'ᴡᴇ ꜱʜᴀʀᴇ ᴀ ꜱᴇɴᴛɪᴍᴇɴᴛ. ɪ ᴄᴀɴ ʙᴇ ʙᴏᴜɢʜᴛ ᴡɪᴛʜ ʙʟᴏᴏᴅ ᴀɴᴅ ʀᴇᴠᴇʀᴇɴᴄᴇ.'
Only one month has passed in Daliah Viper's life trying to reintegrate at court and follow the uneasy trails her eyes have caught.
One month filled with blood, tribulations, and l...
-the young of an animal or a family of young especially : the young (as of a bird or insect) hatched or cared for at one time
-a group having a common nature or origin
- the children of a family
- of a bird : to cover (young) with the wings
- to think anxiously or gloomily about: ponder
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I can't escape both my guards and my cousins noting my burned hand.
"It's nothing," I answer.
They don't believe me. Least of all Evangeline. The rest happily obliges to corner me and get my hand the smallest medical attention. It is covered in elastic compression knitted fabric, a small white bandage that slightly soothes the aggressive tickle with some sort of cooling underneath.
Hadrien and Loren work softly on that while the rest catch and corner me, voices asking me things, for direction, about what happened.
It isn't like I have a very big story to tell or plot to unravel. Nothing except a burned hand and a dismissal.
"At least he seems...relatively collected," I conclude.
My guards try to keep a neutral face. Evangeline avoids any snide remark. MY cousins only grimace. Again. No one believes me.
I wonder...
Elara once cut me into pieces during dinner, and she never seemed like a very loving mother or pleasant person. I can't say any mind reader dead isn't a triumph personally. Some part of me wonders how I would celebrate the moment Samson was dead. I would dance over his corpse.
But he isn't important, and he hasn't provided any sort of strategic or political discourse for a country. Elara may have been a horrible person, as Atara coins us all, but she was well versed and brilliantly smart on scheming and holding the stitched network together.
Everything is balancing on the tip of a knife. What now happens is what will mint over a lot of people.
For just a moment I wonder if anyone will dare another coup. Just now, that the mind readers are weak, and we have a barely adult wearing the crown.
Will we return to the capital? What is the next step? And how good of retaliation will it be?
Or maybe the strike will come from another side entirely.
The broadcast has fanned some revolts. Something about military efforts to quench and suffocate the revolts of red people in bigger cities, inspired by the broadcast that showed off a victory and a Queen's corpse.
I swallow hard on that while my subordinates breach the air with trickling news.
No news from the capital, but on the small landing site, bodies shiver on in.
