Chapter Text
Angwyn and Arianwen start a new life. Adaine meets a boy.
or. Even the strongest of us still yearn for home.
~~~
Adaine was five years old and about to leave the only home she’d ever known. She still didn’t know why, only that Mother and Father had been whispering to each other as they packed trunks of clothes, spellbooks, and furniture into an entourage of horse drawn carriages. She caught a word every once in a while, ones too big for her to understand yet––though her tutor in Fallinel always said that she was very clever and so she bet she’d get it soon––words like diplomat and promotion and Solace. She pestered Aelwyn about it, sometimes, when Aelwyn decided that she liked her again and was pleasant enough to answer questions, but even she was lost on where they were going and why.
They took everything important, like Mother’s papers and the books from Father’s study and Aelwyn and Adaine’s school notes. They left the servants, Adaine’s tutor, the first blossom from the garden, Aelwyn’s old spellcasting components, and Adaine’s only toy doll. Her mother, upon watching Adaine’s chin wobble at the realization that it could not come with them, had knelt in front of her and tapped her cheeks–hard enough to sting a little but not enough to truly hurt.
“Adaine,” she’d said, voice softer than Adaine was used to, “You’re going to need to be a big girl from now on, and big girls are too old for toys.”
Adaine had sucked in a quivering breath, set the doll back on her bed, and that was that.
Soon, Aelwyn was shoving her elbow into Adaine’s stomach on the bench of the carriage, climbing over her to peer out at the expansive ancient woods of Fallinel. Adaine managed to stick her face underneath Aelwyn’s armpit, strands of her blond hair muddying her vision, and watched as the old-growth oaks turned to valleys and the air took on a distinctive fishy smell. She watched elven boys push wagons stuffed to the brim with fine silks as stalls of clothing and food began peppering the pathway.
Adaine’s mouth watered at the sight of flaky pastries dusted with sugar and honey. She was only allowed sugar on her birthday, in the form of a single fluffy dough ball drizzled with honey. It had melted like fresh cream in her mouth and she’d spent the entire night licking the trace remnants of sticky sweetness off her fingers. Every other day of the year, sugar was not allowed. Her mother always said she had enough energy as it was, there had been no need to add to it.
Eventually, Aelwyn was gripping their mother’s hand tightly, with Adaine’s fist twisted firmly in the cloth of Aelwyn’s sleeve, as they boarded the ship. Adaine felt the wood of the plank dip lightly with their bulk as the weightlessness of being on the sea engulfed them. The change in noise was deafening. Adaine’s house was quiet. Her parents were quiet, Aelwyn was quiet, and Adaine needed to be quiet too. It was how Angwyn preferred it. Here, the sound of the waves slapping against the boat mixed with the breeze ruffling through the mainsail, swooping like gull calls beneath the steady drum beat of conversation.
Adaine let go of Aelwyn’s sleeve, and neither she nor her mother looked back as the two disappeared into the lower decks. Adaine watched her father speak with the Captain, a tall elven man in a crisp sailor’s uniform who looked as serious and boring as her father, while unseen servants carried trunk after trunk onto the deck, where a crew of oh my gods, not elves picked them up and carried them down a large set of stairs in the center of the ship.
Adaine looked around and realized that her family and the Captain might have been the only elves on the boat. Several humans ran around, each off to perform what Adaine assumed were sailor-y duties.
She spotted a gnomish woman in a different outfit, a large coat covered in buttons and buckles, pulling a large parchment sheet out of her pocket as she spoke with a half-orc man. She looked up and saw large ocean birds swooping around an Aarakocra that kept swatting at them with a bat of some kind. Adaine giggled. A shudder of excitement wiggled its way through her.
The gnomish woman with the parchment turned towards her at the noise and grinned wolfishly. Adaine saw a flash of gold poke through her lips. She squeaked, her face reddening like a tomato, and scampered down to the lower decks, ready to show Aelwyn everything she’d found.
