Page 36 of Kiss of the Dark Elf's Blade
We are gathered around a table of various spreads and meats. Father even brought in some iypin, a favorite treat of mine. But Kaisax is still notably absent. He always talks about how busy he is.
“Mother,” I start, then wait for her to allow me to speak. “He’s always been defensive of that territory as if it’s not a huge quadrant in the city. How am I supposed to do my business effectively when he’s walling me off?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Figure it out. Just don’t take this away from your brother after everything he’s been through.”
I shake my head, looking at the filthy oven. I want to clean it for them. I want to help.
“I really don’t get it,” I reply. “You know I don’t have the power to take anything away from him. Why is he so threatened by me?”
A servant girl with Brielle’s build enters the eating room, her hair disheveled and falling in her eyes from hard work in the cellar. My mind avoids the temptation to wander, as I mull over whether or not Brielle has accepted my proposal. In the morning, I will look. But I’m still coming up with excuses not to check, even though it’s all I think about.
“I’m just going off of what he told me,” Mother says. “You know, he’s been all out of sorts lately… even more than usual. If you two would look after each other rather than bickering all the time, maybe you’d both be a little happier.”
“Yeah, well…” I reply, taking a piece of braised iypin from the center of the table and placing it on my plate. “We’re survivors.”
Father casts me an angry look.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks.
I shrug, taking a bite of the meat. They may not always be great people, but they know how to cook iypin. The meat is succulent and delectable, its juices well-preserved and bursting with flavor.
Right on cue, Kaisax bursts through the door. He can’t ever enter a room without boisterously announcing his presence. By contrast, I always learned to seem small and to keep well hidden to avoid being needed.
“I’ve arrived!” he shouts, knocking several items off of an adjacent table when he enters, and I can already tell that he’s inebriated. I give him a small scowl before returning to my meat.
“Oh,” he says, looking at me. “You’re here.”
“And as chipper as ever,” I tell him, smiling brightly. I make sure that the smile is patronizing enough that he’ll see its dishonesty while my parents will register it as genuine.
He groans.
“Is Aylmer coming?” he asks. “I find he’s much better at conversation and a little more civil.”
“You don’t have to talk about me like I’m not sitting right here,” I say.
Where they might have earlier taken a more aggressive and perhaps inappropriate approach to stop our feud, our parents have grown more mellow and are content to not intervene.
After all, the last time they tried getting involved, it nearly wiped out half of their home. Even meaningless conflicts between two drunk magic users can escalate rather quickly. I can still see the spots in the wall where the contractors patched over what was lost.
“Why don’t you sit down and enjoy the food?” Mother asks, as calmly and quietly as possible. “If you don’t want to get along, you don’t have to for our sakes. You can just pretend your brother isn’t here.”
“That sounds fine to me,” Kaisax says, shuffling his chair backward, sitting down in it, and shuffling forward aggressively. The chair scratches resonate loudly throughout the room. He catches my eye, and it looks like he wants to say something, but he suppresses it.
And the next thirty minutes pass by peacefully and uneventfully. I wish Aylmer could have been here, too. He always has such interesting stories.
We even get to a point where my brother doesn’t want to rip my throat out, and he somewhat interacts with me as our parents ask us about how jobs are going. Kaisax is notably tight-lipped about some things, especially when it comes to Lowtown, but he does go into detail about some of the finer details of his work. Apparently, he has a dfam who performs all of his clerical duties, but the last one went missing, and he’s gone through several headaches training the new one.
Mother blushes at some of the mentions of how I conduct my job, but she’s still willing to listen, and Father is very invested in it. He used to say that if he could go back and retrain, he’d love to be a mercenary working for the crown, though I’m not sure if he’s just flattering me or not.
But when I step away to help with the cleaning spell on the dishes, Kaisax reveals it was all a ruse, following me into the keeping room.
“What I did in there,” he says, opening the door with no ceremony as I check the brim for diluted powder. “You’d better appreciate it.”
Mother has put on a recording in the other room, and I can hear the harps as the door slams shut behind Kaisax on entry. Advances in magical sound keeping technologies always astound me.
“Whatever are you talking about?”
I maintain a stoic, almost friendly, demeanor with him. The less fuel that I can add to the fire, the better.