Chapter 148:
– Haru –
I sat cross-legged on the tatami floor of Mother's sitting room, my ten tails fanned out behind me in a loose wave against the woven straw, and finished telling her every absurd detail of what had happened in Essos.
The fight with Serie. Daenerys abdicating. The pregnancy. Hela's middle-of-the-night disappearance to the North. The desert I'd nearly turned into a glass canyon before Hela bonked me in the head with a thrown sword like I was a misbehaving puppy.
Yasaka listened to all of it the way she always did, with her chin resting on one elegant hand, her expression giving away nothing while her eyes catalogued everything. Twelve golden tails coiled around her like a slow-moving river of fur, occasionally flicking when something I said amused her or worried her. She was wearing a deep emerald kimono today, the silk loose enough at the collar to show a tantalizing hint of cleavage that I was absolutely not looking at because she was my mother and I had standards.
She wasn't alone, though.
Cersei Lannister was tucked against her side, sitting on the cushion with her legs folded beneath her in the slightly stiff way of a woman still learning how Japanese-style sitting worked after a lifetime of high-backed Westerosi chairs. Her golden hair, longer now than it had been when we'd dragged her broken mind out of King's Landing, spilled down over Yasaka's shoulder where she'd rested her cheek. She was wearing a pale cream yukata that clashed beautifully with Mother's emerald, and her green eyes were narrowed.
She had a pout on her face. An honest-to-the-gods pout. The former Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, the woman who'd allegedly arranged the deaths of half her enemies with a smile, was pouting like a noblewoman who'd been served the wrong vintage at dinner.
Oh, this is going to be good.
"She just..." Cersei made a frustrated gesture with one hand. "She gave it up? Half the world? All of that territory and people fawning over her? An army of Unsullied, and she..." Her lip curled. "She traded it for magic lessons from a random barefoot elf that came out of nowhere?" Her tone made it sound like Daenerys had traded the crown jewels for a moldy turnip.
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. Spoken like a woman who spent thirty years stabbing people in the back to claim a chair made of rusty swords.
Cersei wasn't done. She lifted her head slightly off Yasaka's shoulder, those green eyes flashing with the old fire that had nearly gotten her killed half a dozen times in her own world. "Do you know how rare that kind of power is? Armies. Loyal servants. In my world, men slaughtered each other for centuries trying to acquire a tenth of what that girl had handed to her on a silver tray, and she..." She let out a sharp, exasperated breath. "She just gave it up. As if it were nothing…?"
"Maybe it wasn't worth as much to her as it was to other people," I offered carefully.
Cersei made a small, dismissive sound that suggested I was sweet but stupid for thinking that.
That was when Mother turned her head and licked the shell of Cersei's ear.
Cersei jumped about three inches!
"Ara ara," Yasaka purred, her voice dropping into that low, dangerous register I had heard her use on diplomats she wanted to take advantage of, prisoners who'd tried to sneak into Kyoto to harm our family, and apparently her new lover with absolutely no warning. "Does that mean you would leave me now, my Cersei? Run off to Essos to rule in that little dragon-girl's stead, if I gave you my permission?"
The color that bloomed across Cersei's cheeks was a phenomenon to behold. She huffed, which on Cersei looked less like an exhale and more like a small explosion of wounded dignity.
"Of course not," she muttered, and her tone was so embarrassed it was almost comedic. She tried to recover, lifting her chin in that imperious way she had. "You are the Empress of Kyoto, and..." Her voice caught slightly. She glanced sideways at Mother, then down at the tatami, then up again with something soft and almost shy in her expression. "And am I not your queen, if I remain here at your side? And in your bed?"
Oh, that one landed.
Mother's whole face transformed. I had seen Yasaka happy a thousand times in my life. I had seen her smile at me when I brought her cakes. I had seen her laugh when Kunou said something ridiculous. I had seen her practically glow when she'd held both of her children in her arms after a long day of paperwork.
But this was something else entirely.
Her smile was small and stunned and impossibly tender. One of her tails uncurled from around her own waist and slid up to wrap loosely around Cersei's, the gold of Mother's fur sliding against the cream silk of the yukata.