She barreled through the interior of the ship, bumping into crewmates and Unseen Servants on her way, a half-hearted “Sorry!” her only penance, until she heard her mother lecturing about something in one of the cabins. She slowed as much as her excitement would allow and stepped inside. She locked eyes with Aelwyn, ramblings about the brief things she’d seen ready to balloon out of her lips.
“Oh, there you are,” her mother interrupted, tone clipped. “Really, Adaine you can’t just run off. There are all sorts of vagrants on these types of vessels.” Her adrenaline deflated in her chest. “And, dear, if I put in the effort to braid your hair, the least you can do is keep it together.”
Adaine tugged at a strand that had fallen out self-consciously. She didn’t correct her mother that it had been Aelwyn’s hair that she’d braided. A servant had done hers, as they always did. Aelwyn caught the mix-up and huffed under her breath. Adaine couldn’t tell if she was laughing at Mother or at her.
Mother did, however, waive Adaine forward and twist her head around to start weaving the strands together, droning about the importance of remaining presentable at all times and reputation. Her lessons had included a lot about that lately. She hadn’t learned much but she knew that their family was old. In Fallinel, old was the same thing as important. Still, she paid her mother’s words no mind, instead focusing on the feeling of her hands carding through Adaine’s hair. A rarity in Adaine’s life. Rarer now as she got older.
“You’re a big girl now, Adaine,” her mother would say, pushing Adaine’s arms away when she said good morning or scraped her knee or lost something or went to bed, “such frivolity is beneath you.”
Yes, it was important to pay attention to rare things.
When Arianwen was finished, she guided Adaine away and sat her next to Aelwyn on a cot pushed against the wall of the cabin. It was a cramped thing, with one cot just big enough for Aelwyn and Adaine to squeeze into together and another on the opposite wall for their parents to use. Arianwen had brought a satchel of their study materials, which sat next to another stack of what Adaine assumed were her and Father’s important work things. A small circular window sat at the edge of the cabin, where cerulean blue waves crested into view over a quickly pinking horizon.
“I want you girls to stay here,” Arianwen said, Adaine’s hopes of adventure dwindling like a dying ember. “There are still many things to do before we get to Solace, and I expect nothing but your utmost attention to complete them.”
More things to study, Adaine thought bleakly. At least Aelwyn, too, had the decency to look similarly displeased.
~~~
Adaine still managed to sneak to the top deck occasionally. She had been right; her and Aelwyn’s days were spent hunched over books and sheets.
In the morning, her usual lessons continued. Arianwen would dump a short book in her lap or make her complete sums or, her favorite, read about the basics of spellcraft. Adaine was not yet old enough to practice magic, that was a treat reserved for her sixth birthday, only a year away now, but her parents insisted she learn the basics of spellcraft in the meantime. She poured over diagrams of spell components, forcing herself to deconstruct how each layer of spellcraft came together. It was like a puzzle, almost, each component slotting together in the exact right place. Adaine liked puzzles.
In the afternoon, she learned about Solace. Her mother explained to her and Aelwyn the basics of Arcanotech, letting them marvel at drawings of machinery unlike anything they’d ever seen before.
Then, she started teaching them Solesian. Like maths and spellcraft and everything else in life, Aelwyn took to it like a fish in water. Her mouth formed perfect rounded Solesian syllables. She recited sentences back to their mother, performed perfect conjugations, wrote out the alphabet in crisp, clean, disjointed letters.
Adaine, like maths and spellcraft and everything else in life, stumbled through every step. No matter how many times she was asked to repeat it, she never got the hang of Solesian’s clunky syllables. The clashing, sharpened sounds clattered in her ears, never finding purchase in meaning. By the end of the afternoon, Adaine felt as exasperated and annoyed as her mother looked.
The rest of the afternoon, until Angwyn retrieved dinner from the kitchen, was dedicated to Aelwyn’s spellcraft lessons, under Arianwen’s careful eye, and her father would spend that time quietly reading in his cot.
