To read the Fates is to invite temptation.

  To change the future is to dishonor Fate.

  Let life unfold as scroll: one line at a time.

  –Brikhvarnni Proverb [The same as part 1]

  Mell was tired of being in the middle. Tired of being the mom. The referee. Literally. But it wasn’t over yet. Gale stomped away, pounding her booted feet into the ground until she reached the biggest tree by the poppy glade. There, she pressed her back into the white bark of an aged tree and groaned to herself.

  Krid tramped to the edge of camp, pacing to cool himself.

  Fenn and Syrdin circled to her, both grim with the tension of the duel–the tension of a near-death. Mell had to admit she was surprised at Fenn–less in that he’d defeated Gale and more that he’d fought at all. He was chronically non-confrontational, and he’d just confronted Gale and Krid in about the worst way imaginable.

  At least he was growing. She hoped he grew out of this phase quickly.

  “We probably should have a plan for moving forward,” Fenn said as the three gathered, “and I… don’t know what it should be. How… what do we do?”

  She half-smiled, despite the tension in the air. Just that much communication from him was an improvement. He really was trying. “The first step is letting those two cool off.”

  “Obviously.” Syrdin said. Zhe glared at Krid.

  “He’ll apologize, Syrdin.” Fenn assured zhem. “When he’s ready.”

  Zhe didn’t have the humor left to roll zheir eyes this time. “I just need him to not murder me.”

  Mell watched Gale slump to the base of the tree, grasping at the hair on her temples.

  “What if we studied the artifacts while they calm down?” Fenn asked. “We still need to get that staff working for you, Mell.”

  “That’s a good idea.” She didn’t move her attention from Gale. As annoyed as Mell was with her preferred expression of hurt, the girl was having a hard time. Her head lolled with exhaustion where she sat. Mell’s shoulders prickled with alarm. There was definitely magic at work.

  “Before you get trapped in books, we need supplies. ‘Cause, y’know, personally I’d like to not starve.” Syrdin said. “Point me toward the edible stuff, first?”

  “Of course, that makes sense.” Fenn nodded. “Perhaps you could begin without me, Mell?” He turned to her.

  She watched Gale’s head dip. Then it swiveled around, as if she’d seen something. “I… have something I need to check on first.” She left Fenn and Syrdin to forage and pass on the word to Krid.

  She crossed the camp and knelt beside Gale, who stared deeply into nothing. Mell tapped her shoulder. “Gale?”

  “Eep!” She jolted. “The centaur? Where did he go?” She launched forward to search, stumbling to her feet.

  “Woah there.” Mell grabbed her arm to keep her from tripping straight into the poppy glade. “No Centaurs here, just me.”

  “But it was just out in the trees!”

  “You were dreaming. Everything’s okay.” She reassured her. Magic afoot, for sure. Mell settled her back to sitting, lowering herself next to her.

  “I guess I was mistaken.” Gale turned her cheek toward Mell, her eyes cast on the dull leaves strewn over the ground.

  “Is it alright if I sit with you?”

  Gale slid her pretty green-hazel eyes sideways to Mell, scowling. “If this is about Fenn, I know I’ve been harsh with him, but he’s lied to me. First, he pretended as though he–we–would live in Etnfrandia forever. He never mentioned any quests! He always spoke of his time at your school as something past that I wouldn’t be interested in!

  “But then you came and I worried. What, with how he never wanted to progress the matronage! But then he stole those artifacts! Stole them! And the fae, and now Syrdin! A Night Elf! Mell, those have always been our enemies. Not just to Etnfrandians, but free people everywhere. Yours, Mell. They are power-hungry killers, are they not?” The girl strained to catch her breath, waiting for Mell to answer.

  She blinked at the sudden onslaught of information. “I…came to check you for traces of an enchantment.”

  Gale withered. “I see.”

