Elegance is fickle; a fleeting creature that holds little weight over what follows after it. After all, what is thought to be the pinnacle of elegance is thought silly in subsequent decades. Due to this flaw in the perception of elegance, it is sometimes difficult for an event, a person, a place, or even a single moment to be called elegant. Elegant was, however, the only word that fit as Lord Vauld, the Pretannai Minister of Health, strolled up the long marble stairway to the front entrance of the Estra Villa.
Light danced from every window. Even at a distance, one could make out the ring of laughter, the hum of music, and even the distant crack of riding strops, surely evidence that somewhere on the villa grounds a slightly impromptu game of Cork had broken out. Those around Lord Vauld were bedecked in finery that would financially ruin most people for several generations. Flickers of doubt ran through Lord Vauld’s mind as he continued towards the villa. While his own regalia was fine crimson silks adorned with hand-shaped braiding and embroidery of gold and platinum made by the finest wire-weavers the Holy Jahlnarth Empire had to offer, he seemed to be a few steps below elegance if the crowd he had arrived with was anything to judge by.
Judgement, he had noted as he ascended, was the order of the evening. While it was very true that the Estra family had been heavily involved in Pretannai politics from the start of the rebellion, and throughout the subsequent war against the Holy Jahlnarth Empire, everyone knew exactly why Lord and Lady Estra were never seen in public without one of a dozen varieties of mask fixed to their faces. Cassain were, after all, considered lesser than the rest of the world. It mattered little to the rest of the nobility that no Cassain chose to be born bearing a curse that robbed them of their skin, certain sinews, and a litany of soft tissues that reside close to the surface. To be one of the “walking meat displays” that easily frightened children—and sometimes even adults—was tantamount to walking into the King’s throne room naked.
Despite the curse they labored under, the family of Estra had prospered. Their wealth was opulent and their generosity was unmatched, which upset those nobles that believed Cassain had no business in politics or money. Members of court and guild committees liked to whisper this distrust was due to the fact that anyone born a Cassain could read minds. Such a thing was surely what gave those of the Estra line an unfair advantage in negotiations and various other political dealings. Lord Vauld had heard his fair share of rumors, most of which proved false in the end, and so he ignored this one as well. He was, however, aware that Cassain had remarkably powerful minds. While their curse robbed them of skin, it made their minds into fortresses that not even the most dedicated student of the emerging practices of magic had been able to breach. Those same minds also gave the Cassain the capacity to communicate directly with the minds of others, relaying thoughts and ideas rather than fumbling their way through verbalizing ideas as others were compelled to do.
At the unnecessarily elaborate doors of the manor, Lord Vauld presented his invitation. He had to clench his sharp teeth ever so slightly as the porter received the gilded paper. Lord Vauld’s discomfort was born less from the fact that the porter was clearly Cassain—dressed in some sort of primitive costume that left most of their skinless torso exposed while their face was covered with a smiling white mask. Studying medicine and making a practice of surgery had numbed Lord Vauld to the horrors of anatomy long ago. Rather, the discomfort was from the gloves he—and every other guest as far as he had seen—had been asked to don for the first ever Flayed Society Gala.
“And why must I wear gloves?” he had asked the courier who had brought his invitation to his infinitely more modest manor.
“It is your claws, my Lord,” the courier had replied with a stately bow. “The claws, nails, and talons of Yorn, and any other race frankly, can be unpleasant to Cassain. So, as not to make any one species feel singled out, Lord and Lady Estra have asked that all guests arrive gloved and remain so for the course of the evening.”
Lord Vauld, and his ancestors he imagined, cursed gloves whenever they had to be worn. Some Yorn, such as those with feline blood, had the luxury of claws that could be withdrawn. As an otter, Lord Vauld had no recourse save to keep his sharp claws blunted; a habit garnered from his time in the operating theater. Though, even those kinds of precautions were apparently not enough for a gala at the Estra Villa.
On rare occasions, Lord Vauld could be impressed. He had a reputation in King Silverhorn’s court for being difficult to phase and even harder to steal a reaction from. The entry hall of the Estra Villa managed to do both as he tried to take in the gold lining the details of magnificent pillars hewn from pure white Volkrusian marble. Frescos in the most vibrant tones greeted him with depictions of gods and battles and great feats of heroism from any flat or empty rounded surface that had been left out of the intricate detailing of every single molding along every single seam between the floors and ceilings. Chandeliers of what he could only assume were crystals mined from the crypt cities of the Morcego lit the entire vaulted room with clean, warm light. Guests in finery that could not be properly valued by a more pragmatic noble such as Lord Vauld milled about, waited on by Cassanic staff dressed in such a way that it was abundantly obvious that their bodies lacked proper skin or fur or scales.
