8. LOVELORN

eight

LOVELORN

L ily pads and flowers bobbed across the pond's surface, thin veils of steam bringing their sweet scent up to Lucetta's nose. The water wasn't as sweltering as the hot springs in the mine, but warm enough to ease the strain in her aching muscles, and the headache that had become so persistent lately.

She curled her toes into the bottom of the pond. It was spongy, something she wasn't sure how to feel about. Idly, she flicked water at Maji across from her, busy shampooing the mass of hair. Their eyes met, and that same question they had been unable to address before built again.

What would they do after finding Ben, if they found him?

"Maybe we can all join a different mine," Maji said, quietly.

"Maybe." Lucetta tapped the rippling surface of the water, unsurprised when the gold shimmer of what she hoped was a fish flashed within the dark blue murk. "I guess that depends on Tau."

"I don't think he'll go back."

His unwillingness to leave Maji's hovel suggested as much. Nor did it seem likely he would transfer to another mine.

"I think Tau will stay with Ollie." Maji's deep brown eyes darted to the open door. Then her gaze set back on Lucetta, determined. "I'm not leaving him, either. I don't care if that means I never get to mine again."

"I know." Lucetta expected nothing less.

"Maybe I'll ask if they want to go to my village. They'd be safe, and it's peaceful. I think they'd both like it there."

"Ask Tau to give up his duties entirely?"

"He's already done that," said Maji.

Lucetta tilted her head from side to side. "Maybe."

As far as she knew, Oliver was happy wherever he had a bed and a meal, whether that was in a big city, or the smallest burrow available within a mountain. What would it take to keep a Sentinel happy?

"I'll have to go back to get my plants," Maji said and Lucetta couldn't help scoffing.

"We'll need a whole train carriage for those alone."

Another flick of water in Maji's direction, along with a playful smile, before Lucetta hoisted out of the pond and onto plush moss. She grabbed a soft terry cloth hanging from a polished branch nearby. Robes hanging by another branch behind the door caught her attention. In silent delight, she snatched one in a stunning amethyst purple, silky fabric eliciting a shiver as she slipped it on. Sleek and cool in just the right way.

"Ogh." Lucetta groaned. "The things we've missed out on by always being on the nut."

"Yeah, how stupid are we?" Maji supplied a faint quirk of those heart-shaped lips.

She submerged, the spread of her pitch black hair like oil slick across the water. Then she burst back up in a loud splash, arms raised high, clutching a large and flailing golden fish. Cascades descended her face, thick lashes clumped as she blinked to clear her vision.

"I knew I felt something!"

"Keep it," said Lucetta. "If Fae food is no good, we can cook that."

She hid her warming satisfaction at Maji's laugh by leaving the room.

Oliver and Tau were on the massive bed nearest the exit. While mostly hidden within the tight hold Tau had on him, Oliver looked to be asleep, the rise and fall of his shoulder heavy. Tau lay facing Lucetta, obsidian triangles never giving anything away. At that moment though, her skin prickled with the knowledge he was watching her.

The bed's blush coloured canopies and burgeoning white flowers undid Tau's borderline sinister appearance. Mostly. She tried to smile. Tried, and failed. Oliver had plainly suggested his relationship with Tau had crossed a certain line a few months ago, but seeing them so intimate was bizarre .

She was glad Oliver's feelings weren't as unrequited as she'd believed, but sparks of protectiveness flew up within Lucetta all the same. With a sigh, she threw the terry cloth onto the ornate vanity desk nearby and crossed the room to the balcony.

A balmy breeze combed her curls outside, lacking the salty notes so customary to ocean air. In silence she watched the sun dip toward the horizon, resting her forearms across the thick wood railing. Pink and gold tracks smeared the sky above the suspended tidal wave, the last rays of sunlight refracting in the water, transforming joyless city structures into peridot green marvels.

Lucetta didn't come from an impoverished home, but she had never experienced the finer things in life either. Not like this. Now, she had a faint idea, and couldn't help the resentment that burrowed into her heart to make itself a home there. The lack of luck, the abundance of useless discoveries.