  Mell sighed. The girl hadn’t had a chance to talk to anyone in days. As a young adult, Mell would’ve burst, too. But she couldn’t find it in herself to just pat Gale’s shoulder and tell her to let it all out. No, there were too many hypocrisies. “You know, I don’t believe I recall you telling him that you’re an adopted Wood Elf.”

  Gale’s frown deepened to a pout. “That’s only one thing.”

  “And your magic. He didn’t know about that until very recently.”

  “I would’ve told him eventually. Only, it’s illegal and I didn’t want it to concern him.”

  “And you don’t think Fenn felt similarly about his interests? The main difference I see is that Fenn has given his life to this, and you kept yours as a hobby.”

  Gale picked up her head to look at Mell. “But the Night Elf? …Nevermind. Why am I asking you? You brought zhem here.” Her chin found her knees again.

  Mell sighed, resigning herself to a bit of a chat. “Gale, do you think that you’re much like the other Wood Elves?”

  “I must look like them, but otherwise… I don’t know. I… don’t even know what songs they sing. I only have the one book of magic. All I’ve ever known is Etnfrandia.”

  Good that she understands that much. Gale wasn’t anything like the Wood Elves, at peace with all creatures great and small. “And Fenn, is he like other Etnfrandians?”

  The pretty hazel shifted to Fenn in his white blouse and dark trousers that tucked at his boot-tops. “Not so much, I think. Not anymore.”

  “And Syrdin, what if zhe left the Night Elves and chose something different, too?”

  “But zhe didn’t. Zhe’s a killer. Just look at the way zhe fought Krid!”

  “And you. Just look at the way you can create objects with magic.”

  Gale frowned. “That’s not at all the same.”

  “It’s not? Then look at the way you can shoot a bow.” Mell nudged her shoulder and conjured a smile. “Such a killer.”

  Gale took offense, sitting taller. “Because I had to learn it as an art! Syrdin–!”

  “Also had to learn.”

  “No zhe didn’t. Zhe’s chose violence as a way of life!”

  “Maybe, maybe not. What if it was all to survive? You’ve said yourself that zheir people are violent. What if it was kill or be killed?”

  “And how many lives did that cost?”

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  Mell had no patience for that line of logic. Such philosophical dilemmas never had morally white solutions.“Certainly zheir life has saved yours. And mine. And a whole wagon full of passengers from bandits on the way here, I’ll have you know.”

  Mell watched Gale swallow down a lump, her eyes glassy. There was something she wasn’t saying. Another leaf landed in her hair, sticking to a tangle.

  Mell bit back her impatience. “Are you ready for me to check you over for that enchantment?”

  Gale squinted warily. “Are you done lecturing me?”

  Mell would have loved to lecture Gale. She would have loved to tell her about the thousands of years of human and Night Elf history she was missing, and about the Wood Elves she didn’t know, and about how utterly peaceable they were. The Wood Elves were artful, yes, but their most distinctive cultural phenomenon had always been that, even when attacked, they did not retaliate. Gale was no Wood Elf, only Etnfrandian, even if her blood–and her magic–testified otherwise. “Yes, I’m done. I want to see why you keep falling asleep. May I?”

  She chewed her lip for a moment. “What must I do?”

  “Just sit still. You shouldn’t feel anything except a bit of tingling.” Mell put her hands together in a runic gesture then placed them on Gale, concentrating. It was a routine: the words, the motions, the work of the cleric. In the present moment of tension and chaos, of threading together a diverse group, that routine was a lifeline.

  Awareness of a magic not her own tugged at her consciousness. It sensed of fae magic, of course, but specifically of illusion and… bewitchment? She’d have to ask Fenn what kind of magic the poppies used. Those seemed likely culprits for a spell that sent one to sleep with dreams.

  She removed her hands from Gale. The girl’s eyes were closed, but at the movement, they blinked heavily. Neither of them spoke for a moment.

  “There is magic, isn’t there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you do anything about it?” Gale didn’t look up.