Adjusting his jade-bedecked mask, clearing his throat softly for no one’s benefit except his own, Lord Vauld ducked his head and surged through the entry way. Every noble in the city, and the surrounding countryside it seemed, had received an invitation to this gala. Crowds of more than 50 made Lord Vauld nervous. Crowds of well over a thousand, with a considerable number of both staff and party-goers clearly lacking the birthright of skin, were enough to compel him to find the host, thank them for their graciousness, wish them well, and then flee through a back door so he could return to his books, his correspondents with the Physician’s Guild, and most importantly his star charts. There was a conjunction happening tonight that he was missing for the sake of these festivities and it left him just a little sour.
Grandeur did not cease to accost him as he shuffled quickly towards what he could only assume was the massive room of the villa set aside for things such as galas. From every angle he was pressed by details wrought in gold. Looking at the floor did not help. Beneath his soft red calfskin boots was a checkerboard pattern of deep blue marble and painfully white granite tiles, interrupted every few yards by mosaics made of tiles so small that it would have been possible for Lord Vauld to comfortably rest such a tile on the tip of one of his blunted claws.
For a second time, Lord Vauld’s breath escaped him as he stumbled into the ballroom of the villa. A dome of glass soared high above him on a lattice of gold and polished steel. The rounded walls of the room were part glass, part mural, part mosaic, with exquisitely manicured gardens visible through the tall windows, all bathed in the bloody shades of the sunset. The murals catching the last light of day exploded as their colors popped for one last moment in the weakening light of day depicted the histories of the Pretannai Empire, focusing particularly on the contributions of the Estra family.
Rich, dark, perfectly fitted and polished wood was now under Lord Vauld’s boots; the perfect surface for dancing. Many patrons were already, indeed, dancing to the music flowing over the thronging crowd by a group of musicians on a raised platform to Lord Vauld’s left. These musicians, and so many of the crowd, were Cassain. Their numbers made sense as Lord Vauld skirted the room, eyes darting about in an attempt to spot anyone he might know. This gala was, after all, being put on by the Flayed Society. While certainly no political or cultural powerhouse, the barely-one-year-old Flayed Society had already cemented itself in the minds of nobles and commoners alike as an exclusive league for those afflicted with the curse of being Cassain.
The entire notion had seemed laughable at first. The Holy Jahlnarth Empire made a sport of hunting Cassain, regardless of whether they were slaves or citizens and regardless of their core race. While such barbarous acts had been abandoned in Pretannai, the Cassain were still not considered to be desirable company. Who would want to spend time with someone who couldn’t blink, whose entire face was like a skull stretched with writhing muscles that one had to witness moving whenever speech was undertaken? Nobles that had laughed initially when the Flayed Society had been formed were now among those in attendance. They weren’t hard to spot. Lord Vauld had to smirk under his mask whenever he spotted someone that was clearly uncomfortable with the amount of tissue on display around them.
When the petition for the formation of the Flayed Society had first surfaced, Lord Vauld had been part of a small number of lords that had immediately seen no issue with its formation. He reasoned that there was no danger to those afflicted with a very severe curse being able to find solace among their own kind. That view, called foolish at the time by other lords, was what had netted Lord Vauld an invitation to this first gala of the Flayed Society.
Having successfully navigated around the perimeter of the ballroom, Lord Vauld allowed himself a moment of relief. Thus far, he had only had to make small talk with two nobles. All that had been said were momentary salutations, as they were also tradesmen that had clawed their way up to a more comfortable position in life. Those who worked the trades knew that words were meaningless in such settings, so they spared them. Now he found himself able to access one of the glass doors that led onto the terrace that spilled out into the gardens beyond. If, by some miracle, there were a private place to sit alone within said garden he could still see the conjunction.
“Lord Vauld, correct?”
Lord Vauld froze, his usually sleek fur bristling, his hand paralyzed mid-grip on the latch of the door. The words that he had so clearly heard had not been carried to his ears. He had heard them, as clear as the ringing of a crystal bell, directly in his own mind. Exhaling to let the pressure out of his spine, Lord Vauld turned to identify the individual that had just “knocked” on his mental doorway.