Adaine disappeared to them then and she was able to make her escape. She much preferred the cool sea breeze and salt spray of the ship’s deck. She never spoke to anyone, just deposited herself in a nook between two crates and watched the bustle of keeping a ship afloat. Sometimes, she’d wander to the deck’s edge, and stare out at the sparkling blue sea, the sun creating gemstones in the lap of waves. Most of the time, though, she spied on the gnomish woman in the cabin at the front of the ship.
The woman spent a lot of time looking at maps, and talking with the half-orc man, and finding Adaine spying on them, each time poking her head around to find Adaine with owlishly wide eyes staring at them. Each time, similar to the first, she’d startled and then run downstairs, just barely sneaking back into the cabin before her Father looked up from his book to notice her again.
Today, however, the half-orc was taking the lead. The two had a sprawl of jewels and other trinkets littered across the table in the middle of the cabin. The gnomish woman leaned against the wall, her arms crossed, as the half-orc closed his eyes and began chanting. Adaine recognized the watery swells of Sylvan arcane incantations immediately. She watched the ritual intensely, she’d never seen anything like it before, Aelwyn still on cantrips and her mother and father never bothering to cast ritual spells around her. At the end of it, the table glowed a soft deep-blue and the contents on top of it vanished. When the half-orc opened his eyes, he nodded to the gnomish woman and Adaine stumbled in. She hadn’t noticed she’d been leaning forward, drawn like a moth to a flame until she tipped over, regaining her balance with the awestruck look on her face never leaving.
The two sailors stared at her, the gnomish woman chuckling lightly. Instead of running away, this time, Adaine straightened, clasping her hands behind her back and bowing deeply, as her mother had taught her to do with all Elven nobility.
“Hello,” she said in accented Solesian. “My name is Adaine Abernant.” She peaked her head up and flushed proudly, the only sentence she knew coming out exactly as her books intended.
The gnomish woman nodded seriously at her, a string of meaningless Solesian flying at her. Adaine stared at them, befuddled, before the woman seemed to realize she couldn’t understand them.
“Hello, Adaine,” she said. The swooping, feather-light touch of Fallinese Elvish taking on an accented gnomish coo. “I see you’ve finally decided to grace us with your presence. I hope your previous excursions have been well enjoyed.”
Adaine ignored the playful jab. She wandered to the table, her head barely poking above it. “What kind of spell was that?” She asked, hands gripping the edge of the surface.
The half-orc man began gathering all that was left on the table, an array of purple-painted playing cards. “A divination spell,” he said. “Are you interested in spellcraft, young lass?”
Adaine nodded vigorously. “I’m going to be a wizard! Mother is going to start teaching me in just a few months. What’s divination?”
The gnomish woman whistled. “That’s early. How old are you, lass? Seven? Must be a right kind of genius to become a wizard that young.”
Suddenly bashful, Adaine held up five fingers. “ Five?” The half-orc exclaimed. “Why, you must be a super genius!”
Adaine giggled. The gnomish woman kneeled in front of her. “Divination wizards look into the future,” she whispered, like they were sharing some great secret. “A divination wizard can do anything, if they find the right timeline for it. See Tyrion here was checking the weather for us. There are clouds on the horizon, and he makes sure we’re ready to weather the storm.”
Adaine drank every word. Seeing the future sounded much more fun than whatever Mother and Father did. If she could see the future then she could figure out how to do things before Aelwyn could and get to know everything her mother and father refused to tell her because she wasn’t old enough yet.
“Are you a divination wizard?” She asked the woman. The woman tossed her head back and guffawed.
“No, no, deary, never had half a mind for that complicated spellcraft. I’m just a pirate,” she said. “Now my friend here. He’s a divination wizard and a pirate.”
Adaine’s mouth dropped into a small “o” shape. The half-orc grinned at her, all sharp teeth and facial piercings. Adaine was about to explode with questions of how and why and when and how again when her Father burst in, ire seared into the pinch of his brow.
“Adaine,” he said, tone forever placid and neutral, though Adaine was well attuned to the wrath that laid just beneath the surface. “There you are. You know your mother doesn’t want you up here.”