I felt something warm settle in my chest, watching them. After everything Cersei had been through, after every cruel husband and crueler family and the slow-motion catastrophe of her own choices, she'd ended up here, blushing on Mother's shoulder and calling herself a queen because someone finally treated her like one without trying to use her. And Mother, who had buried two husbands and carried the weight of an entire faction's politics on her shoulders for longer than I'd been alive, was looking at her like she'd hung the moon.
It was beautiful.
It was also, I realized about half a second too late, escalating fast.
Mother leaned in and pressed her lips to the soft skin just below Cersei's ear. Cersei's breath hitched, a tiny "Hnn..." escaping her throat before she could stop it. Mother's hand, which had been resting innocently on Cersei's thigh through the yukata, slid up with absolutely no innocence at all and cupped one of Cersei's breasts through the cream silk, her thumb finding the nipple through the fabric and circling it slowly.
Cersei's eyes fluttered half-shut. Mother's mouth moved down her neck, soft and warm and unhurried, and Cersei made another small sound that was definitely not appropriate for a conversation about international politics.
My ears flattened against my skull and my tails went completely still behind me.
Nope. Nope nope nope. Not this time. Not again. I am still in this room. I am still in this room and they have absolutely forgotten about me again.
I cleared my throat. Loudly.
Neither of them stopped.
Mother's hand slipped inside the collar of Cersei's yukata.
I cleared my throat again, louder, with more conviction, the kind of throat-clearing you might deploy if you were trying to flag down a deaf elderly man across a crowded room.
Mother paused with her lips against Cersei's pulse point and slowly, slowly turned her head to look at me. One eyebrow lifted. The corner of her mouth curled into the exact same shameless smirk she'd given me in the tea room. "Yes, Haru-kun?" she asked sweetly. "Did you need something?"
Cersei made a small mortified squeak and tried to readjust her yukata, which Mother was actively preventing her from closing.
"I'm... still here," I said, gesturing at myself with both hands. "I am still in the room. We were having a conversation. About Essos. And now I'm not having a conversation about Essos, I'm getting flashbacks to last week, and I would like to leave with my dignity intact, thank you."
Mother's smirk widened. "You could have left whenever you wanted, sweetheart."
"You were the one talking to me!"
"Mm." She tilted her head, considering, then leaned down and kissed Cersei's cheek with surprising tenderness before sitting up properly. Her hand slid out of the yukata. Cersei pulled the silk closed with the wounded dignity of a woman who had been thoroughly compromised and had every intention of pretending otherwise. "Better?"
"Marginally," I said.
She's enjoying this so much. She is enjoying my suffering on a personal level.
Cersei cleared her own throat, cheeks still bright pink, and tried valiantly to pivot back to the topic at hand. "We were... discussing your dragon girl. And her poor decisions."
"Right. Yes. That." I pointedly did not look at Mother's hand, which had now settled on Cersei's hip in a manner that was mostly chaste if you squinted. I blushed at what I was going to say next. "And there was something else important," I said, and felt heat climb up my neck and into my face. My tails, traitorous bastards that they were, started swaying behind me in that slow, happy rhythm they did whenever I was thinking about something good. "I, uh. I wanted to talk to you about me getting married. About planning out weddings soon. Multiple weddings..."
Mother's eyebrow lifted again, this time with genuine interest rather than teasing. Cersei looked up from where she was still aggressively rearranging her yukata.
"Daenerys wants one soon. Before the baby shows. And I agreed, obviously, because I'm not going to let her walk down an aisle thinking her child is a bastard." I scratched the back of my neck. "But it got me thinking. About the others. Aela and I have been together longer than anyone, and Rias was promised to me before half the women in my life even existed, and Naruko and Kushina are both pregnant too, and there's also all my other girls I need to think about..."
I trailed off, my tails curling back around in front of me where I could see them. I was definitely blushing now. I could feel it in the tips of my ears.
"I want to start marrying them. Not just Daenerys. All of them. The ones who want it, anyway." I looked down at my hands. "I think I've been waiting for everything to feel settled before I did anything official, and I just realized that nothing in my life is ever going to feel settled. So we should just... do it. Pick dates. Plan ceremonies. Make it real."
There was a beat of silence.
