind of day.
Then Hela's expression shifted. The kind of thing you'd miss if you didn't know her face as well as I was starting to. She reached across me and cupped Daenerys' face in her long pale hand.
Dany blinked up at her, startled but not flinching. Hela's thumb stroked very slowly along the line of my queen's cheekbone and then drifted lower to Dany's soft lips.
"All of Haru's women really are beauties, aren't they," Hela murmured, and her voice had dropped into a lower register that made the little hairs at the base of my ears stand up. "I have been meeting them one at a time and every time I think surely this must be the prettiest one, he introduces me to another and I have to revise the list."
"Hela," I said warningly.
She ignored me. Her thumb stroked Dany's cheek again. "And you, silver one. With your violet eyes and your little secret growing in your belly. You are going to be absolutely radiant in a few more months. There is a particular glow that comes on pregnant women around the second moon that no cosmetic in any realm can replicate." Her smile deepened. "You should also know, since clearly no one around here is doing their job of informing their queen of such things, that pregnancy does very interesting things to a woman's appetites. You will find yourself growing... restless. Heated. You will wake in the middle of the night with your thighs clenched together and your skin burning. Your body will want things with a desperation you have not felt before, and it will want them often."
Dany's pink flush deepened rapidly into a proper scarlet blush that crawled up from the neckline of her dress all the way to the tips of her ears. Her mouth opened slightly. No words came out.
"It would do you a great deal of good," Hela continued, thumb still stroking Dany's cheek in that slow deliberate rhythm, "to have someone trustworthy close at hand during those times. Someone who can help you with those urges whenever they come upon you." Her eyes flickered to mine, wickedly pleased with herself. "Our fox is of course the most trustworthy and capable of all, but he is only one man, even if he is a very enthusiastic one. A second pair of hands. A second warm mouth. A second friendly tongue. These things can be invaluable to a pregnant queen."
"Hela."
"Mmm?"
I reached up with my free hand and gently bopped her on the top of her head with my knuckles. "Bad Hela. No seducing my pregnant fiance."
She turned her face toward mine with slow lazy amusement, completely unrepentant, her hand still cupping Dany's flushed cheek. One pale eyebrow arched in a perfect mocking curve. "Then, my fox," she purred, "you will simply have to keep us both satisfied, yourself, won't you."
My tails twitched hard against the arms of the throne. I had about half a second to formulate a dignified response before Dany ruined me completely.
Because Dany, still blushing bright red and still pinned under Hela's hand on her cheek, cleared her throat very softly and said in her sweetest most innocent Queen of Meereen voice. "My bedchambers are not very far from the throne room, actually."
My brain short-circuited. First Cortana and Rias last night, and now this. It seemed like the women in my life were growing more accustomed to being together with me at the same time.
Hela threw her head back against my shoulder and laughed until her pale cheeks had color in them, one hand coming up to cover her mouth while the other one stayed firmly cupping Dany's face. "Oh," she gasped between laughs, "oh, I like her. I like her so much. Haru, you have excellent taste in queens."
"I am aware," I managed, my voice coming out slightly strangled.
"Her bedchambers are not far."
"I heard her the first time."
"They are not far, Haru."
Dany tilted her head into Hela's palm, accepting the caress, and fixed me with a look that was somehow both shy and absolutely filthy at the same time. Her violet eyes glittered up at me through her pale lashes. "I had planned to drag you up there privately the moment court ended anyway, my king. I have been alone in that bed for weeks and I have a very great deal to tell you and show you." Her small hand squeezed mine where it still rested on her stomach. "I did not anticipate bringing another woman along. But I find I am not opposed."
Hela leaned in and, in a move that surprised me even though it shouldn't have since knowing her, pressed a very soft and very deliberate kiss to the corner of Daenerys' mouth. Close enough that Dany's breath hitched audibly and her fingers tightened around mine.