For a third time in a single evening, Lord Vauld had to remind himself to breathe. He had no name for the creature standing before him, but if someone had demanded he give her a title right then and there he would have chosen “stunning.” By the structure of the lower half of her face, her hairless tail, the glittering gold eyes framed by a bejeweled black mask, she was identifiable as a Yorn, a canid of one flavor or another judging by the tips of the sharp teeth that could not be hidden by the lack of proper lips. She was draped in profound blue silks that crossed over her shoulders, across her chest, then disappeared around her sides to presumably meet the dazzling floor-length skirt she wore. Gems had been cut to perfection and adhered to her dress in small clusters. Despite being trapped under her piercing gaze, Lord Vauld could not help but notice a familiarity to the patterns of the jewels that adorned the dress.
“Constellations of the west skyline…midsummer positions,” he muttered as though this mysterious lady were not standing before him with her eyes fixed keenly on him.
“Indeed,” a very real voice said, cutting through the low rumble of chatter and music around them.
Lord Vauld blinked, eyes drawing rapidly up from the skirt, across the exposed muscle and sinew of her torso, the faintly undulating structures of arteries in her neck, and to the sharp spheres of gold that were all of her eyes that could be seen from beneath the mask. Cassain, as far as Lord Vauld understood, would do what this one had just done to get people’s attention because of their difficulty with regular speech. Missing skin came at the price of missing certain other fats, cartilage, and minor muscle groups, such as those around the mouth. Forming specific sounds was difficult, and in some cases impossible, for even the most well educated Cassain.
“Apologies for gawking, my Lady,” Lord Vauld said very quickly, bowing to her just as the music swelled and then stopped. “I am Lord Vauld of House Vauld.”
“And I am Lady Milla Estra of House Estra,” she replied directly into his mind once more with a delicate courtesy, her dress glittering in the ballroom lights as she dipped and then rose once more. “Welcome to the Clear Gala.”
Lord Vauld felt his face wrinkle just a little as he straightened from his bow amid the clapping of the crowd. Lord and Lady Estra had three daughters and he was having trouble remembering where Lady Milla fell in that order.
“I’m the oldest,” she said to his mind, her amusement coming across to him as a light, almost tangy flavor on his tongue. “Tell me, do you prefer your title as a surgeon or as a Lord?”
“I prefer that those I converse with not dig around in my head when they do so,” Lord Vauld replied curtly, though he couldn’t contain his amused smirk. “Among the right company, I am content with my given name, no titles required.”
Lady Milla Estra’s eyes remained unphased as she giggled.
“Sorry, Lord,” she said out loud, her voice breathy and weak, her mouth unable to make the shapes needed for certain vocalizations. “Can I talk to yer head should I s-ear no digging?”
“Of course,” he replied with the tiniest of bows. “You can think of me as just Valud, Lady Estra.”
“And you may think of me as just Milla,” she thought back to him, the flesh of her face writhing into what Lord Vauld assumed was a smile. “If I may, Vauld, permit me one last observation? You recognize the stars on my dress, so I assume that you are a student of astronomy. There is a conjunction tonight in which Malstrus and Arcuria will pass over one another, creating a star the likes of which none have witnessed in a century. There is spot, in the garden, where we might observe this celestial event, if you would like to accompany me?”
Instantly Lord Vauld could see the place that Milla was referring to. The image was a collage of memories, all coming from different angles, all bathed in different light, each image slightly fractured, slightly flawless. There was a fountain carved from blue crystal, a path of white gravel flanked by complexly shaped shrubbery, a sharp memory of the bench on which Milla would sit and read volumes about botany and astronomy.
“That is a unique way of communication, my Lady,” Lord Vauld chuckled, deftly opening the door behind him and bowing to allow Lady Milla to pass. “This place you propose? I believe it would be perfect.”
Instead of a traditional answer, Lord Vauld had to catch his breath as he felt Milla’s joy in his chest, her nervous thoughts flitting through his own mind as he staggered a little. A solid mass settled into his stomach as he felt her confirmation that she was pleased with his acceptance of her suggestion. Giddy, exuberant anticipations blasted across him before all of it was swept away, presumably by Milla once more shielding her mind from their contact. Milla continued as if nothing had happened while Vauld struggled to stumble out the door and close it gently behind himself. He had communicated with several Cassain in their strange mental way, as he had found it aided greatly in understanding their symptoms during diagnosis. But he had never experienced such a radical mode of conveyance as this brief conversation with Milla. Without a single word, she had bestowed everything she could ever hope to say and he had understood it perfectly.