The unravelling of what she'd known.

Preoccupied by if onlys and what ifs, she didn't immediately notice the shapes that had appeared within the wave-wall.

"Hey, Maji," Lucetta called out, her scrutiny now fixed on the colossal silhouettes visible only with the waning sun.

"What?"

A gasp, a flash of lustrous yellow, and Maji was beside her, clad in a similar robe hugging her round figure with perfection.

"Are those frogs ?" breathed Maji.

Lucetta wrenched her focus back to the shadows in the crescent surrounding the city. "Sure looks like frogs. Monumental, I-wouldn't-have-come-here-if-I'd-known-frogs."

"I'm sure they're friendly," Maji said, still gaping.

The sun disappeared, darkening the sky to dusty purples. With it, the croaks of several hundred frogs shattered the rigid silence of the day. Soft green flared with every croak, permeating streets below and beyond with noise and lights, the colossal wave rippling with every deep ribbit of the goliath-frogs. Their illuminated chests and crystal-clear water allowed flashes of their eyes, giant spheres with blackened slits fixated on the city below them.

Lucetta shuddered.

"It's fine," Maji said, more uncertain. "Now I understand why the Fae get so upset by noise."

"If this is what they put up with every night?" Lucetta said over the racket. Chirps of insects had joined in, the melange of noise strangely soothing all the same. "Yeah."

"Do you think Sam is okay?"

Her gaze snapped to Maji, who pointedly wasn't looking back. She knew Lucetta didn't give a damn about Samuel. If he was stuck in some kind of prison, then he was exactly where he deserved to be.

"I'm more worried about Ben. He obviously hasn't found Sam," said Lucetta.

So where did that leave him? Trapped, trying to cross Malimoure at best. At worst… Lucetta didn't want to think about it. For all his faults, Benjamin was her friend. Samuel had skewed him, and the believed death of his husband had nearly undone him. Leaving the way he had, with nothing but a sideways, guilt-riddled glance while Lucetta watched him sneak out of her hovel that night was just another afterclap brought on by grief.

"I saw him leave, you know," Lucetta murmured. Maji turned those beautiful brown eyes to her, but she couldn't meet them. "I didn't try to stop him. Why didn't I?"

If Lucetta thought confessing would ease the weight of regret, she was sorely mistaken. She rubbed at the back of her neck with no hope of easing the tension that drew her shoulders tight again.

Maji's silence grew ever more intense with the croaks of a thousand frogs.

"Not like you could've stopped him," she said at length. "Ben's as stubborn as the rest of us."

Lucetta allowed herself a glance. "Yeah. I guess he is." Done bathing herself in froggy belches, chirrs, and verdant green light, she pushed off the railing. "Come on. There's a telephone inside. We'll order something to eat."

Oliver hadn't moved an inch, while Tau had taken to stroking a gigantic gauntlet over his forehead, as if wiping away bad dreams. Lucetta stopped at the edge of the bed and reached to shake Oliver's shoulder, visible within the cage that was the Sentinel.

A restless twitch of those claws. They had moved in her direction, stilling Lucetta's hand. She raised her eyebrows at Tau as he flexed his fingers.

It almost felt…threatening.

"He needs a bath," Lucetta said, and quickly decided she'd misread the situation as Tau settled his palm over the side of Oliver's face. "He'll feel better."

When she curled her hand over the ball of the shoulder and shook, there was no reaction from Tau. Barely one from Oliver, either.

"Up, Ollie."

A low, unwilling moan and he curled further against Tau.

"We're getting something to eat, and you need a bath. Think of Tau, you're probably an affront to his nose." That got him up, although not without a glower at Lucetta's saccharine smile. "Do you want a hand?"

She followed him to the bathroom, where Oliver sleep-stumbled about as he discarded his clothes and dipped his toes into the pond, clear of suds already.

He shook his head, sliding in, and grimaced when he turned to face her.

"It's spongy," he said, voice still drowsy-thick.

"You have at least one friend in there too." Lucetta smirked at his widening eyes. "Unless Maji decided we're eating it tonight."

