Rhy watched Salena glide away, her caramel hair falling down her back like an inverted flame, emphasizing her narrow waist and the graceful curve of her hips. His mouth had gone dry, and he didn’t have any idea what had possessed him to say any of that to her. Except that he felt like a lust-filled and awkward lad again, which had come as quite a shock. Tossing back the mjed, he sent an earnest prayer to Moranu—something he was normally careful never to do, as he didn’t care to awaken the goddess’s interest in him—to keep him from making the biggest mistake of his life.
Or at least, not one to knock all the others out of the top ten.
“Rhy,” Astar complained, “you were supposed to wait to drink until we all toasted, to seal the good luck and the goddess’s blessing.”
“A pointless superstition, Willy, my boy,” he replied easily. “Especially when, thanks to Jak’s delusions of grandeur, we have a cask big enough to fill the glasses of everyone in Ordnung for a week. Anyone else need a refill?” he asked as he went to the cask.
“I do,” Jak and Zeph chimed together, coming to join him.
Zeph kissed him on the cheek while she waited. “Well done,” she whispered. “We have your back.”
“Don’t meddle, Zephyr,” he muttered under his breath, sliding a look to Salena, who watched them with that serious, pensive look she got when she was thinking about rules instead of fun.
“What meddling?” Zeph widened her eyes in shocked innocence. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“Uh-huh.”
Jak handed Zeph her refilled glass. “It’s not delusions of grandeur when you deliver,” he pointed out.
“Seems to me like Astar and I delivered, while you acted as our valet,” Rhy taunted him.
“Please come do Astar’s ceremony,” Gendra called, “or we’ll never get out of this room.”
“It’s tradition,” Astar protested, “not my ceremony.”
The three of them returned to the group at the table, making a loose ring around it and setting their full glasses down.
Astar, happy that they were all finally going along with his plan, beamed at them. “I wanted us all to have a private ceremony before the main one at midnight. You each have two pieces of paper, one for the past and one for the future. Once you’ve all written down your own regrets and wishes, we’ll have a toast to each other, to ask Moranu to set Her hand on our friendships to endure.”
An uneasy feeling crept down Rhy’s spine, one that came of invoking the goddess. Across the table from him, Salena watched him with a speculative expression, as if she could read his apprehension. She was one of the few people who knew how heavily Moranu’s hand sat on him. When the heroic Queen Andromeda had eliminated the scourge of Deyrr from the world, his mother had done it partly by making a bargain with the goddess, pledging her unborn child to Moranu’s service in exchange for Her help. That unborn child being him. A hell of an onus to be born under. Moranu hadn’t called him to Her service yet, but it was only a matter of time.
“What, exactly, are we writing down?” Rhy asked, trying not to sound as tense as he felt.
They all looked at him. “Haven’t you ever done this ritual?” Gendra asked.
“Nope.” He shrugged in the extravagant Tala style to remind them. “This is my first Feast of Moranu outside Annfwn, and the Tala don’t do this.” He wiggled a dubious finger at the quills and paper.
“True,” Salena said drily. “We’re lucky if the Tala write anything down at all.”
He eyed her. “Not everyone worships libraries, Princess.”
She narrowed her eyes and opened her mouth, but Astar put a hand on her arm. “It’s good to remind us all,” he said, looking around the table. “For the past, we write down a regret we’d like to leave behind. For the future, we write down a promise, wish, or hope for ourselves or for someone else.”
“Isn’t the past already behind us?” Rhy asked.
Salena’s gorgeous lips quirked in an appreciative smile. “That is the definition of the past, after all.”
Gendra groaned and thunked her forehead on the table. “Why did we want them to start talking to each other again? I’m never going to make it to the dancing. Never.”
“The past,” Stella said, not raising her voice, but silencing everyone immediately with her gravity and the resonance of magic, “is only behind us if we make an effort to leave it behind.” She leveled her storm-gray gaze on Rhy, then on Salena. “Past mistakes and regrets can be like stones we tied around our necks of our own free will. They weigh us down, chains to the past that prevent us from moving into the future. If we are forever dragging those weights, they stunt our growth. This is an opportunity to break those chains and drop those stones of remorse, leaving them here to burn cleanly in the fire, so that we can move into the new year unfettered by past mistakes, free to grow into better people.”
A hush settled, and they all looked at each other. Rhy started to drink his mjed, but Gendra, beside him, put a hand on his forearm to lock it in place, giving him a pleading look. Right. No more delays.
Astar cleared his throat. “On that note, you all should have an idea of what to write down. Past first.”