Mother's expression was doing something complicated and warm, her golden eyes going slightly bright at the corners.
Cersei, to my surprise, was smiling. A real one, not her court-smile. "About time," she murmured. "Honestly I never really understood why you weren't married to all those girls yet. Your culture still confuses me a bit…"
I opened my mouth to respond.
Which was the exact moment the shoji door slammed open with enough force to nearly come off its tracks.
"ONII-CHAN IS GETTING MARRIED?!"
Kunou launched herself across the room before I could even raise my hands. She was a small streak of golden hair and golden tails and a lavender kimono with butterflies embroidered on it, and she hit me with the focused velocity of an artillery shell that loved its big brother very much. I went over backward onto the tatami with an oof, my tails splaying out beneath me, and Kunou immediately settled on top of my chest and started nuzzling under my chin like a much smaller, much more enthusiastic fox.
"Yip yip yip!" She was actually making little fox noises, which she only did when she was so excited. "All of them?! All your girlfriends?! Even the big sister Ranni?! Onii-chan, onii-chan, can I be the flower-tail girl? Can I have nine flower baskets, one for each of my tails? Can I throw real flowers? Can I get some flowers from that Pandora world that glow funny?"
"Kunou." I tried to pry her off my chest, which was like trying to remove a very determined limpet. "Kunou, sweetie, I haven't even talked to most of them yet…"
"But you're GOING to!" She bounced once on my sternum, which knocked the air out of me. "Onii-chan you're getting married, you're getting married, you're getting MARRIED!"
"Kunou, please get off your brother before you crack his ribs." That was Tanya's voice, calm and dry as it always was, coming from somewhere in the doorway.
I tilted my head back at an awkward angle and managed to catch sight of her through the curtain of Kunou's tails. She was standing just inside the threshold in her usual coat and beret, that small, deceptively peaceful smile playing at the corner of her mouth. The smile she wore when she was genuinely pleased about something but refused to make a fuss over it.
"Congratulations, Lord Haru," Tanya said, inclining her head in that crisp military half-bow she'd never quite shaken. "It is a sound strategic decision. Formalizing alliances reduces ambiguity, simplifies inheritance lines, and provides clear legal standing for your household. I approve."
Only Tanya could make 'I'm happy for you' sound like a quarterly performance review.
"Thanks, Tanya."
"I am also pleased for you on a personal level, of course."
"I appreciate the clarification…"
Behind her, Myrcella stepped into the room, and I felt the energy in the doorway shift.
She was wearing one of the lavender kimonos Mother had gifted her after the first awkward week, with her honey-blonde curls braided down her back the way Cersei did them every morning. She'd grown more comfortable in the palace over the past weeks.
Right now, though, she wasn't smiling.
Her teeth were sunk into her lower lip in a small, unhappy way she'd probably picked up from her mother. Her hands were folded in front of her, fingers wound tightly together. She was looking at me, and the expression on her face was a complicated mess of things that didn't belong on a princess at a happy occasion.
"Congratulations, Lord Haru," she said quietly, dropping into a small Westerosi-style curtsy that didn't quite work in a kimono. "I am very glad for you and Lady Daenerys. And for the others. It is..." She swallowed, the line of her throat moving. "It is a wonderful thing."
She was lying. Not maliciously. Just badly. Her green eyes, so much like Cersei's they were almost startling, were shining at the corners, and she wouldn't quite meet my gaze. She kept looking at my chest, my shoulder, the wall behind me. Anywhere but my face.
Ah. Hells. I wonder if this is how Enri will also react to the news…
I gently extracted myself from beneath Kunou, who allowed it with a small disappointed yip, and sat up properly on the tatami. I straightened my coat and tried to look like I had any dignity at all.
I looked past her, at where Cersei and Mother were sitting on their cushion, and the dynamic in the room had shifted in an instant. Cersei had taken Mother's hand, the one that had been resting altogether too high on her thigh, and physically guided it down to the much more appropriate position of being clasped on top of her own, like a perfectly proper noblewoman holding hands with her perfectly proper consort.
Mother accepted this rearrangement without protest. Mostly because Kunou was in the room now.
