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“Imy is twenty-seven,” I math out loud. “So, you’re a year younger—”
“No. We’re the same age. He likes his space and craved his quiet time away from us when we were all teens.” Talodus grins as if he’s recalling a memory. “Connak is the youngest. He’s... Twenty-four? Ecaeris is a year older than him, and Rin is a year younger.”
“And her brother?” I inquire.
I still find myself curious about Joldwin Battlerain.
Their group used to be five instead of four, and I wonder how things would have turned out if he hadn’t died. Would these Mongrels still have been mine? Would my heart beat for one more person? Or would I even be here?
His death changed the course of our futures, but we’ll never know how much he altered our journeys.
“Joldwin would have been twenty-six in the Virgo season,” Talodus answers.
“What’s your favorite color?”
He blinks at me several times, confused by my change of topics. “What?”
“I just realized I don’t know enough about any of you,” I admit. “I mean, I now know why you became a guard, and that you don’t sleep during storms—”
“You knew?” he asks, eyes so wide I can see the streams and bands in his crystal blue irises.
“That you were awake when I left?” I clarify and shrug. “Not exactly; though I suspected. I thought about waking you, but I wanted to make my decision without bias. And if you’d gone with me to meet Isolde that night, my choice might not have purely reflected my wishes. I wanted my resolve to be true, to show I stayed because I wanted to be here, even if that meant starting over and being alone.”
Talodus brushes his thumb across my cheek. “We just wanted to make sure you were safe.”
“I knew you wouldn’t try to change my mind,” I reassure him. “But if I chose to leave, it would have been that much harder with you there.”
“You had already made your decision before you got to the beach,” he states.
I nod as I lean my head against his hand. “I had, but I was still scared.”
“We all feared, Ada,” he whispers, delicately cupping my face like I might break under his brute force. “Feared that you would leave after we’d grown attached, that you would change your mind about us once you knew what you really wanted.”
“You are what I want,” I tell him. “All four of you. It’s just… The thought of knowing what I want is as terrifying as deciding to make Spiran my new home.”
* * *
We’ve barely opened the door to Cotear’s house when we spot Rinya pacing in the living room as if she’s a caged animal. Her jerky movements remind me of Ecaeris when he has too much on his mind.
Rin points at a chair in the corner, wordlessly telling me her task is complete. We see the delivery woman sitting there, ready to meet us.
I take a moment to read the room, discreetly examining the woman who was taking my undergarments… and she’s not what I expected. She’s young, striking, with light brown hair tumbling over her shoulders. Guessing an age is a tricky game on Spiran; Isolde looks in her forties, though she’s over the thousand year mark. But I want to say this woman looks as if she isn’t a day over twenty.
“Tell her,” Rin demands after the awkward silence.
“Poko and Cotear were courting me,” the woman informs us without hesitation. “And then you showed up. I was jealous of the attention they were paying you, so—”
“They were stalking her,” Talodus defends, giving her no time to say anything further. “There’s a big difference between that and giving someone the attention they’ve asked for.”
I sigh before I can stop myself. “Just so we’re clear, I never asked for anything from them.”
“That’s not how they spoke of you, though.” She takes a fortifying breath as she gazes at her intertwined fingers. “When they continued to talk about you after I asked them to stop, I popped. I thought they were courting you in private, so I took the things from your barracks and your deliveries from Queen Isolde out of spite and inconvenience. Delivering offerings to you gave me the opportunity to snoop around and search for signs that Poko and Cotear had been there with you.”
I rub at my forehead, trying to keep my face from scrunching up in confusion. “So, you weren’t held against your will or manipulated into anything? You were just acting out of spite because you thought they were courting me?”
“I wish it were that simple,” she answers, her skin flushing a splotchy pink in her embarrassment. “I heard them talking about how they had been seeing you at night, but this night was going to be different. They didn’t care who tried to stop them, and I took that statement as meaning me. I also knew you were publicly courting several men. I couldn’t understand why there was so much secrecy, why you were hiding some, but not others. Why, unless you knew they had a lover already…”
She touches her chest, then fists her hand over her heart as she hangs her head. “So I put your things in their house while they were gone, and I waited. But they never came back. Poko didn’t wake me up to fuss at me about leaving shit in his room or ask where it came from. He was just… gone. I found Cotear two days later, and he was jumpy about giving me answers. Then the announcement happened, and everything started to add up.”