He snatched her wrist, hand twisting her skin to an uncomfortable pinch. “Ah, so the young lass is yours, Ambassador,” the half-orc said jovially.
“Yes,” Angwyn clipped. “I hope she didn’t bother you from your work too much. The child has no sense of proper decorum.”
He dragged Adaine out of the room before she even had a chance to thank them. He pushed her back into the cabin and for the next hour she had her parents’ full, undivided attention.
That night, after being thoroughly scolded, she laid down in her cot, staring at the wall. Normally, she would spend this time whispering about her adventures in Aelwyn’s ear, the nightly ritual the only hint that being cooped up in this room was getting to her. But Aelwyn never liked to talk to her when she was in trouble, so Adaine stewed in silence, the storm the gnomish woman warned of crashing outside. Still, she was not afraid. Her last thought before she drifted off to trance was that she was going to be the best divination wizard ever, so she’d never get in trouble again. And a pirate too, just because she could.
~~~
Adaine was grounded. She spent the rest of the trip under the watchful eyes of her parents, spent Aelwyn’s spellcrafting lessons sitting in a corner, staring at the wall, not allowed to speak or move. She didn’t see the gnomish woman or the half-orc man again, not even when they finally deboarded in Solace.
Adaine could feel the change immediately, the heavy churning of gears that she had begun to associate with Solesian. The many different faces that littered the port. Fallinel had still been primarily elvish, even at the hub of travel. In Solace, Adaine couldn’t pick out a predominant face.
The Abernants loaded into a machine that she vaguely recognized as a car from her mother’s lessons, and began the long journey to Elmville. Adaine, overwhelmed with the new sights, smells, discoveries, and still nursing her wounds, hunkered in her seat, not emerging until they were inside the new Abernant manor. The manor was so much different than their family home. In Fallinel, the only enclosed rooms were bedrooms and kitchens, everywhere else open to the sprawling woods and gardens, protected from the elements by long-standing wards. Here, outside and inside were two distinct places. It was strange.
Adaine remained grounded even after they finished unpacking and Adaine settled into her new room. Her mother had her on lockdown, and she spent hours everyday studying the Solesian that she just couldn’t seem to grasp. Her parents had taken to speaking only in Solesian in the house, leaving her floundering to understand what they said, words running into each other, while they spoke to Aelwyn in slow, patient syllables. Aelwyn tried to translate for her, once, when Adaine was on the verge of tears, trying to figure out something her mother had said, her mother’s expression one that made Adaine feel wholly and entirely stupid. But Arianwen had shot her sister one raised eyebrow and Aelwyn’s mouth had snapped shut.
Weeks passed with Adaine locked in the house, following her family like a ghost. Her lessons and the constant Solesian around her did begin to work eventually, and, ironically, it was only as she began to understand the rapid Solesian in her house that her mother, at the breakfast table, finally said in crisp, easy Elvish, “Aelwyn, Adaine, after lessons today we have been invited out to tea.”
Aelwyn merely nodded and returned to her breakfast as balled melons and poached eggs, but Adaine thrummed in her seat. Going for tea, leaving the house, no afternoon lessons. It was already shaping up to be a good day.
“The Lomenelda family is as old as ours, and even if Hallariel did marry a human, it’s important to still treat their name with the respect it deserves,” her mother said, words halting over human like it was something shameful.
Lessons passed in a blur, none of their new Solesian tutor’s lectures sticking in Adaine’s eager brain––now that they were settled in, Arianwen would not endure the shame of teaching her own child––with the exception of the divination chapter of “ A Beginner’s Guide to Wizardry” that her mother had been having her work through, with the promise that once she was finished with it, she could start finally learning cantrips.
Finally, Arianwen loaded them into the car, and they made the quiet drive to the Lomenelda manor. As they crested a hill, and Arianwen pulled into the driveway of a sprawling pirate ship , just like the ship they had sailed to Solace on, like what she imagined the wizard on that ship to be on right now, Adaine decided that these were her favorite people in Elmville.