Cersei's spine was very straight. Her free hand kept her yukata closed at the throat. She was a queen who had reassembled herself in under three seconds at the sight of her daughter, and watching it happen was honestly impressive.
"Myrcella, sweetheart," Cersei said, and her voice had completely changed. Soft, careful, the same warm tone she used when she braided Myrcella's hair in the mornings. "Come here. Sit with us."
Myrcella crossed the room with relief, like she was glad of an excuse to look at someone other than me. She sat on the cushion beside Mother, on the side opposite Cersei, and Mother reached out and tucked a stray curl behind her ear with the same casual affection she'd shown Kunou a thousand times.
Mother's adopted her too. It's official.
Kunou, meanwhile, had sprawled out across my lap on the tatami like a contented fox, all nine of her tails flopped lazily across my legs. She was still vibrating slightly with excitement. "Onii-chan," she said, peering up at me with enormous golden eyes. "Are you nervous?"
I considered that. "Absolutely terrified," I said honestly.
Kunou grinned, all teeth and pure delight. "Good. That means you mean it."
I huffed out a laugh and ran my hand through her hair, tugging gently at one of her ears the way she liked.
"Well, my son," Mother said, and her voice had that ceremonial quality it took on when she was about to start moving real political weight. "It seems we have a great deal of planning to do."
Before I could so much as draft a mental list of which women I needed to talk to first, or work out the order in which I'd be doing the actual proposing, or really even commit to a single coherent thought about any of it, I had to leave.
Honestly? I was almost grateful for the excuse.
Sunrise mage exam. Co-examiner. Right. Yes. That is a real thing I agreed to that is happening, and not at all a convenient thing to focus on instead of figuring out how to propose to the goddess of the Moon and Stars, a Demon Lord, a werewolf, a devil princess, a Spartan AI, the Asgardian goddess of death, the Vanir goddess of the hunt, and at least seven other women without making any of them feel less important than the others. Future Haru's problem. I am extremely good at making things future Haru's problem.
I kissed Mother on the cheek, ruffled Kunou's hair until she was giggling and trying to escape, gave Tanya a polite nod and Myrcella a careful, gentle smile, and got out of there.
By the time I pushed open the front door of the Fox Hole and the bell jingled overhead, I felt human again. Or yokai again. Or demon lord again. Whatever the hell I felt like on a normal day.
My shadow clone was behind the counter, mixing drinks with my exact same easy practiced movements. He glanced up, caught my eye, and gave me a small nod without breaking the rhythm of the shaker in his hand. I nodded back. No need to dispel him and absorb the day's worth of memories in a single migraine-inducing flood when I was about to spend the next several hours dealing with people anyway.
The restaurant was about half-full. A couple of Nords I recognized from the Companions were nursing tankards in the back corner, arguing in low voices about something probably involving giants. A pair of Quarians sat carefully at a window booth, sipping something I'd had to special-order for their dextro-amino metabolism. Tevos had quietly claimed her usual seat at the bar with a glass of asari brandy and a book.
But there was a specific section of the room that I knew was waiting for me before I'd even fully crossed the threshold.
Fairy Tail was here. You could always hear them before anything else
"HARU!" Natsu's voice, naturally. Loud enough to carry over every other conversation in the room. "About time, man, we've been waiting forever!"
"We've been here for ten minutes, idiot," Lucy muttered.
"That's forever in Natsu time," Happy added solemnly, floating above their table on his little blue wings and licking the last of something fishy off his paw.
"Aye sir!" Natsu agreed, completely missing the sarcasm.
I started to laugh, started to walk over, started to figure out what in all infinite hells was going on, when something purple and fluid and absolutely unfair detached itself from one of the tables and glided toward me.
Irene Belserion swayed as she moved. The dress she was wearing was new. Deep royal purple, the same shade as the heart of a storm cloud, cut to hug every centimeter of her like the fabric was personally grateful for the privilege. The neckline was a deep V that put a frankly criminal amount of pale skin on display, and the slit up the side ran high enough that I caught a flash of stocking and thigh with every step. Her crimson hair was pinned up in some elaborate twist that left a few loose tendrils trailing down her neck.