  “I can.” Magic dispellation wasn’t as routine as detection. Usually people requested spells, rather than requesting their removal. “It could take me a while. It’s not a single cast. I have to sit with it.”

  Gale nodded.

  Mell gestured for her to scoot in front of her, and they settled, Gale’s thin back facing Mell, the souls of her boots’ toes poking out from under her bum. Mell sat cross-legged and was forced to gaze on the knots and tangles in Gale’s hair, which the girl had been unable to comb with just her fingers. She tried to concentrate on the spell, attempting to seek where it was rooted and to divine how to counter it. That bird’s nest taunted her all the while.

  Finally, she found the bewitchment on Gale’s mind. It was centered–of course it was. Centered on the ego. The pride. She put her hand on the girl’s head, crunching in the bits of a leaf stuck there, and willed a supplanting enchantment of protection. It wouldn't quite root, however. The other magic had a foothold that Mell could not remove. Not without knowing what it was, anyway. She had an idea.

  “It’s a bit tricky. Do you mind if I comb out your hair while you wait?”

  Gale twisted around, eyes finally wide open, and with hope. “You brought a comb?”

  Mell laughed. “A pick. I may have braids in now, but girl I cannot go anywhere without a pick.”

  And so the work began. She picked at the ends, unraveling clumps and pulling out bits of dirt and tree. “Did you say you saw a centaur?”

  Gale shrugged, jostling her hair. “I guess so. I guess it was a dream.”

  It wasn’t important enough to Gale to be the foothold–especially when she didn’t know a thing about the Wood Elf god, also a centaur. “And… what else have you been dreaming?”

  Gale’s back stiffened and her ear’s tips turned red. Mell tried not to laugh. The poor thing had asked for Fenn in her sleep that morning. That was an easy conclusion. Perhaps the foothold is a delusion she wants to believe? Of his love perhaps? Mell didn’t know what the truth was in that regard.

  “Does… it matter?” Gale’s voice pitched high with embarrassment.

  Mell chuckled. She couldn’t help it. “About Fenn, huh? You really like him.”

  Gale’s head turned down, almost pulling the pick out of Mell’s hands where it was caught in an especially stubborn snag. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “And… you dream of a better relationship?”

  “Yes!” Gale almost gasped the word, relief evident. Either that she hadn’t had to say it, or at being understood.

  The snag fell. “Gale, what is it you like about him, anyway? I mean no disrespect. He’s been a good friend to me, but…” she glanced at the guy, all elbows and knees, crouched over the roots of a tree next to Syrdin, pointing at some fungi. “No thanks.” Besides, she expected a certain level of maturity in a partner.

  “He… I don’t know. When… when he came back from your lands, he… I remembered him well. He’d been intelligent, and kindly, and shy, and always he could keep a secret. And… I saw he was a man. And I a woman. There was something… I… just…”

  She sighed sweetly, and then tried again. “Fenn is like an orange. A bit stiff outside, but inside sweet and bursting with flavor and complexity. But an orange, though it has a rind, does not lie about what it is. It is the same color inside and out. When Fenn says a compliment, it is in words he really means. No flattery, only truth. I admired him for it. But now…” A tremor ran over her. “Now he lies instead of peeling back. I pick at the rind and find more rind in another color. And he’s so bitter.”

  Mell tried not to chuckle. Gale was being sincere. “Rinds tend to be bitter.”

  “Most of all, I wish he didn’t treat me so much like a stranger. He could explain things to me, but he doesn’t. He could tell me anything. Anything, Mell. But he tells me nothing and hides his life from me. Even now, I don’t know how this journey started, or hardly why he ever left Etnfrandia the first time. He wants me to heed him? Heed what? His silence? His secrets? No, he treats me like a child. ‘Do it because I say so.’ Not even my father treated me that way!”

  The biggest mat finally pulled free, and Mell could run her comb through the lower half of Gale’s hair. She did so, in long soothing strokes, before she started working behind one of her ears, careful to avoid the sensitive tips. “When I met Fenn,” Mell began.