Flowers were out of fashion at this time of year. The snapping cold of fall had yet to fully seize the land, but the fat fruits dangling from the elegantly shaped trees of the garden were a sure sign that the season was winding to its inevitable close. A proper transition to the lush evergreen shrubberies of winter would not be made for some time, so for now it was left to the pendulous fruits of the gardens to provide the needed splashes of garish color among the foliage as Vauld walked side-by-side with Milla towards the west end of the garden.
The rowdy game of Cork was indeed being played on the expansive lawn on the opposite side of the gardens. Vauld snorted, casually wondering if he would be seeing any of the young nobles in his clinic tomorrow morning. From horseback, one was to strike a wooden ball with a long staff that sported a flat bill at a right angle to the shaft, and drive the ball between one of four small sets of posts at either end of the lawn. Originally, Cork had been a training tool for cavalry armed with sabers and lances meant for slicing footmen. Now it was an acceptably dangerous game played by nobles who felt the need to prove that they were braver than the soldiers that marched against the Holy Jahlnarth Empire or who now guarded the borders with the Dynasty in the Haiulaer Vale.
Under her mask, Vauld thought he caught Milla watching the Cork game the same way one might observe a display of vulgar artwork.
“You don’t spend any time betting on Cork games, I take it?” he asked shrewdly.
For a moment, a wave of icy fury pressed down his back like the hands of a deadly lover, promising exquisite pain that would only end when they chose to end your life. Clicking her teeth, Milla reigned in the emotion she had projected, wrapping it in words that were much less impactful.
“There are two young lords out there now, vying for my hand,” she thought disdainfully, her disgust registering in Vauld’s stomach as nausea. “No one special, mind you, except perhaps in their own eyes.”
Two faces flashed behind Vauld’s eyes like momentary paintings that were then eaten up by fire.
“Young Lords Barcus and Wahll,” he scoffed, nodding in understanding, allowing his own distaste for those families to permeate his thoughts, pushing those feelings outward just a little, to the edges of his mind where Milla would be able to see them without digging. “If I recall, it was the senior Lord Barcus and Lord Wahll that most strongly opposed the formation of the Flayed Society. Why are they so eager to have their sons marry the daughter of its founder then?”
“Lord Estra has managed to move mountains,” Milla replied, a slight tremor in her thoughts belying the fact that she was unsure of how to refer to her own father when talking to another lord as she was now…a fact that struck Vauld as mildly charming. “In doing so, our family has prospered. The interest in me isn’t about the Flayed Society, or about myself. Lords Barcus and Wahll are only interested in the fact that Lord Estra has three daughters and no sons.”
Common law began to trickle into Vauld’s head, leaking in through the strains in Milla’s mind as she held back the full scope of her loathing for the two young Lords busily playing Cork across the garden. Every noble, and even the general populace, understood that only male heirs could inherit. This left the daughters of nobles vulnerable to predatory marriages designed solely to ensure that should there be an “accident” that triggered inheritance, the ones who married those daughters would be set to receive the benefits.
This practice was a holdover from the Holy Jahlnarth Empire. In Pretannai, King Silverhorn and his council, referred to as the Grove, had made it abundantly clear that such things were the “old ways” and were to be done away with. Pretannai was a vibrant new empire after all. It would be unsightly for underhanded tactics such as so-called “murder marriages” to continue. Such lofty notions, of course, fell on deaf ears among some of the nobility, but there was enough love for the King in many corners of the empire that commoners and nobles alike would gleefully dispatch those who were caught concocting such schemes.
Vauld realized that Milla had stopped. He turned back, having made it a few paces past her, and found her staring. With the mask, and the lack of typical fur befitting a canid Yorn, it was hard to tell what emotion was prompting her gawking, and then he felt it.
Even as Milla’s face contorted, settling in an expression Vauld would one day learn indicated her fear, the longing struck Vauld like a stray bullet. He had been unaware that his musings on the law had carried his own emotions and thoughts with them, but he could see them now, reflected in the echoes of admiration laced into Milla’s burst of surprise. Though, in her surprise, other thoughts had escaped their cerebral prisons, racing across the air between them to hang on Vaulds rounded ears, to pull at his throat, and drag over his eyes.