She reached me before I'd quite gotten my bearings, slid one hand up the front of my coat, hooked her fingers gently into the lapel, and pulled me down into a kiss that was slow and warm and entirely too thorough for a public restaurant.
She made a small pleased sound against my lips, the kind of soft "Mmm..." that I had learned, over our short and very intense relationship, meant she was getting ideas. Her tongue traced my lower lip with unhurried mastery, and one of my tails reflexively curled around her waist before I could stop it.
She broke the kiss with a faint, satisfied smile, and trailed her thumb along my jaw.
"Haru, my love," she murmured, low enough that only I could hear it, and her crimson eyes glittered. "You are looking very handsome this evening."
"Hey, Irene." My voice came out a little rougher than I'd intended. I cleared my throat. "I, uh. You look incredible. Obviously. You always do."
"Mmm." Her smile widened. She let her hand slide off my chest with the kind of slowness that promised a continuation later. "I was hoping you would notice."
I noticed. The entire room noticed. Behind her, at the Fairy Tail table, I saw Erza go completely red and find something fascinating to study at the bottom of her teacup. She was in armor again, her standard breastplate over a blue skirt, and her crimson hair was loose down her back. She was sitting very straight, her hands folded primly in her lap, and her cheeks were the same color as her hair. She caught my eye and immediately looked back down at her tea, the blush deepening.
Ah, Erza. Still hasn't quite recovered from that night..
I gave her a small, gentle smile across the room. She managed a tiny one in return before going back to staring at her tea like it held the secrets of the universe.
"Haru!" Natsu was on his feet now, slamming both fists down on the table hard enough to make the cutlery jump. "We're here to prove ourselves as the best mages!"
"AYE SIR!" Happy declared from above the table, both paws raised in solidarity.
Lucy let out a long, deep, soul-weary sigh. She was sitting with her chin on her hand, her blonde hair swept over one shoulder, and the look on her face was the look of a woman who had been peer-pressured into something she was already regretting. She gave me a small wave with two fingers and a flat expression that said please save me.
"...I wanted to stay home," she informed me.
"She came because we made her!" Happy added helpfully.
"Happy, do not say it like that, it makes it sound terrible."
"It is terrible," Happy agreed.
Gray Fullbuster was leaning back in his chair with his arms folded behind his head, grinning. He was, predictably, missing his shirt. I had stopped commenting on that approximately three months into knowing him.
"A First Class mage exam in another world," he said, tipping his chair back on two legs. "Sounds fun, fox boy. Count me in!"
"Gray, your clothes…" someone else said.
Gray looked down at himself, swore loudly, and started searching the floor.
I turned to Irene. My ears flicked back, and I gave her a slightly bewildered look. "Irene. What is this?"
She huffed a soft laugh through her nose. "I told my daughter and her friends about the First Class Mage Exam the ELF mentioned." Her smile turned conspiratorial. "And now they want to join in. They badgered me quite a bit about it!" Irene said, but I got the feeling everything had been planned by her in the first place.
"We did not badger," Erza said quickly from the table, lifting her head with a flash of warrior's pride. "We requested. Several times. With increasing emphasis."
"You badgered her, Erza," Natsu said cheerfully.
"Aye, badgered," Happy agreed.
"I did not badger!"
"You said 'mother please' like, a hundred times," Gray said, finally locating his shirt under his chair. "It was kind of pathetic, honestly."
Erza's blush, which had been receding, came back with reinforcements. She turned a shade redder than her hair and hid her face behind her teacup.
Irene let out a soft sigh of pure pleasure, watching her daughter. "And, of course," she said, and there was unmistakable pride beneath the casual tone, "I want to see my daughter crush all the competition. Naturally."
Erza nearly dropped her teacup.
I gave her my warmest smile. The one I knew worked on her, because I was not above using it.
"Don't worry, Erza," I said, and I meant it. "I'm sure you'll do amazing tomorrow."
It was the wrong thing to say if I wanted her to recover her composure, because the moment the words left my mouth her cheeks went volcanic, her tea cup actually trembled in her hands, and she made a small strangled noise that was approximately ninety percent mortified joy. She nodded several times in rapid succession, set the cup down very carefully with both hands, and then folded those same hands in her lap and stared at them.
"I will do my best," she managed.