  Gale took a sharp inhale of breath and became still, as though a misplaced movement would make Mell end her story.

  “I had already read about him in history books. And yes, we humans do have our history books. Edition upon edition of them. When double doctorate Fennorin was mentioned in history, he was usually beside what to me was an old discovery, what had become a fundamental of fae lore. Naturally, I pictured a wizened older elf in wizard’s robes. So when he stepped into the library in breeches and a waistcoat and presented me with his name for the roster–I made a joke that his parents must be obsessed with the artificer from history.”

  Gale giggled. “What did he say?”

  “He said his father wouldn’t have known the word artificer.”

  Gale’s ears fell as the smile must have left her.

  “But he was surprised I’d read of him because, he said, fae magic was ‘a fairly niche interest.’ I was flabbergasted, to say the least. To me, even when I was only about 30, he looked like a kid. Like a student.”

  “You were only 30?”

  “I am ‘only’ forty-seven now.”

  “How old… is that?”

  “According to Fenn’s chart of exponential aging… what was it… thirty is ten, one-hundred is about eighteen, two-hundred about twenty-four, three is thirty-three, four… I’m around 450 or 500. I guess that was easier than I made it.”

  “But your face is round!”

  “And my hair is graying and I have wrinkles at my eyes.” She winced to admit it.

  “That’s how humans age?”

  Mell had forgotten, but the she-elf had probably never met a human before–or not many. “Yes, besides our skin thickening, bones shrinking, and hair thinning.”

  Gale had the wherewithal not to cringe.“So… you’re old enough to have adult children?”

  “I am and I do.”

  “You have kids?” Gale perked up. “What was it like, watching them grow?

  “I don’t know. I missed most of it.”

  Gale stilled again, digesting the information. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It was my choice.” There had been a time that such questions would have made her sore. Not anymore. “But Gale, I know enough of life to know what I’m saying when I tell you that you–the both of you–are still young. Still in many ways like children. Right now, I need you, we all need you, to grow up.”

  “You may think of me as only half your age, but I am not a child.”

  Mell yanked her comb out of Gale’s hair. “You live at home with your father, like a child. Your labor is singing. You’ve never left your hometown. You express your frustration to your betrothed with passive aggressive jabs, like a teen–an adolescent! And Gale, you tantrum like a toddler. Fenn may have the emotional intelligence of a constipated calf, but at least he knows the struggles of loss and survival.”

  Gale glowered, frowning deep into her soft cheeks, but said nothing.

  Mell smoothed the girl’s hair, free of its tangles, and began to pull it into halves. She needed a more protective style, and twin inside-out braids would suit her. Whatever magic had rooted itself in her mind had not lost its hold, and Mell had not rooted it out. Instead, she wove her metal protection circlet into Gale’s braids, praying it would free her over time as it had for Krid against the morboran’s song.

  “Did… Fenn ever speak of me?” Desperation mingled with hope in Gale’s question.

  Mell didn’t know what to tell her that would help, so she settled for the truth. “No. He didn’t speak of his youth at all. Except once, to mention a book his father burned.”

  Gale’s head moved as she swallowed.

  “If it helps, there were never any women. Or men, for that matter. Not for him. Only his students and peers and projects. Only what he could learn.”

  She nodded, making Mell’s fingers slip in her hair. “Then he hasn’t changed much.”

  Mell chuckled to herself. “Somehow, I’m not surprised. But I think…” she watched Fenn settle onto the ground with the staff grip and his notebooks. Before he crammed his nose into the books, he surveyed the camp, observing where each of them were, and what they were doing. She smiled to herself. “...he is changing now.”

  Within her, pride stirred, swelling up into her chest and seeping into shoulders. Fenn, her awkward, under-confident coworker–her friend–was growing, and she had the mixed pleasure of witnessing it.

  He just needed a little help growing in the right direction.