"Mmh..." Then Hela turned her head and kissed the corner of my mouth too, the same way, warm and slow and full of clear intent, and I felt one of her fingers trail down the front of my shirt. "Lead the way, silver queen," Hela said softly. "Our fox has some catching up to do."
– Hela –
…Hela opened her eyes a couple of hours later.
She sat up slowly in the enormous Meereenese bed, the silk sheet sliding down her naked body and pooling around her waist. Her pale breasts caught the soft silver light spilling in through the tall arched windows, and she stretched her arms above her head with a long luxurious yawn, arching her back until her spine gave a small pleasant pop. Every muscle in her body felt loose and warm and used in the best possible way. Her thighs ached in that specific sore way that meant she had been thoroughly and repeatedly taken care of. Her lips still felt slightly swollen. Her hair was a disaster.
It was wonderful.
It was the middle of the night in Meereen. The city outside the pyramid had gone quiet, with only the distant calls of night watchmen and the occasional faraway cry of a dragon drifting in on the warm desert air. The moon was high and full and impossibly bright, and its silver light poured through the thin gauzy curtains and spilled across the enormous bed like a blessing.
Hela took a moment to simply look.
Haru was sleeping on her right, his golden hair tousled and his mouth slightly open and one of his fluffy tails draped lazily across her thigh. His bare chest rose and fell in slow deep breaths, and the soft fox ears on top of his head twitched occasionally at some distant sound. He looked absurdly peaceful. She had watched him wear a dozen different expressions over the last few hours, ranging from playful to tender to feral to worshipful, and she loved this one the most.
Daenerys was curled up on Hela's left, her silver hair fanned out across the pillow and her small pale hand resting on Hela's hip in a sleepy possessive gesture. The little bump on the queen's belly was visible in the moonlight, rising and falling gently with her breath. Her lips were curved in the faintest unconscious smile.
Hela had grown very fond of the silver queen in a remarkably short amount of time.
She had been prepared to tolerate Daenerys as one of Haru's many women. She had not been prepared to like her. And she certainly had not been prepared to end up wedged happily between her and Haru in a tangle of sweat and lust worked out exactly how they fit together.
They had fit together very well indeed. And Hela couldn't wait to introduce Daenerys to Frigga next…
I truly never expected to find myself part of a harem, Hela thought, her grin widening as she looked back and forth between the two sleeping bodies on either side of her. And yet here I am. And the benefits are certainly amazing, aren't they?
She leaned over and pressed a soft slow kiss to Haru's temple, right below the base of one of his twitching fox ears. He sighed in his sleep and one of his tails gave a contented little flick. Then she turned and leaned over Daenerys and pressed a matching kiss to the silver queen's cheek. Daenerys made a tiny sleepy sound and snuggled deeper into the pillow but did not wake.
Hela slid out from between them with the silent grace of a woman who had spent a thousand years alone in a realm of the dead and knew how to move without disturbing a single thing. She straightened up beside the bed and took one more long look at the two beautiful people she had left behind in the sheets.
Then she closed her eyes and summoned her armor.
She flexed her fingers inside the black gauntlets and allowed herself a small private smile.
Much better.
Hela turned toward the nearest pool of deep shadow beside one of the tall arched windows and stepped into it without hesitation.
The shadows welcomed her the way they always had, cool and silent and full of secret pathways that only a death goddess could walk. She moved through them the same way another person might walk down a hallway. Distance meant nothing inside the shadow paths. Meereen fell away behind her in a single step. The Narrow Sea passed beneath her in a second. The warm desert air of Slaver's Bay became the cold salt wind of Westeros somewhere around her third stride.
She had come to this world with Haru for more than just the sex, delightful as that had been.
The real reason was something she had kept largely to herself because she had not wanted to spoil the mood with her lover. But this world had something that had caught her interest the moment Haru first mentioned it in passing days ago, and as a goddess of death she could not leave it alone.
This world had an undead problem.
And now she was here, and she had a few hours before Haru would notice her absence, and she was very curious indeed.
