12:The Welcoming Cold

Sanjuio Alexandrie Aerith Vanessa Elamys Normaer Sylvaris Donadieu…didn’t understand people. She didn’t need magic to divine that. Half the time, she didn’t even really like people. As she left the ballroom, her cheeks began to burn. Walking calmly, head held high, she glanced at Chevalier and stepped out into the hall, closing the door behind her. Nodding and waving away the assistance of the house staff, she quickly made her way outside.

Walking became running. Or as well as she could in a gown. Lifting skirts, she ran fast and she ran hard, trying to get away from thoughts that followed. Not knowing where she was running, she found herself sprinting, running, then jogging toward the orchard before coming to a stop by an old, gnarled olive tree where she leaned, breath steaming in the moonlight. Grimacing, she looked up at the sky and wished she could have run further. She just…

Needed space. Space and apparently to change her perspective - two things everyone had told her to give Lucas time to achieve.

Zut.

Panting, she reached for hidden lacing, pulling the heavy overgarment off. Folding it as carefully as she could, she left the corset and undershirt and removed all but the woollen leggings she wore beneath the skirts. She’d borrowed the ensemble after all, and Maman had forced her to watch how a gown was made from start to finish when she’d ruined three in a week.

Trees stood in somewhat ordered rows around her, silent. 

Judging? Welcoming. Skimming her fingers along the trunk, she felt for hand and footholds in the dark.

“You’re half elf,” Emily would say with amusement, tapping her own pointed ears from higher up, not a smudge on her dark, simple clothes. “Surely your fingers can find handholds.” 

Find handholds, perhaps, but there was only so much breeding took care of. The rest was training. Training and practice. She got less time to practice, these days - she couldn’t exactly climb trees in dresses, and on the road she had to stay safe - which meant staying by Chevalier.

Now…now they were as close to safe as they would be for some time, so she could indulge in a habit she’d had since she was young. She disappeared to do what she wanted to do. For the moment, what she wanted was to get away from discomfort and climb trees. What she wanted was to go home, and this was the closest she could get.

“Surely you can find a way if you really want it.” And she always could. Hers was not the supernatural ability Jasper had shown them, but the feline grace of a gymnast. Slipping her feet from dark ballroom heels, toes of one foot found a divot in the tree as fingers hooked into small spaces. Ignoring the protest of her lungs as she crouched, not fully recovered from the run in a corset, she used the hand and footholds to spring up and grab the first branch. Briefly amused at the sight she would make if anyone had seen (a sinrou in her undergarments hanging from a branch in an orchard could not be all that common), she stretched her arms on the branch for a moment before swinging up and grasping another. Monkey-like, she swung, never putting all her weight on a branch for long until she was sitting on top of a stronger bough and leaned against the trunk to catch her breath. Looking over the side, deep within the leaves of the tree, she could feel lost here. Lost to the world. A safe house in a safe house, if you could ignore the clothes on the ground beneath. If you could assume no one would look here and drag you back to reality.

Sitting on that bough, she pulled a leaf from the tree. A thought, a dream, a whisper, a prayer and a leaf mouse ran up and down her arm before curling up in her hand and falling asleep, little snores like a breeze through trees.

Never alone.

She was never alone. Pulling an early season bloom from the tree, she gave the mouse a friend, and the two curled up together.

The existence of magic in her - that she could use - ask to use - thank for using…

It never left her.

She could remember being young and being told of it, but she no longer remembered the silence unless it happened.

People were upset with her for…what, exactly? For being focused? For wanting…for doing what she needed to do? Lucas had to learn how to use the Song. He knew that. She knew that. And he would. Ultimately, he would do what La Chanson asked and that was the important point - but it wasn’t all she cared about. And right now, sitting in the tree, she hated herself for it. Everyone kept telling her he didn’t have the same experience of La Chanson that she did. She wasn’t stupid. Of course he didn’t. He couldn’t. No one could. At this point, she wondered whether even Grandmère had. What she wanted to know was how it was different, not to be told repeatedly that it was. She hadn’t expected all this to go so far, but it had and she’d tried to apologise but the words never came out right and she just couldn’t think and then others were talking and changing the topic and pulling her away from what she was trying to do to make it better and - 

Angry tears springing to her eyes, she held her hands up to her mouth, lips pursed, prepared to drop the spell as she peered into cupped hands to see sleeping mice curled up together.

One was a delicate pink, tail made of braided stamen, fur of softest olivebud-fuzzy petals. The other a pale, hardy green, tough, tail a thick barky brown. Inhaling, she pursed her lips more, preparing to blow them away - and stopped. 

Even self-created magical mice seemed better at interacting than she. Que c’est embarrassant.

She leaned her head on her cupped hands. The mice kissed her forehead, noses cold.