Adaine trailed behind Aelwyn, who trailed behind their mother as a door fashioned in the front of the docked pirate ship opened and a tall elven woman with long silver hair and a purple silk robe appeared.
“Ah, Arianwen, come in, come in,” she said, voice languid and dripping with honey. “When I heard that Angwyn had been chosen as the new ambassador I almost didn’t believe it. I mean, what has it been, twenty-five years?”
The three were ushered inside as Arianwen responded, “Almost fifty. That means you have yet to meet my daughters, haven’t you?”
They were led into a tea room tucked into a remodeled cabin. Arianwen shed her coat as Aelwyn tugged Adaine forward.
“Aelwyn Abernant. A pleasure to meet you, Ms. Lomenelda,” Aelwyn said in a graceful bow.
“Adaine Abernant. How do you do?” Adaine echoed after.
Hallariel clapped her hands together and gasped excitedly. “Oh you precious dolls! Arianwen, they are the picture of perfection.” Adaine flushed deeply. “But I must correct you, I have been married for a time now. Hallariel Seacaster.” Mother’s smile thinned for just a moment and Adaine watched, gloriously, as Aelwyn apologized.
The adults fell into easy conversation, catching up on each other's lives and affairs, while Adaine snacked on small cucumber sandwiches brought to them by a smiling halfling maid who pinched Adaine’s cheek as she passed. Occasionally, Hallariel would remember them and coo over their hair or skin or outfits and, strangely enough, she seemed much more enamored by Adaine than Aelwyn.
Eventually, Adaine heard a clattering from outside, like a china cabinet falling down stairs, and Hallariel’s eyes lit up.
“Oh my goodness, I had forgotten,” she said. “My darling Fabian, he is just Adaine’s age. Oh, they would make great playmates, you must meet him.”
Arianwen raised a brow and hummed. “Adaine could use someone to study with.” Adaine flushed, grip tightening around the fine ceramic plate in her hands. She didn’t need help, she could figure it out, whatever it was, on her own. Hallariel beamed and bent down to grab Adaine’s hand. Hallariel dragged her away, her mother and sister trailing lightly behind them. Aelwyn, in a charitable mood, looked sorry for her.
The two rounded a corner into the ship’s main hull, which had been fashioned into a kitchen and expansive dining room. There, a young half-elven boy, with white hair like Hallariel’s, was sword fighting a real life pirate. The pirate was dressed just like the ones she had met on the boat to Solace, all large coats and gold seams. The boy was dressed in clothes that Adaine assumed were usual Solesian garb, loose flowing pants and a plain sleeveless shirt. Adaine watched with wide eyes as the pirate backed the boy up into the dining room table, leveling a wooden sword at his chest.
Hallariel took this moment to interrupt, clapping wildly and descending into quick Solesian. Adaine tried to keep up, picking up on the occasional word, friend, Fallinel, Adaine. Adaine bowed deeply when she heard her name, determined not to show her miserable comprehension.
“Why, hello there, lass,” the pirate said, words jumping on the air like a ship at sea, “The name’s Bill Seacaster, greatest pirate who ever lived or ever will live.”
Adaine mulled the sentence in her head, carefully translating each piece. She fiddled with her fingers, shaping each word on her tongue as she formed a response.
“I’m going to be the best wizard pirate too,” Adaine stated as simple as fact, because it was. She watched the boy’s face contort, each feature twisting into variations of disgust, befuddlement, and astonishment.
Bill Seacaster guffawed, stomach heaving with effort and louder than any noise that had ever graced her home.
“Well you’ll just have to battle my darling boy to the death for the title,” he said. The boy cooled his features to smug acceptance, as if his father’s words were, too, as true as fact.
Adaine pieced together a sentence that vaguely meant: Fight, boy, die, book? She assumed it was something rude anyway, her assessment of these new Solesian pirates already dwindling. Adaine, under the watchful eye of her mother, mouth pinched into a frown already, debated if punching him was an acceptable alternative to spellcraft.