An army of the dead, she thought, a slow pleased smile curving her lips as she walked through the shadow paths. How interesting. How very, very interesting…
Because the thing was, an army of the dead raised by some unknown power was still, fundamentally, an army of the dead. And Hela was the Goddess of Death. The Goddess of Death, firstborn of Odin, she whose authority over corpses and souls and the grey places between had been carved into her essence since the moment of her creation. Whatever was animating the frozen dead in the far north of this continent was a power she fully intended to introduce herself to.
And if that power turned out to be something she could usurp and take command of, well. That would be a rather lovely bonus, wouldn't it?
She needed an army of her own. Eventually. Not today and not next week, but eventually, when the time came to finally march on Asgard and take Odin's head off his shoulders. Haru would help her when that day came. She had no doubt of that. Her beloved fox would burn the Bifrost to ash and crack the golden city open with his bare hands if she asked him to. But she did not want to rely entirely on him for her reclamation. She was a queen in exile and a goddess of death, and a queen took her own throne back at the head of her own forces whenever possible.
And Westeros, evidently, was offering a great many corpses up for the taking.
The air around her grew colder. The shadows grew longer and colder and quieter, and Hela knew she was getting close to whatever sat at the heart of this continent's undead problem. She slowed her pace slightly and let her divine senses stretch outward, searching for the tell-tale cold signature of a necromantic power source.
Whatever was raising and commanding the dead in this world had to have a core, a focal point, a throne of its own. She intended to find it.
And when she found it, she was going to have a very interesting conversation with whoever or whatever was sitting on it.
– Serie –
Serie was frowning before the door to her private study even finished opening. She had been frowning for most of the day already, truthfully, because the First Class Mage Exams were scheduled to begin tomorrow morning and the logistics of running them always put her in a foul mood, but the sight of Frieren standing in her doorway sharpened the frown into something closer to genuine irritation.
Of course it is her, Serie thought, her crimson eyes narrowing slightly. Of course the one elf in all the continent who has the audacity to show up uninvited and unannounced would appear in my study the evening before the exams. Of course.
Serie leaned back in her high-backed chair and folded her small hands neatly in her lap, arranging her face into the cool imperious expression she used for dealing with subordinates, rivals, and Frieren. Centuries of practice had made the expression effortless. She let the silence stretch for a few deliberate heartbeats before she spoke.
"Frieren."
"Serie."
"The First Class Mage Exams do not officially begin until tomorrow morning. You are aware of this, I assume. The candidates are not meant to gather at the examination site until sunrise, and the examiners themselves are not scheduled to convene until two hours before that." Serie tapped one finger slowly against the arm of her chair. "Why are you here a day early, before me, in my private study? Have you come to cheat and try to persuade me to pass you automatically this time? Because I will remind you, as I have reminded you on every previous occasion, that such an arrangement is not going to happen. Not for you. Not for anyone."
To her considerable surprise, Frieren simply shook her head.
The younger elven mage was standing in the middle of the study with her usual placid expression on her small delicate face. She looked faintly pleased with herself, in that quiet understated way Frieren had sometimes, and she was holding something in both of her hands.
A small woven basket.
"I am not here to cheat," Frieren said in her calm flat voice. "I am here because it has been a very long time since we last saw each other, and I decided to come with a gift, and I wanted to give it to you before it spoiled."
Serie's frown twitched.
A gift? From Frieren? Frieren has never once in her absurdly long life brought me a gift. Frieren has brought me complaints, awkward silences, occasional requests for advice she never intended to follow, and exactly one deeply uncomfortable conversation about what Flamme would have wanted me to do about her. She has never brought me anything that could reasonably be described as a gift.
Serie opened her mouth to deliver a sharp dismissal of whatever nonsense Frieren was about to try to foist on her, and then her senses caught up with what she was actually looking at, and the dismissal died on her tongue.
