The Chimera

Chapter Thirty-Six: Leavetaking

Tai is leaving.

Skander feels a reasonable way about this. It's alright; the world still spins.

When the ambassador from Antamery moves onward to the capital, she'll take Hilo, Tai, and two dozen soldiers from the garrison with her.

The ambassador has been lucky enough to only have spotted a few specters on her way to the citadel, and even then from an easy arrow's distance. But now that her retinue is properly within Beledon, where the monsters apparently opt to revel and roam, additional soldiers become a necessity.

Tai's decision to accompany them is a quick one. Lionel knocks at his window at dusk on the day before the ambassador is set to leave. He delivers a letter from Tai's brother, informing him that their father's fallen ill again.

It isn't anything serious. The illness recurs nearly every year, swinging in with the turning of the weather and fading out after a few days. Tai chooses to neglect disclosing this when he writes a letter to the council, asking them for leave to visit Beledon for a few days to tend to his "ailing father".

His father will be fine. Tai just wants to finally meet this Aedus Kade fellow face-to-face.

Hilo will come too, but not out of curiosity over their city's supposed savior. He has his lecturing at the university to return to, and even outside of that, he seems to like mingling with the people from Antamery.

"He'll know all their folklore and end up with a book of their city's poetry, at this rate," Edeline observes, handing Tai a pouch. Inside is a small clay jar filled with Fallon's salve for treating a specter's bite.

Her attentive, meticulous brother was up nearly all night mixing enough lavender petals, dandelion, mustard oil, and all the other ingredients of the salve together for each traveler to have their own personal jar, should they run into trouble on the road.

"The treatment is for a bite, not a scratch or slash or anything else. So if you run into one of the monsters and have to pick between its teeth or its talons, I'd pick the first," Fallon had said, eyes shadowed and curls drooping in his fatigue. Edeline wouldn't be surprised if the faint smell of lavender remains wisp-like about his hands for days to come.

"He still likes poetry?" Tai asks, only marginally interested in the answer. He vaguely remembers Hilo attending poetry recitations around the city when they had all been young together, fresh out of the academy a decade ago.

"He does, when he has time for it," Edeline says, sounding rueful. She knows the strain Hilo's under, with his constant travels back and forth between the citadel and Beledon.

Tai looks up from tying the pouch alongside his saddle bags. They stand in the stable at the bottom of the hill, where Tai had once bitten back a laugh at Skander's impression of him, and where the ambassador's retinue now prepares to leave. Soldiers and secretaries flit back and forth across the stable, donning cloaks and checking gear.

Even with all the movement around them, Tai feels suddenly as if he can ask Edeline something honestly, as if the commotion has granted them a pocket of privacy.

"How can that make you happy? To know that you steal each other's time like that?" he asks her.

Hilo stumbles into the citadel sometimes, worn out with managing his tasks as a university lecturer, his travels to the citadel, his time with Edeline, and his obligations to his family in Beledon.

Meanwhile, Edeline drains herself with worry for him every time he makes the trek to and from the citadel, often sending Lionel out to keep an eye on him from the sky. And she has enough to manage herself with overseeing archery practice and her younger siblings.