As Tybalt and Victoria left, Mariella and Vidalia looked at each other while Kistana began concluding their business with the dressmaker. She was the one carrying the money, since no one in their right mind would try to rob someone who had fought a dragon.
“This is nice,” Mariella said.
“It feels good knowing he’ll be spending some time with her,” Vidalia said, her expression filled with sisterly love.
“Your sister has adapted to all this much better than I did,” Mariella observed. “More quickly, I mean.”
“I prepared her for it our whole lives,” the foxgirl replied with a shrug. “As best I could while trying not to scare her or make it seem like an obligation.” She turned to face Mariella just as the fire mage was thinking that sounded very overbearing. “How are you doing, Mariella?”
“What? How am I? Uh, I’m fine, I think. Thank you.”
“Before Dero left, she mentioned some things about how your fight earlier went.”
Mariella could tell Vidalia was trying to be delicate, but it still made the fire mage’s blood boil as she thought about the Hero, still alive somewhere after he had threatened to carve her baby out of her womb. Tybalt had spent the whole of the following evening with Mariella, trying to make her understand why he had felt it necessary to spare the Hero. Despite that, Mariella had considered smashing the chthonic sword - which now contained Chad’s soul - several times over the ensuing days.
But ultimately, she knew the decision hadn’t been all Tybalt’s.
It had been rooted in his faith in prophecy. Which also meant grounded in advice from Vidalia, who had decided that the lamia’s gift of prediction, like the foxgirl’s own, had to be trusted above what momentary circumstances seemed to dictate was the right course of action.
Mariella shook her head.
Vidalia is almost always eventually right about these things, I’ve seen the evidence of it and heard it affirmed repeatedly by those who have lived around her for longer than I have.
“It’s fine,” she heard herself say. “I know that my child is safe. That’s what matters.”
The foxgirl swallowed, and a look of unmistakable relief passed over her face before she spoke.
“Anyone who wants to hurt you or your baby will have to go through all of us first,” she said. Vidalia placed a hand gingerly on Mariella’s stomach, and they shared a smile.
The two of them were the only women in the group who were already showing, though Kistana and Dero were pregnant too. Mariella thought her and Vidalia’s bumps looked cute, even if she had initially felt like she was doing something a little bit wrong by getting pregnant already, before even being married.
“I would never let either of you come to any harm, nor any of our children,” Kistana agreed, popping her head into view from near the dressmaker’s counter.
“I will also stand in defense of your family when the moment calls for it, in keeping with the results of my decisive combat with the necromancer and the huntress,” Aoife chimed in - a bit awkwardly, Mariella thought.
Even if Chad returns? You were fighting for him when we met you. That was an obvious reason for distrust. Of course, it would be incredible to have a dragon helping to protect their family if they could be certain of her loyalty. But it felt a little too easy. Unearned.
Kistana and Vidalia exchanged a subtle look that Mariella read as wondering the same thing she had just been considering. How much could they really trust Aoife?
But of course it wouldn’t be prudent to show those feelings openly.
“It’s good to have you, Aoife,” Mariella forced herself to say. “I hope you will be happier with us than in your previous situation.”
Aoife gave them a small, tense smile, and Mariella realized she actually seemed a bit anxious about what the others thought of her.
“It would be difficult for this to be worse,” the dragon said. “The three of you seem happy and secure in your positions beside the necromancer. The dark elf and the other fox, too. He treats you as valued mates.”
Is she expecting to be one of us in that way? Well, that would certainly give her a reason to stand by our family through thick and thin…
Mariella couldn’t think of a reason why she would oppose the idea. Tybalt would either die a king or an outlaw, as Vidalia liked to say. Bringing a dragon into his harem, as Dero called it, only increased the odds of the former, which was good for all concerned.
But it seemed to be something that Aoife was quietly assuming or expecting would simply happen, without necessarily having reached any understanding with Tybalt. Mariella knew him well enough to know when there was sexual or romantic tension between him and someone else. She had seen shades of it with Kistana and Dero, though she hadn’t thought Tybalt would win the latter over.
If she expects something, and he’s not interested, that could be a problem. Though I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t be interested in a woman who can shapeshift into different forms until she finds one that pleases him - or at least I’m guessing she can, since she currently has an attractive human form. Unless it’s her personality.
“I would not allow the Hero to harm any of you, now that I have joined you,” Aoife continued, seeming to recognize one of the big sticking points the others might have about accepting her.
“That’s a pretty quick change of stance, I think, Aoife,” Vidalia said. “Not that we distrust you, but is there some other reason you care about standing by our sides besides losing a fight? It seems very arbitrary.”
That was more overt than Mariella was used to from the foxgirl.
She has already seen how Aoife will answer, Mariella realized. In her dreams. She knows the answer, but she asked anyway… which means the end result will probably bring us all closer.
More and more, it felt obvious that Vidalia used her powers mainly to keep this family - the kin group she had dreamt of assembling all her life - bound together, rather than primarily dealing with external threats.
That was probably the real reason she was sometimes cagey about revealing her predictions. Not just the prospect of accidentally changing the future by talking about it. She was always managing all of them. Mariella, Aoife, Kistana, Dero, probably even Tybalt and her own twin, Victoria.