The basket was radiating magic. The basket in Frieren's hands was putting out a quiet steady pulse of power that Serie could feel pressing softly against her senses from halfway across the room. The magical density of whatever was inside that basket was absurd. It was the sort of magical signature Serie would have expected from an ancient artifact of a lost civilization, or a sealed spell scroll written by one of the great forgotten archmages of the first era, or perhaps a fragment of something genuinely divine.
Serie's breath caught very slightly in her throat.
An artifact? She has found an artifact. Frieren has actually found something interesting after all these centuries of wandering aimlessly through the continent collecting useless grimoires about gardening spells and stain removal techniques? Something truly rare. Something powerful enough that I can feel it from here without even trying.
The hunger for knowledge and power that had been the defining feature of Serie's entire long existence stirred in her chest. The same hunger that had driven her to collect every spell she could find for a thousand years. The same hunger that had made her the most powerful mage on the continent. The same hunger that had made her impossible to live with, according to every apprentice who had ever tried and failed to endure her tutelage. She wanted to see what was in that basket immediately. She wanted to know what it was and where Frieren had found it and whether she could acquire it for her own collection before the evening was out.
She did not let any of this show on her face. Centuries of practice at that, too.
Serie composed her expression back into something cool and mildly interested, the sort of expression appropriate for receiving a gift of moderate curiosity from an old acquaintance one did not particularly enjoy.
"Very well," she said with a small dismissive gesture of her hand. "Present this gift of yours, Frieren. I will see what you have brought me."
Frieren stepped forward and held the basket out across Serie's desk.
Serie accepted it with both hands and was immediately struck by two things. The first was that the basket itself was remarkably light. The second was that the magical pressure pouring out of it was even stronger up close, a warm steady radiance that felt almost alive against her fingertips. Her heartbeat quickened slightly as she settled the basket on her desk and lifted the small cloth cover with the reverent care of a scholar about to unveil a discovery that might reshape the field.
She pulled the cloth aside.
Serie's face went completely blank.
She stared down into the basket for a long, long moment. She stared. She blinked. She stared some more. She tilted her head very slightly to one side and then to the other, as if perhaps viewing the contents from a different angle might cause them to reveal themselves as something other than what they appeared to be. It did not work.
"What?"
Frieren watched her placidly.
"What," Serie said again, her voice flat. "What is this? What am I looking at? Are these? Frieren. Are these cookies?"
"Yes," Frieren said with a soft nod.
The basket contained cookies. Roughly two dozen of them, arranged neatly in overlapping rows on a small square of waxed parchment. They were golden brown and perfectly round and studded with what appeared to be pieces of dark chocolate and small candied nuts. They were, to all visible appearances, cookies. Ordinary baked sweets of the sort one might find at a village festival or a child's birthday celebration. They looked, in fact, completely and entirely unremarkable in every possible way.
Except that they were putting out more magical power than anything Serie had personally examined in the last three hundred years.
Serie's hands tightened very slightly on the edge of the basket.
"Frieren," she said slowly, with the patient dangerous calm of a woman who was about to become extremely upset, "why does a basket of cookies contain more raw magical energy than the reserve crystals in the foundation of this academy? Explain this to me. Immediately!"
Frieren smiled. It was a small smile, and it reached her eyes in a way that Frieren's smiles almost never did, which Serie found unsettling enough on its own.
"My new friend Haru made them. He is a chef. He made them especially for you when I told him I was coming to see you. He said they were a peace offering and that he hoped you would enjoy them. I have already tried a few of them myself earlier today, and they are amazing. I wanted to bring them to you before they lost their freshness, which is why I am here a day early. Fresh cookies matter."
Serie stared at Frieren. Then she stared back down at the basket. Then she stared at Frieren again.
Who the fuck is Haru!?
Serie had, in her long life, heard of a handful of attempts by various mages to combine cooking with magic. The results had always been profoundly disappointing. A bread loaf that glowed faintly. A stew that restored a small amount of stamina. A pie that made the eater mildly resistant to cold for an hour. The entire subdiscipline had been dismissed centuries ago as a novelty that could not produce meaningful results because the physical act of cooking destroyed the delicate structures required to hold complex magic in a stable form. Every credible magical theorist she knew had agreed on this point. It was simply not possible to imbue food with anything more than trace enchantments.