"Whatever it is, I'm hungry enough to eat it."

"You and me both." Lucetta popped the stopper off a pink glass bottle from a side table and tipped shampoo into a cupped hand.

"Can I borrow Sigma's magic? Tau still seems off."

"Of course. You don't have to ask." Lucetta knelt by the pond's edge. "It's yours, really. It's in my bag."

"Nah. I'll just kill someone else with it."

The moment the words slipped free, Lucetta felt the shift in Oliver's mood. He busied himself wetting his hair, but the tenseness in his scrawny back was there. Carefully, so as not to spook him, she massaged the glob of shampoo into his peculiarly coloured hair. A dreamy scent of wild blossoms and something earthy permeated the air, not unlike the fragrance that naturally clung to Maji.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Lucetta glanced over her shoulder at the doorway, wondering where Tau was. He seemed very capable of assuaging Oliver's distress.

A slight shrug. "Not much to tell."

Except, there was so much more to it, based on what Anna and Helen had told her when they discovered her rummaging around Oliver's hovel.

"I don't think we ever told you what happened between Lauper and us, did we?"

Oliver swept his focus up to her, the question of how she knew lingering in his eyes. Once like peridot, now more like seraphinite. He didn't give voice to the question, and Lucetta didn't offer an explanation.

"One day, Ben and Sam were arguing while working. I don't even know what it was about."

A faint scoff met her words. Benjamin and Samuel often argued, but it had become particularly rampant after Oliver joined their group. Lucetta knew why, of course, and it had as much to do with Oliver's curse as with Benjamin's inclinations toward him.

"In any case, Ben gets angry and he whacks his pickaxe into a discovery by accident. Nothing big," Lucetta assured when Oliver fretted. "Just a cluster of crystals. We never found out what it was exactly, because the moment he pulled the pickaxe out, it turned to ash."

"Oh, shit."

Lucetta hummed. "That didn't sit well with Lauper, so he demanded that all proceeds of the next discovery go to him alone. Said we owed him. I told him where to stick it, things got heated. In the end, we all agreed he should find himself a different group." She rubbed the back of Oliver's neck with sudsy fingers, hoping to ease some of his tension. "Lauper was always an arsehole. He never listened. Didn't know how to work in a team. He slacked off all the time and he was always rude to Ben, worse to Maji. Always picked on her for being short."

Oliver remained quiet.

"Anna and Helen told me what happened," Lucetta said eventually. "His bad luck, Ollie. It's not your fault."

"It is my fault." Oliver dipped his head into cupped hands, rubbing his face and muffling his voice. "I should have controlled my temper better."

"You were assaulted. I would have reacted exactly the same."

The chuckle that left Oliver was about as genuine as pyrite masquerading as gold. "Yeah, but you're not cursed."

Lucetta traced her knuckles down the side of his face, leaving a track of pink-tinged foam, prompting him to turn and meet her eyes. "You'll be alright."

His expression became so forlorn, her heart shattered for him.

"I'm so grateful to you and Maji for always being by my side," he croaked. "But I wish you weren't. There's no point in ruining your lives just for me."

Lucetta smiled, wryly. "Don't flatter yourself so much. I wanted to find Ben, it just coincided nicely."

This time, Oliver's chuckle was more sincere. "I love you, too."

She gave his head a playful nudge. "Wash up. If you and Tau are having sex, the least you can do is be clean for him."

Oliver's face peaked to a shade of ruby and Lucetta snickered, rising to her feet. She strode toward the door, but turned at a splash, water spraying the moss near her feet.

"I don't regret it," Oliver said, wiping foam off his forehead.

Lucetta jerked her head into a tilt. "Don't you?"

He frowned. "I mean—I'm sorry you two got caught in this shit storm, but I don't… Lauper was nothing more than bung-fodder clumped on someone's trill. Like you said, he deserved it."

"That's not—" Lucetta faltered. Had she said that? "I'll…go get Tau for you."

She nearly ran into the giant loitering just outside the door. Lucetta huffed in surprise and stepped aside, idly motioning for the Sentinel to enter and leaving the two to it.