"That is all anyone can ask, sweetheart," Irene said, and then turned her smile back on me, and let her hand trail down my arm slowly enough that the implications were unmistakable. "Now. Are we ready to go?"
…The walk through Serie's tower was an experience.
Her apprentice, a slender brown-haired woman in elegant robes who introduced herself as Lemil and immediately stopped speaking after that, was leading me through corridors lined with glowing crystal lamps and floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with grimoires that smelled of leather and old parchment.
It would have been a peaceful walk if Lemil had been alone.
She wasn't. There were three other apprentices trailing us at varying distances, all of them pretending very hard to be doing something else. One was supposedly arranging a vase of flowers in an alcove and had been arranging the same three stems for the entire time I'd walked past her. Another was reading a book that I was eighty percent sure was upside down. The third had ducked behind a pillar and was now leaning out with the kind of obvious not-spying you saw in stage comedies.
All four of them, including Lemil, kept sneaking glances at me. At my ears. At my tails. At my chest, neck, and ass, in roughly that descending order. Lemil's cheeks had been a steady dusty pink for the entire walk, and every time she opened her mouth as if to ask me something, she lost her nerve and snapped it shut again.
I kept my hands in my pockets and pretended I couldn't hear the whispered "Did you SEE the way they move?" from behind the pillar, or Lemil's sharp hiss of "Shh!" in response.
She finally stopped at a tall wooden door at the end of a sun-warmed corridor and bowed without making eye contact. "Through here, Lord Haru. Mistress Serie is expecting you…"
"Thanks, Lemil."
She made a small squeak and fled before I'd finished saying her name.
I shook my head and pushed the door open.
The room beyond it was not what I'd been expecting from Serie's reputation as a 'war elf'. It was, in fact, a sun-room. The walls were mostly tall windows, the morning light spilling in across pale stone floors warmed by patches of sun.
Flowers were everywhere. Hundreds of them.
In the middle of all of it stood Serie. Her voice when she spoke was calm and steady and entirely different from the unhinged grin she'd worn while trying to vaporize me. "Hold the breath in your chest, not your throat. The mana follows the breath. Yes. Slower. There is no rush. The flame does not require fuel to exist, it requires intent. You are not feeding it, you are simply giving it permission to be."
And in front of Serie, standing in a patch of warm yellow sunlight with the silver of her hair almost glowing in it, was Daenerys. Her cheeks were pink from concentration.
Her hands were cupped in front of her, fingers curved as if holding something precious, and hovering an inch above her palms was a small flame.
It was about the size of a marble. Soft, golden-orange, perfectly stable. I could feel her magic threading through it. Her magic.
I stopped just inside the doorway and let the door click shut quietly behind me.
"You are a true prodigy with fire magic," Serie was saying, and her tone was completely different from the one I'd been on the receiving end of yesterday. There was actual delight in it, the bright clear pleasure of a master craftsman watching their apprentice produce her first decent piece of work. "I have not seen affinity this clean in three hundred years."
"It is..." Daenerys's voice was breathless and reverent. "It is amazing… I made this flame with magic." And then she happened to glance toward the door.
Our eyes met.
The concentration cracked at the corners and bloomed into open, uncomplicated delight. The flame above her hands sputtered, wavered, and went out with a tiny pwiff of golden sparks that spiraled down between her fingers like fireflies.
"Haru!" she said, and then immediately looked horrified at herself. "I mean, oh, wait, I lost it, I had it, I had it for almost a minute, I am so sorry, Mistress Serie, I did not mean to..." She paused. Looked back at the spot above her hands where the flame had just been. Looked at me. Looked back at her hands. The wonder hit her face all over again, and her grin returned, slow and brilliant and a little disbelieving, and she held her cupped hands out toward me as if she could still show it to me even though it was gone. "Haru, look! I just did magic! With my own hands!"
I crossed the sun-room in a few unhurried steps. "That was amazing, Dany." I leaned down and pressed my forehead to hers. "That was incredible. Look at you."