The basket on her desk was a direct and flagrant violation of everything Serie thought she knew on the subject. If someone told her these cookies could revive her dead apprentice Flamme she might actually believe them!
She reached into the basket with a hand that she was absolutely not going to admit was slightly unsteady, and she picked up one of the cookies. It was warm. It should not have been warm. Frieren had carried it here from wherever she had been, and the basket had no visible heating enchantment, and yet the cookie in her fingers was warm as if it had come out of an oven moments ago. The magical pressure against her skin intensified at the contact.
Serie brought the cookie up to her face and inhaled.
Butter. Brown sugar. Vanilla. A faint complex undertone of something floral that she could not quite identify. The aroma alone was enough to make her mouth water in a way she had not experienced in longer than she cared to admit.
She opened her small mouth and took a bite.
The cookie crunched softly between her teeth and then yielded into something impossibly soft and warm in the center, and in that exact same instant the magic hit her.
The magic inside the cookie exploded directly into Serie's mouth the instant her tongue touched it. At the same time the flavor hit her, and the flavor was the best thing she had ever put into her mouth in over a thousand years of living. It was a cookie. It was only a cookie. And yet every component of it was perfect beyond comprehension, the butter richer than any butter should be, the sugar cleaner and sweeter than any sugar she had ever tasted, the chocolate darker and more complex than any chocolate she had encountered, the texture crumbling and melting on her tongue in a way that seemed almost engineered for maximum pleasure.
And threaded through all of it, underneath it and around it and inside it, was the signature of whoever had made the cookie. Because that was how magical food worked, or at least how it worked when the magic was integrated properly. The caster's essence was impressed into the creation at the moment of making, and any sufficiently sensitive mage could read that essence from the finished product the same way a wine expert could read the vineyard from a sip of wine.
Serie read Haru's essence.
The cookie told her things. The cookie told her, in the unmistakable language of imprinted magic, that the being who had made this treat was a magic user of power so far beyond Serie's own that the comparison was not even meaningful. The cookie told her that whatever Haru was, he was not a human mage, not an elven mage, not any kind of mage that Serie had a word for. The cookie told her that he had poured an amount of magical energy into baking this batch of sweets that Serie could not have matched if she had drained her reserves completely and focused her entire will on the task for a week.
The cookie told her that Haru was, without question or qualification, a being of a higher order than anything Serie had ever encountered or even theorized about.
Serie's knees went weak.
A shiver of raw pleasure raced down her spine and up again and then raced back down a second time for good measure. Her thighs squeezed together under her desk without any conscious input from her brain. Her small hands tightened on the edge of the basket. Her breath caught in her throat. And then, to her absolute horror and against every ounce of her considerable pride and self-control, a low soft moan spilled out from between her lips.
"Mmmnnhh..."
The sound hung in the air of her private study like an accusation.
Serie's eyes snapped open wide. Her pale cheeks flooded scarlet. She pressed her lips together hard and swallowed the rest of the cookie in a single convulsive motion and clenched her fists on top of the desk, and she looked up at Frieren with an expression that was halfway between mortification and murderous demand.
Frieren was watching her with polite interest and the faintest hint of a knowing smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. "Good, right?" Frieren asked.
Serie growled. "Frieren..."
"Yes?" the silver-haired elf asked innocently.
"Frieren," Serie said again, her voice coming out slightly higher than she intended. She cleared her throat firmly and tried again, reaching for the icy authoritative tone she had cultivated over ten centuries. "Who. Is. Haru? Who is this chef? What is he? Where did you find him? How long have you known him? Why have you never mentioned him before? Explain yourself immediately. What kind of secret have you been keeping from me, and why."
Frieren tilted her head slightly. "He runs a restaurant called the Fox Hole. I met him a while ago…"
XXX