Chapter Text
At the dawn of the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, all those with any magic— Gift, immortal, and wild— woke suddenly, laboring to hear something that was not a sound.
Veralidaine Sarrasri, the most powerful wild magic user in living memory, sat up in her bed-nest of cats, dragon, marmoset martens and dogs, eyes wide in the dawn gloom. She could sense what every other magic user in the palace was doing– the king was awake in his study, Onua Chamtong, startled, lept out of her dawn bath. And Numair Salmalín, her one-time teacher, frequent travel companion, and guide in magical work, sat up in his bed, pouring sweat.
She could feel that Numair had only been asleep for an hour or two; though whether his late night was due to overindulgence in Midwinter festivities, or some academic pursuit overriding his desire for sleep, she wasn’t sure.
The young dragon Skysong, nestled near Daine’s hip, trilled without stopping, her voice expanding throughout the palace, passing through walls and buildings as though they were nothing more than ghostly shadows.
“Kit, hush.” She said, though she had little interest in following up that order. “Numair, what is it?” As surely as she knew Numair was under rested, she knew he could hear her.
“It’s the barrier” he replied, in his soft baritone. “The barrier between the realms. It’s gone. Evaporated.”
Daine could feel him shift in bed, leaning to hold his face in one of his large but gentle hands, as surely as if she sat next to him. Suddenly, she became aware of something she’d never consciously known before. The awareness briefly— only very briefly— pushed aside her consideration of what the barrier collapse would mean.
She put her realization aside to be considered later, and returned to the present, ghostly and uncertain as it felt, and focused on what needed to be done. That practicality was what had gotten her — and Numair — through any number of difficult scrapes in the last three years.
“The immortals— they’ll be on us like a ton of bricks,” she said, matter-of-fact. “I’d best get up.”
And get up she did, gently dislodging her mammalian bed-mates back to their homes around the palace, and setting Kitten on the ground despite a squak of protest at the early hour. (When had she stopped her constant trilling? Daine couldn’t quite recall).
As Daine pulled on breeches and boots, a practical patched shirt, and tied her volumes of curls back in an efficient braid, the ghostly quality of the world at dawn faded back into normalcy, though everyone who’d woken at dawn was left with a bone-deep sense of foreboding, either from the experience of that sound-not-a-sound resonating in their magic, or the very practical knowledge that attacks and encounters with immortals– Stormwings, Hurroks, spiderens and more– would increase a hundredfold from the levels of the last three years.
Daine felt that foreboding as much as any mage in the palace, but as her first-hand awareness of the other mages faded from her consciousness, her mind forced her to consider the other piece of knowledge the morning had thrust upon her.
I love him. The thought made her pause while bucking her belt. I’m in love with him. She turned the thought over in her mind again and again. Part of her said she shouldn’t be surprised. Numair was her closest friend, her most trusted ally, and a constant source of warmth and knowledge and acceptance and comfort for the last three years. And he was an attractive man, in his lanky, too-tall, absent-minded way. Put together, she shouldn’t have been surprised at her unbidden impulse this morning to want to be in bed next to him, to curl around him and hold him…
Daine shook her head, trying to banish that thought. Banish any thoughts of the sort. Close as they’d been for three years– and they’d become very close– at the beginning of that time, she’d been barely thirteen. Even now, she was a month short of her sixteenth birthday, and Numair, well… he had a reputation that wasn’t entirely unearned. He wasn’t going to consider Daine– basically a child, his former student , that way. Not a slender waif of a girl when he so clearly preferred buxom, mature women.
With practicality born of long practice, Daine shoved all thoughts aside except the danger to the kingdom she loved, buckled her belt, slung a tunic and quiver over her shoulders, grabbed her bow, and went to figure out where she was needed.