Against the navy walls, Maji stood out like a sunflower, poking at what Lucetta was fairly sure had to be a radio atop an elegant table below the cluster of hexagonal windows.

"That's not the telephone," Lucetta teased, peering at a paper pinned to the wall behind the radio. Instructions on how to operate it. "Been in the mine too long, you. It's over there on the bedside table. Why don't you try for room service?"

"Oh, hah -hah." Maji gave her a look, turned to the telephone, and hesitated.

Lucetta pressed her lips down on a laugh. "Never used a telephone before?"

Neither had Lucetta, of course, but at least she didn't approach it as though it were a beast to be captured by a Sentinel. A quick guess, and she lifted the handle, passing it to Maji who looked at her in fright. In horror, when a voice emanated from it.

"Anyone there?" Maji bellowed, then jolted, pulling the receiver away from her face. From a distance and still shouting, she added, "Can I get some food, please?"

"You don't have to yell," said Lucetta between snorts of mirth.

Maji's look became panicked. "She's asking what we want."

"Everything. And wine. Lots of wine."

Instructions Maji passed on, loudly, then threw the receiver down, eliciting a faint ping . "I think she got it."

"I think so too."

Lucetta's grin dropped at the sudden slam of the restroom door. Something banged against it on the other side, followed by a muffled moan.

She gaped at the dark, polished wood. Oh .

"What are they doing?"

Lucetta turned her bafflement on Maji's innocence. "They're having sex."

Visibly, that innocence withered. " Huh ? Wait—huh? How ?"

It was tempting to pass on what Oliver had told her about Tau and his sex organs, just to see her reaction. Not that she would betray such trust. Instead, Lucetta returned to the radio, poured over the instructions again, and turned the dial.

Blaring music had her jumping back in fright.

"We've been in the mine too long ," she breathed over the drums and honking instruments. "Did you know these things have been around for a couple of years now?"

Maji gave her another look. "I only heard about them in passing!"

Lucetta shrugged. "I'll do your hair?"

A proposal that perked Maji right up.

With a faint, fatigue-tinged sigh, Lucetta sat on the edge of the other bed, too close to the restroom. Fortunately, the upbeat music swamped any noise that might have otherwise penetrated the door, preserving what remained of Maji's sweet cluelessness. Her plump frame settled between Lucetta's legs on the mossy carpet.

"You okay?" Maji asked.

Lucetta hummed, running her fingers through glossy black hair. Still damp, unsurprisingly. She had so much hair.

"I feel responsible." Another confession that didn't unburden her shoulders. "If I'd just gone to help wash him like normal, none of it would've happened."

"That's stupid," said Maji without pause. "How could you have known? Has he told you what happened?"

It occurred to her that Maji knew even less about the situation, yet she'd still come along. In a murmur, Lucetta relayed what she'd been told by Helen and Anna, gently running a brush through the luscious hair, taking a moment to let the weighted waterfall of obsidian dance along her fingers. Then, she set to braiding the left section, beginning near the temple.

"That's awful," said Maji, and Lucetta tried not to jerk as fingers idly toyed with her bare toes. "I'm glad he's got Tau back, at least."

Lucetta scoffed, softly. "Omnipotent Sentinel, vanquishes a hundred Wandering Horrors like they're nothing, and follows a dinky human around like a lost kitten."

"It's cute!" Maji snickered, then. "How weird was it seeing Tau all droopy from the rain?"

It had been worrying at first, but now Tau had returned to his old self, more or less, it was funny, and Lucetta chuckled along. Finishing the braid at the base of a golden nape, Lucetta pointed a foot at her bag resting against the bed, indicating Maji ought to get her pins out. With several in hand, Lucetta secured the rest of the black tresses in a small bun, then repeated it on the other side.

"I owe you an apology," said Lucetta.

"What for?"

She had to stay Maji's head with firm fingers when that round head tried to turn. "I think I've been sending you unwanted signals. I know you're not… You don't tilt any particular way, as Ollie puts it. But I can't help liking you."

Maji was quiet, but resumed toying with Lucetta's toes.

