Peeble lands on my shoulder and surveys the scene with the air of a food critic evaluating a new establishment. "Adequate. The lighting is theatrical, the crowd is lively, and I see at least three beverages that appear to be on fire. I approve."
We take a table near the back. Thalia orders for us, speaking to the server in the Verdance's language, and within minutes, heavy clay mugs arrive filled with something amber and faintly glowing. I take a sip. It tastes like honey, apples, and a third thing I can't identify but warms my chest from the inside out.
"What is this?" I ask.
"Root ale," Thalia says. "Brewed from the Heartwood's runoff. The tree produces a sap that ferments naturally. The city's been drinking it for centuries."
"It's delicious."
"It's also significantly stronger than anything you've had before. Pace yourself."
"She won't," Kaelren says from beside me, because he knows me.
"I absolutely will," I say, and take another long drink.
Kaelren sits close enough that his thigh presses against mine under the table. He hasn't said much since we arrived, but he's not uncomfortable. He's watching the room with the quiet alertness that never fully turns off, cataloging exits and sight lines out of habit, but his body is relaxed. His arm rests on the bench behind me. His corruption marks are dim, settled; the dark lines along his forearms are barely visible in the amber light.
Thalia sits across from us, and within ten minutes, I witness something I wasn't prepared for. She relaxes.
It happens gradually. The first mug of ale loosens the set of her jaw. The second takes the stiffness out of her shoulders. By the third, she's leaning back against the wall with her legs stretched out under the table, and the mask she wears every day, the stoic commander, the disciplined leader, slips just enough that I can see the person underneath.
She's young. Not in years, not in experience, but in the way she laughs when Peeble tells a story about Kaelren getting lost in the tunnels of Iteration Ten. Her eyes crinkle at the corners, the same way mine do, and her laugh comes out startled and full, like she forgot she could make that sound.
"I did not get lost," Kaelren says.
"He absolutely got lost," Peeble counters. "He wandered in circles for forty-five minutes, refusing to ask the local wildlifefor directions. A mushroom tried to help him. A mushroom, Kaelren. It was pointing. With its cap. And you walked past it. Twice."
"I was following the Rootline."
"You were following your ego, which, as we've established, has its own gravitational field."
Thalia laughs again, and the sound makes my chest ache. This is what she doesn't get. This is what all the cycles of fighting has cost her. Not just the people she's lost, not just the sleep and the stress and the weight. The laughter. The ease. The simple, stupid joy of sitting in a tavern with people you love and listening to a beetle roast your father.
I want to give her more of this. I want to give her a lifetime of it.
The music shifts to something faster, and people start leaving their tables to dance in the open space near the musicians. The dancing is energetic, communal, a lot of spinning and stomping and grabbing the nearest person to whirl them in a circle. It reminds me of the barn dances Grandma Jo used to drag me to when I was a kid. Less hay, more glowing moss, but the same energy.
"You should dance," Thalia says, nodding toward the floor.
"I should have another drink."
"You should dance," she repeats, and the look she gives me is warm and firm and very much her father's daughter. "The city celebrates before Bloomfall because it might not get the chance after. This is how the Verdance says I'm still here."
That gets me.
I grab Kaelren's hand. "Come on."
"I don't dance."
"You do now."
He lets me pull him from the bench with a resigned expression. I drag him into the crowd, and the music catches us, and I spin into him, and his hands find my waist, and we move.
He's a better dancer than he'll ever admit. His body follows the beat with the same instinctive precision he brings to a fight, and when I spin away, he pulls me back, and when I press close, his hand slides to my lower back and holds me there. The amber light turns everything gold. The music is fast and bright and joyful, and for three full minutes, we're just two people dancing in a tavern.
Then someone taps my shoulder.
I turn. A tall fae man is standing behind me, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, with the kind of effortless confidence that comes from being the best-looking person in most rooms. His marks are vivid green, pulsing with the easy glow of someone well-connected to the Rootline, and he's smiling at me with a smile that is approximately sixty percent charm and forty percent audacity.