Milla’s thoughts betrayed that she had knownVauld would be attending the Clear Gala. She had seen him before, on those rare occasions when her father would let her accompany him to the palace for meetings of the Grove, the military, or other lords of the empire. Even in those moments, now portrayed as palm-sized vignettes before Vauld’s eyes, Milla’s eyes had lingered on the “mysterious and handsome” Lord Vauld, drinking him in, hungering to hear the music of his mind within her own. She had strained against those sinful notions even as she was being informed that Lord Vauld would be attending the Clear Gala. She had constrained her own pride and managed to wring some civility out of herself just long enough to greet her two prospective suitors, all the while scanning the masses as lightly as possible with the fringes of her mind, eager to brush against what she felt sure would be the beautiful mind tied to the equally handsome surgeon-turned-Minister of Health.
In the maelstrom of thoughts and desires and spite and startlingly loud drunken thoughts, she had caught a whisper of discomfort; the kind only possible in the mind of one who was not raised in the finery of a villa. Milla knew who she had found, for she could see in the unshielded mind the litanies of medical facts and figures, the calm, almost practical emotions that could empathize with the most distraught of wounded children while maintaining a steady hand and soothing voice. Quivers of anticipation had nearly caused her to lose control of her thoughts, which would have blasted anyone near her as she surged through the crowd, eager to reach her target, to finally, after all the dreaming, meet Killian Vauld, who she was sure was as kind as he was fiercely gorgeous.
Light spilled across them from the villa above. Music touched their ears amid the ruckus of the Cork game. Velvet darkness closed in around them as the sun set and the stars peppered the heavens like diamonds tumbling across a jeweler’s workbench. High above, in the 5th quadrant of the new night, two stars collided without ever touching, for they were worlds apart. As their combined light reached the gardens of the Estra Villa from a million years away, it fell on the awestruck face of Lord Vauld and the slightly crimson face of Lady Estra, her blush causing a flush of blood across the surface of her flesh, trapped by the energy that coated her body in order to protect it from the world around her.
Vauld stepped forward, slowly, trembling slightly under the cacophony of fears and sudden doubts that were bombarding him as Milla’s mental fortress crumbled. Their connection broadened as both of them cast off the last of the thin barriers between their minds, with Vauld’s thoughts beginning to backflow toward Milla, causing her to take a hesitant step forward as she saw herself from his eyes. Where so many saw a demon, a monster, or simply something unpleasant to look at, he saw elegance. He knew names for parts of her that she didn’t know had names. Even though they had met a mere handful of minutes prior, it was as though he already knew every fiber of her being, and in each muscle and tendon, each edge of bone that shone dully and every ligament that shimmered in the borrowed light of the villa, he saw beauty.
They stood, toe-to-toe, each lost in the others thoughts. Neither of them spoke, because there was nothing their mouths could say that would not pale in comparison to what was now passing between their minds. He was watching, feeling, sharing the days and weeks and years that made up her life as she witnessed, in detail, his youth, his schooling, his labors as a young surgeon on the fields behind the armies that fought against the Holy Jahlnarth Empire, and she felt his own fears as he was appointed to be the King’s advisor on the health of the rapidly growing empire.
Hand shaking ever so slightly, Vauld tugged his glove off. With continued trepidation, he reached up, his curiosity roaring above all else, a lifetime of knowledge paling in comparison to the need to know what it would feel like if he were to touch Milla’s face. Before his hand ever made contact with the strange barrier that shielded her body from the outside world—a barrier made from the same strength of mind that fueled the inferno of apprehension and elation now bursting on all sides—he could feel the power in it. In a flash, he saw the deepest parts of Milla’s mind, the ones that kept her heart beating at its now manic pace, her breasts heaving as she gasped for air in the face of this unprecedented experience, her “skin” thrumming with enough energy to vaporize anything that it did not wish to touch it.
But she wished him to touch her.
There was no soft fur to greet Vauld’s rough pads as he touched Milla. By now he accepted that she would have seen as much as he had, that she would know he had touched, had loved, had been loved, but that of late he had found no pleasure in such things. A pain in his chest, the kind no doctor could treat, had been driving him away from dalliances, compelling him to search for something with substance, for someone who craved him as much as he may crave them, an individual who was more than a pretty thing to be admired. Strength was being sought after. A desire for a mind to match his own wobbled atop the pile of regrets that emanated from the depths of his chest as he touched a surface the likes of which he had no comparison for.