"Like me, like me?" she asked, eventually.

Lucetta stilled, her heart giving an unsteady beat. "Yes, Maji. Romantically ." Just in case there were any lingering confusions.

A contemplative noise was Maji's only response. Lucetta didn't know how to take it. She tied off the other bun, then slapped her hands down on rounded shoulders, a suggestion for Maji to get up and look.

"Wow, it's so cute!" She tilted her head from side to side, peering into the vanity desk mirror. "I guess you'll be doing my hair from now on."

"It's a bit bumpy." It was very bumpy.

Lucetta caught a flash of a goofy grin as Maji bounced across the bed and wrapped her arms around her shoulders from behind. Soft lips pressed a firm but quick kiss to her cheek. In thanks, Lucetta presumed.

Since they had asked for everything on the menu, it wasn't much of a surprise that their meals took ages to arrive. All the same, Lucetta lay across the bed with her legs dangling off its side, growing ever crankier with Maji in no better state beside her. Oliver and Tau had yet to emerge. The jubilant tune from the radio had mellowed into something less upbeat.

Maji bolted upright at a knock, swinging the door open to reveal a dark-skinned Fae in a long, slim dress with such a glimmering sheen, it might as well have been made from pure amethyst. It wasn't often Lucetta fancied wearing dresses, but she fancied that one. And that Fae.

Silky hair slipped past the Fae's shoulders like a sleek, golden cascade as they pushed the cart in, laden with covered dishes. They did not pause to say anything, face set with the neutrality of a rock, their silence persistent as they slipped out of the room and quietly closed the door.

"This is way too much," Maji said, lifting wooden cloches to investigate.

Foregoing the use of cutlery, Lucetta collected a cabbage parcel. A savoury bean filling, rich in spices she couldn't name. Benjamin would have loved this.

The thought quelled her delight somewhat, the constant worry that had chased her the past two months rearing back to life. Their parting words had been angry ones. When he'd told her of his plan to chase after Samuel, she had compared the size of his brain to that of a gnome's thick end. Lucetta hadn't changed her mind about Benjamin's butt-brain, but she hoped he was at least an alive butt-brain.

She swallowed the cabbage parcel with a grimace, having left it in her mouth too long, then made her way to the restroom door and rapped her knuckles across it.

"Food's here and there's too much. We need your help, Ollie."

A muffled, "Coming," was all she got, and she resisted the urge to make an inappropriate remark.

When Oliver emerged, dressed in a long-sleeved shirt that didn't look entirely clean and well worn denim, he looked more content than he had in years . Lucetta ran her fingers through his still-damp hair, catching his gaze. The smile he gave her was outright dopey.

"There's wine." Lucetta's attention drifted to Tau ducking in through the doorway.

Did Oliver now know what he looked like under all that fabric? Had he taken his mask off? Lucetta bit down on the need to ask.

"Where's the meat?" asked Oliver, frantically lifting more cloches in search of protein.

"Fae don't eat meat," said Maji.

Information that distressed Oliver a great deal, and had Lucetta snorting. She grabbed another cabbage parcel and held it up to his mouth. He inhaled it with barely a chew, yet grimaced.

Maji snickered. "It's not that bad."

"We've eaten worse," Lucetta added.

Gnome meat, for a start. A thought that the other two must have echoed, since they fell silent, the persistent worry about Benjamin thick in a breeze still aflow with croaks and chirrs. Lucetta snatched up a bottle and yanked out the cork to pour them all a glass—a wooden goblet, really.

Tau made himself comfortable on the centre of the bed, where Oliver immediately joined him, goblet in hand and spilling some over opulent sheets. He looked up at the Sentinel with such adoration, his love obvious even from where Lucetta stood with brass instruments bellowing into her ear.

As she watched Tau press his face against Oliver's head, and Oliver press a kiss to armoured knuckles, she felt the sharp bite of jealousy. Lucetta shifted her gaze to Maji, blissfully unaware of all around her, stuffing her face with something dark green and crunchy, and looking absolutely adorable with her bumpy hairdo.

Lucetta held back an unhappy sigh.