Maybe that’s why her tribe didn’t fully trust her predictions. A history of seers trying to manipulate the future. At least she’s on the same side as me… I think. She shook her head lightly. No, don’t doubt Vidalia that way. She didn’t make your father sign on for genocide. She didn’t make Tybalt manipulate you. She’s only ever been kind to you. She hasn’t done anything that would suggest she’s anything other than benevolent.
She and the foxgirl’s eyes met, and they exchanged smiles.
A benevolent puppetmaster, perhaps, but benevolence is a quality in short enough supply in this land to be worth prizing no matter the underlying motives.
“I have been in search of a stable foundation for my future family for years,” Aoife said after a long, uncomfortable few seconds. “Whether it was by conquering territory for myself, securing a worthy mate, or simply seeking out a safe environment, I strove to create better circumstances for my future offspring than those I enjoyed.”
“That… isn’t how people commonly think about dragons,” Mariella said, her response a little slow as she chewed on her own reflections about Vidalia at the same time that she tried to process what Aoife was saying.
“I have heard that before,” the dragon replied coolly. “Frankly, the general idea that dragons are not nurturing caregivers is correct. My experience with that is why I insist on doing things differently myself.”
“What was your experience?” Vidalia asked.
“Hatching alone,” Aoife said. “On a smoky hill, amid scattered broken eggshells, jagged rock, and ashes. I was the lucky egg.”
“Dragons practice a kind of harsh survival of the fittest,” Kistana observed, stepping back over to them with the purchased dresses draped over her arm.
“Survival of the randomly chosen,” the dragon said. “There is no way to eliminate the element of luck if you actually abandon your offspring. Can you imagine how many times I was almost eaten in my first ten years of life? I know it is hard to believe, considering how powerful I am now. And a dragon is born knowing how to defend itself - knowing who it is, to some degree, instinctively - but you are still small, your claws smaller still, your body weak and untested. You are a… great potential source of experience for some lucky, slightly more mature creature. On the day I was born, a slime tried to eat me. A slime! I defended myself by breathing hot steam at the stupid beast. That barely did anything, but it proved unpleasant enough that the creature left me alone after a minute of concentrated effort.
“That was the first time I felt fear. Not of the slime so much as… Well, I was too weak even to make a simple fire. Anything above a slime could have killed me. I had been abandoned, left to sink or swim as fate would have it. Losing a fight is only one reason I joined your group. Ironically, it was the necromancer nearly killing me to defend you that made me more interested in what your lives were like together. The fact that he stopped because of her wishes—” She looked at Kistana, and the catgirl just smiled guilelessly—“was both monumentally foolhardy on the surface and on some level impressive. The two of you had some relationship of respect and protection, which I gradually recognized must be mutual between you and all of the necromancer’s mates. It made it obvious that you were not typical humans.”
“Most humans are protective of their mates - er, wives - and their young,” Mariella said.
“In my experience, most humans are too weak to protect anything,” Aoife said. “They were therefore generally beneath my notice except as a potential source of resources. Of those who were otherwise, they did not seem particularly devoted to family, but rather intent on accumulating resources, consuming more, enjoying more short term mating opportunities, acquiring more power of whatever sort, to no clear end. I have spent most of my life on the outskirts of human civilizations. It was safer than the badlands where I was hatched. I have seen much from the outside. But perhaps my experience of humans has been unrepresentative.”
“Nah, doesn’t sound like it,” Vidalia said.
Mariella wrinkled her nose at that. Humans were mostly good, she knew, being human herself.
But she also couldn’t comfortably contradict the foxgirl. The natural next questions from Aoife would be, “How did you grow up? What is your family like?”
She couldn’t answer those without acknowledging that her own family lived down to those negative stereotypes. Her father was a general who cared about protecting his Kingdom and his family, and that might make him marginally better than the humans Aoife had experienced. But it had also led him to turn a blind eye to the mass slaughter of beastfolk.
“If you were looking for family or the opportunity to make one, this is probably the right place,” Kistana said. “We all come from difficult backgrounds, but we’re united by Tybalt and by a common sense of purpose. I didn’t know it, but I was looking for a family too.” She smiled at Vidalia and Mariella in a way that swept any discontent from the fire mage’s mind.
Kistana’s genuine, innocent regard for her co-fiancees was the kind that couldn’t be faked. And Mariella had seen the same from Vidalia over and over too.
Mariella reflexively smiled back and reproached herself for how she had been thinking of the foxgirl just a few minutes ago.
There was nothing to be resentful or suspicious of here. She was getting too used to looking out for threats - to watching her back. She couldn’t let that turn into suspicion toward the people who loved her and her child.
This was her family. They were joined by blood - they were all carrying Tybalt’s children - and common cause both. Mariella herself had a position of respect in this arrangement. She was one of the senior wives, not a concubine or a low level subordinate as she had been in the military. She was valued. Tybalt had even said before that he valued her conscience and the restraint that she might impose on him that Vidalia and Victoria wouldn’t.
It was safe here.
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