Lightning rushed into his fingers, deepening the connection between their minds, wrenching a gasp form both parties as they stood, stripped to their very souls with not a single secret left cloaked and no desires left unexpressed. Like the celestial display above, their spirits overlapped and, for an instant that lasted no longer than a breath and a half, it was as if they were one soul.
Stumbling, Vauld groped for some support around him and found a bench, which he promptly collapsed onto. Milla stood before him, panting, eyes wide, knees shaking as she clutched her chest. Neither of them was able to speak as the blinding connection they had just shared began to fade. Memory was not lost to either of them as they individually clung to the things that had shone most brightly in what they had seen of the other. When the vibrating dust of their souls finally settled back into its typical patterns, each of them was left grappling with the magnitude of what had just passed between them.
It was Vauld that managed to find his voice first.
“I…was unaware Cassain could do that,” he noted, a feeble chuckle faltering in his throat as he slumped on the bench.
“It is…very rare,” Milla confessed as she sat heavily next to him, her thoughts and feelings now so closely monitored that there was no overflow as she spoke to his mind. “Perhaps this is too bold to mention, but that kind of connection is usually only found with a lifelong partner. I…have never personally heard of a non-Cassain connecting to one of us so easily and so…powerfully.”
Shame began to exude from Milla. Despite the moment of composure, the hedges of her emotions had been thoroughly burned, and now it was difficult to keep her inner thoughts out of the scope of Vauld’s mind. The connection she spoke of, the one they had just shared, the touch he had so carefully placed on her cheek, all of it was mired in thoughts of the taboo and of the indignation of those who would not take kindly to the idea of Milla selecting someone other than her proposed suitors to be the one who had access to the darkest vaults of her heart and mind.
“You knew me long before I arrived here,” Vauld said evenly, brow flickering with a frown as he realized she had known his given name before she had ever stumbled upon it in his mind. “You even know my name. How long have you been watching me?”
“For some time now,” Milla replied as her shame redoubled, memories of stolen glances and longing stares in the palace of King Silverhorn rolling between them. “You were easy to admire from afar, to pine for, I suppose. But never, never did I think that I would have the opportunity to meet you, to speak to you, to see if the ideas of who you were that I had built up in my mind were anywhere close to who you really are.” She gave him what he assumed by her sudden mischievous surge of emotion a roguish grin. “I’ll admit, I didn’t expect you to be so versed in love making, but you are what I hoped you would be in all other ways. Though…I would understand if I am not what you are looking for. I saw it, the hole in your heart, the one you’ve been trying to fill. I know that I am not as strong as some of the other females you have your eye on these days, but I would hope that….”
Her thoughts trailed off as Vauld made no effort to hide his own.
In abrupt fashion, Milla realized that their connection had not been one sided, that he had seen her and how she struggled to be recognized by a society that valued her in slightly lesser fashion that it would have if she were a son. He had watched through her eyes as she had learned the sciences of Pretannai and the histories of the world beyond. She was sharp, witty, a more competent strategist than half the members of the Grove, and possessed a curiosity Vauld found endearing. It alarmed him a little that she had snooped around to find his name, and some sordid details of his past, but even in those memories he had noted a care that she had in not treading too far. She was not looking for damning information. Rather, she was trying to learn who he was, to understand who Killian was, who Dr. Vauld was, how they were all different from Lord Vauld, the Minister of Health, and how all three came together to from one complete individual.
Knowing that he was about to feel a very real shock, Vauld tilted himself toward her, slowly, as not to startle her as he tried to let his mind be as open about his intentions as he dared. Milla’s response was to tip her head towards his, her thoughts askew, heart beating more wildly than before, her invisible skin almost crackling as his lips touched her nonexistent ones.
In the grand scheme of things, this little kiss was lost in the evening. The game of Cork continued on, two of its players unaware that the next day they were going to be verbally—and literally in one case—beaten for playing Cork rather than wooing an available young lady. Nobles and courtiers and members of the Grove and ranking members of society and the armies danced to the lush music that filled the ballroom of Estra Villa. Malstrus and Arcuira would continue their divine entanglement, but this was only a distant reflection of the entanglement below that they now blessed with their mingled light.
Bathed in starlight, lost in each other’s thoughts, Lady Milla Estra and Lord Killian Vauld embarked on an affair that would lead to open courtship, then a wedding that left King Silverhorn in tears and, eventually, a life that both of them would have willingly lived a thousand times over.
