#also just obviously galfrey and daeran should have had a convo after iz lol

[cassynite]

WIP Wednesday

Tagged by @dujour13!! Thanks so much--I have been focusing more on drawing than writing lately but unlike my writing drawings don't look good till they're done so here's a bit from chapter 3 of Daeran fic (which at this rate is going to get finished before chapter 2 lol).

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It's the movement from the guards stiffening to attention that alerts Daeran to the figure walking his way. She is still in the armor that she wore at Iz, when she threw herself into the maw of Deskari's trap and emerged alive. Then, she'd looked regal and triumphant and only half as contrite to Sparrow as she should have been. She'd graced Daeran with a nod as cold and remote as he'd ever seen from her, as if he'd just successfully pulled off yet another grand statement snubbing the Mendevian old guard, and not just miraculously come back from the dead and the horrors of the Abyss.

She does not look cold or regal now. Her armor is stained from the battle in Iz, and her pinned hair and her face is spattered with crusted blood. She looks tired, like the sun orchard elixir is only wallpaper over her century and more of living. The expression she wears when staring at him, sitting right outside the war room waiting for Sparrow, is complicated.

"Hello," the queen of Mendev says. Her voice is low, and slightly hoarse. "Do you mind if I sit next to you?"

She doesn't wait for a response, for Daeran's refusal--and it would have been a refusal, as if he wants to sit next to his honored cousin--but when she does settle next to him, he doesn't rise. He's waiting for Sparrow after all. If the lauded queen wishes to endure his presence until the Knight Commander arrives, he is not going to flee from her presence.

It is several minutes of silence thick enough to cut a dagger through before Galfrey sighs. "I'm sorry."

It takes a second for the words to register as real--but Daeran would never even dare to imagine Galfrey apologizing. It's enough for his self-control to break and to stop pretending she isn't there; when he looks over, Galfrey is already turned slightly toward him, her lips tight.

He finally recognizes the expression on her face: guilt. He doesn't even think he's seen her show something as mortal as guilt before.

"For what, exactly?" His voice is hard. "Sending us to the abyss to what was, in retrospect, almost certainly our deaths? Or something else? I never did forgive you for how you made me cut short my little sorcerer's contest in '14."

Galfrey ignores the barb. "Stopping the Nahyndrian crystals by any means was necessary for the war efforts as a whole. If anyone could have survived it, it was the Commander--and she did. But. I should not have let you go with her. I should not have forced you to stay in the Crusade in the first place. It was...rash. And it ultimately put you in more danger than you should have ever been placed in."

Half a dozen responses form in Daeran's mind--how if he'd really wanted to leave the Crusade, he would have found a way. How Galfrey's petty little revenge had become the best thing that had ever happened to him. How he didn't need her, or anyone, to baby him, and that he was capable of making his own decisions--and had made them already, when it came to so many things about the Crusade and its Knight Commander.

He gives a graceful half-shrug, turning his attention away from Galfrey in a cutting end to the conversation. "I rather imagined you'd be glad to see the back of me. I can hardly tarnish my family's good name and my mother's legacy if I was already where everyone assumed I belonged anyway."

To his surprise, Galfrey lets out a small chuckle. "You're hardly beyond recall. Your mother was a hellion in her younger years as well, you know," she comments.

It's rare for Daeran to be rendered speechless, but he opens his mouth and for several seconds, no words come out. Not once in his life has his mother's memory ever been anything than that of a paragon of virtue. Finally, he says, "Excuse me?"

"Oh yes." Galfrey straightens, some life returning to her expression as she recalls the distant past. "She even ran away from home, tried to renounce her title. Your grandparents were far more traditional in their upbringing, and Silaena apparently chafed under the expectations of her role. She went off when she was--maybe a few years younger than you at the time, really. Joined a traveling theater troupe."