Of the things in Alexa’s short life so far, she’d only really had to worry and care about two things: Her family and La Chanson. The only two things that consistently and constantly drew her focus. And now she was being asked to split that focus by people who didn’t seem to understand how all encompassing that attention was. And the only question they could ask about the object of her attention was “what does it want?”

“Ask it yourself if it’s so important to you!” she wanted to scream. The same question over and over and over. Boring and pointless and unhelpful for someone who would do what it wanted regardless. Short sighted - or else too longsighted. Did they not think it would tell her when she needed to know? Perhaps that was not enough for them, but it was enough for her. 

For all the difficulty she had in trusting the Edgewaters, they had more difficulty trusting La Chanson. “Why,” she whispered to the mice, “should I trust people who refuse to respect something so beloved to me?” 

There were so many better questions to be asking. Spider had come closest - why did it show them the river? Why had it left Spider coated in mud? Why did she need this much power or this level of connection to it? Why had it chosen her, sure, but how could something so powerful need her? What could she and Lucas give it that it couldn’t do alone? What was against it? What was the problem it was trying to solve? Would it be with her always? 

That last was a dichotomous question, and one she very very specifically did not ask. 

Trust did not come easily to Alexandrie. The small amount of trust she had thus far extended to the Edgewaters was prompted in large part by La Chanson, and by Chevalier. Court had taught Alexa that what people said was rarely what they meant, so she simply didn’t pay attention to what people said. Why listen and put energy into understanding words spoken through masks of politeness? Look instead at what they did, her instinct told her. Actions told her more than words. People lied with their words. Most people, anyway. 

‘Even Lucas,’ she thought, resting the mice on the bough before her. 

‘Even he hid behind the mask.’ He always had. A face for the public and a face for the private. Which was it? Which should she listen and seek to understand? And what was the point when such faces changed with the season?

Frustrated, she stood and looked down at the clothes beneath her. The gown, the beauty (or appreciation of it) was as much Alexandrie as the girl in the tree. Ask one a question and you would get much the same answer as the other. Ignoring it and gauging the distance between herself and a nearby branch, she took a couple of steps back and leaped to it, hanging above the ground. Curling into herself, she wrapped her legs around it and hung upside down. Blood and La Chanson pounded in her head as she hung, looking at the mice in the other bough as they stood on hind legs, trying to find a way to get to her. She half-smiled, half-grimaced and dropped the spell. Petals and leaves floated away on the breeze.

Pulling herself up onto this new, higher branch, she could see the majesty of the house, but could no longer see the clothes below through the leaves. Good.

She wore the clothes. They didn’t wear her. Put her in veils or rags and she was still the same person with the same face. Change his clothes, and Lucas Edgewater was an entirely different person. That rankled, whatever the reason.

Maman was the same person at home that she was in public. Grandmère (despite Maman’s objections) was the same person at home that she was in public. Papa was the same. Chevalier didn’t have the choice of more than one face. He was ever Chevalier. 

She couldn’t say that of Edgewaters. Of the two she travelled with, at least Spider was honest about it. At least she could count on Spider to be honest about his deceptions. It was why she had been willing to trust that Tallman would do as she said. 

So. Lucas wasn’t stupid enough not to use La Chanson. Et La Chanson was not stupid - it would not give someone abilities they would mismanage. She trusted La Chanson’s judgement as far as those it empowered - if it believed he could do what it wanted, he would be able to, and maybe she didn’t need to make it happen. But a strange itch of distrust in him had plagued her since they started this journey, and while it had shrunk, it had not disappeared. Searching her own feelings, she didn’t feel jealousy, or pain. She felt frustration and…betrayal? 

Everything was conflicting. She hated that she felt this way, and she hated that anyone or anything could make her distrust any part of La Chanson or Chevalier. But it was there, and trying to ignore the feeling only made things worse.

If only they knew how hard it already was to trust them with this much of her affection - eugh - attention. It was on the scale of being “cousins” to the Dash’em’ali, and she didn’t even know how to verbalise that in any meaningful way that she couldn’t help but feel would be undermined somehow. 

So why try?

The sinrou folded her legs beneath her to warm her toes and tucked her hands under her arms. She’d never spent so long thinking about people who were not family - especially people who openly admitted to lying to her.

Cold as it was, Alexa felt safe here. Here she could think, could curl up and watch the world, watch light flicker through the window of people who would still be dancing, talking, lying to each other for hours more. Here, in this tree, she didn’t need to watch her tongue, or her manners, or her graces.

Conflicted as she was, cold as it was becoming, she leaned against the trunk of the tree, broad - welcoming - closed her eyes and listened to the Song of the World. There were no time pressures here - no need to be more. 

Eventually, the lilting lullaby of the World set her mind to rest, and her heart to dreaming.