She made a small pleased sound and tipped her face up and kissed me…
I gently pulled back from Daenerys at pointed clearing of Serie's throat. Dany made a small noise of protest before she could stop herself, then immediately tried to look composed about it, which was undermined entirely by the way her cheeks were still pink and her hand lingered on the front of my coat for an extra second before she let it fall. Her silver hair had come a little loose from its twist. There was a strand stuck to the corner of her mouth where I'd kissed her.
I reached up without thinking and tucked it back behind her ear, and her lavender eyes did that soft thing again that made my chest ache when any of my women looked at me like that.
Serie's expression was the patient, faintly amused look of a teacher who had lived long enough to find young love charming for approximately fifteen seconds before it became inefficient.
"How wonderful," she said, with the perfectly controlled patience of someone who had already decided you were going to behave from now on. "I am genuinely pleased that you have joined us, Haru. Now that you are here, finally, we can begin. The students have been waiting."
She turned on the ball of one bare foot and started toward the far doorway with the brisk stride of a woman who expected the universe to keep up with her.
I lingered, my hand still resting at the small of Daenerys's back, and cleared my own throat. "Actually," I said, "before we go down there. There are a few more people joining the exam…"
Serie froze mid-step. Her long ears flicked back. "More people?"
"Yeah, about that..." My ears flicked once. Daenerys, sensing entertainment, perked up against my side. "Irene brought her daughter and a few of her daughter's friends from the Fairy Tail magce guild. They want to take the exam."
There was a long, contemplative silence. Then Serie's whole face contorted into a frown. "What is Fairy Tail," she said flatly.
"It's a mage guild. From Irene's home world. Earthland. It's actually pretty famous over there. Lots of property damage. Generally beloved by the public despite the property damage." I paused, then added helpfully, "They're loud…"
Serie was not amused. Her ears tilted further back, and her expression hardened into something genuinely irritated. "And why," she said, with a slow, dangerous calm, "did that arrogant dragon think for one solitary second that she was invited to crash my exam?" She trailed off, glaring at the wall as if it had personally offended her.
I scratched behind one ear with deliberate carelessness. "I mean," I said, in my most thoughtful, most regretful tone, "I guess I can go tell them to leave. If you don't think your world's mages can handle a few mages from another world, I get it. No shame in that. I'll let Irene know your people just can't cut it..."
Daenerys made a very small sound at my side that I was almost certain was a smothered giggle.
Serie froze. I watched her shoulders go completely still. The vicious challenging grin from yesterday was making its return tour, climbing up the side of her mouth in slow installments.
"Now hold on… I never said any of that. I am perfectly happy to permit foreign mages to take the exam. We have the resources. We have the space. We have the judges." She smiled, and her smile had teeth in it now. "It will be educational. For everyone involved. I am sure the dragon woman's students are very promising. I am sure they will give my candidates a delightful run for their copper!"
I nodded sagely. "That's very gracious of you."
"I am a very gracious mistress."
I smiled at her. "I can tell…"
Serie's grin sharpened further. "And I will be especially happy. To see. That arrogant dragon woman's daughter," and she put a particular spin on the word daughter that made me suddenly worried for Erza, "and the rest of her little friends get crushed by my candidates. Without mercy. Publicly!"
"Mmm." Yep, that's more like what I expected this blonde elf to say. She's very prideful.
"That is what she gets," Serie declared, with the satisfaction of an elf who had been quietly nursing a grudge for the entire morning, "for ignoring me in your restaurant!"
"Wait, when did Irene ignore you?"
"I went to the Fox Hole looking for you. She and the goddess of magic were sitting in a corner booth chatting about you. I introduced myself and they exchanged perhaps three sentences with me before they began discussing the way you laugh and the slight kink in one of your tails like I was not even in the room." Her eyes narrowed.
Daenerys, who had been listening to this with growing fascination, turned her face into my shoulder and giggled, properly this time. My tails swayed a little behind me. "Mistress Serie," Dany said, as she got herself under control, "I am beginning to suspect that being your apprentice is going to be very entertaining."
"Hmph! Of course it will be! None of my apprentices have ever lived boring lives." Serie spun back around toward the door, her hair swinging. The wrap of her dress flared. Her bare feet padded silently across the warm stone. "Come along, both of you. We have an exam to begin. We have applicants whose dreams need to be crushed!"
XXX