They all bent over the task, quiet filling the room, the fire crackling and the wind roaring distantly among the high towers. A few of them were already scratching words down. Show-offs. Rhy stared at the blank paper, about a hundred possibilities flying through his mind of mistakes and regrets he’d love to never think about again.
“What if my paper isn’t big enough?” he said into the quiet. Five heads snapped up to level unamused glares on him, while Jak tossed him a jaunty salute.
“Pick one,” Salena suggested in a lethal tone. “If you like, I can make a list for you.”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” he replied. “The list is so long. How to choose?”
“Rhy,” Stella said, not without sympathy, “no one but you and Moranu will know what you write down. It can be anything at all.”
“Yes, well, Moranu is not that fond of me,” he retorted. “I try not to let Her into my head.”
Stella cocked her head, looking through him in that sorcerous way his mother did, and nodded to herself.
“It doesn’t even have to be real,” Gendra snapped at him, folding her paper several times into a tiny square. “Write down the color blue for all I care, just write something and burn it.”
He followed as she strode to the fireplace and pitched in her note. “But then I wouldn’t have your pretty blue eyes in my life,” he teased, stepping back in surprise when she whirled on him.
“Fine,” she hissed. “Don’t take this seriously. But do try not to ruin it for the rest of us.”
“Why are you pissed at me?” he asked, genuinely taken aback. Gendra never got mad at him—unlike everyone else—and was always staunchly on his team.
“I’m not.” She sighed, relenting and putting a hand on his arm. “You know I love you like a brother, Rhy, but it would be nice if, for once in your life, you thought about how someone else feels.” She walked away, leaving him gaping after her.
“Burrrrnnn,” Zeph whispered in his ear as she leaned past him to toss her paper in the fire.
He narrowed his eyes at her. “What did you tell Gendra?”
“Me?” Zeph patted his cheek. “Not a thing. Go write something down so Astar will let us leave the Room of Doom, all right?”
Beyond irritated, he stalked back to the table and dashed off one word—using a Tala rune just in case any of them peeked—crumpled it in his fist, and threw it in the fire. The flames caught it, burning slowly as the pungent smoke coiled up. The runes seemed to glow, taunting him.
“Put a lot of thought into that, did you?” Salena teased as she tossed her crumpled paper into the fire.
“What is this, everyone yell at Rhyian night?” he grumbled, and Salena paused, giving him a considering look. He’d forgotten about that, how she couldn’t let a question go unanswered. She took every one seriously, and he’d used to love to tease her by asking questions she couldn’t possibly know the answer to, just to wind her up.
But this time she did. She really had changed. “Just play along for a bit longer, and then you can be free,” she suggested.
“Not hardly,” he replied in a sour tone. “I’m trapped in mossbackland until dawn. On the longest night of the year.”
“I’m sure you’ll find a way to cope,” she replied, walking with him back toward the table. “You can drown your sorrows in one—or several—of the hundreds of women out there waiting to enjoy the longest night with you.”
He caught her hand again, partly to stop her harsh words—all the harsher because he knew he deserved them—and partly because he needed to touch her again. The glide of her clever fingers against his skin reminded him of so much. Why should he want to forget the past? It had been far better than his recent present. Salena raised an inquiring brow at him, and he released her hand before he made some declaration in the impulse of the moment that his future self would never be able to live up to.
“Do we get to drink now?” he asked Astar somewhat desperately, gazing at his temptingly full glass of mjed.
“Not yet.” Astar gave him a stern look. “Now we write down a wish, hope, or promise for the future, to keep or to give to someone else.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Rhy sighed. “I remember that part.” Catching the edge of Gendra’s glare, he pasted on a happy smile. “This is so fun and meaningful!”
“Oh, for Moranu’s sake,” Gendra muttered, writing rapidly.
“You could wish for me to be a better person,” he murmured to her, hoping to make her smile.
“I’m not wasting any more of my wishes on you, Rhy,” she replied crisply.
“I’m done,” Zeph declared, folding her paper and making a show of tucking it in Astar’s breast pocket, giving him a sultry look as she did it. Salena and Gendra exchanged looks, and Rhy wondered if he’d missed this development. Stella looked on calmly, her mind possibly somewhere else, as it often was.
Astar, always well-mannered, took Zeph’s hand and bent over it. “Thank you, my lady. Should I read it now?”
Gendra groaned under her breath, and Salena closed her eyes as if in pain. Zeph smiled, bringing Astar’s hand close enough to brush it with her breast. “Later,” she said as Astar jerked and turned bright red, “when we’re alone.”
“Shall we toast?” Gendra said, much too loudly, and everyone seized on the moment.
“Rhyian isn’t done with his,” Salena said, giving him a lethal smile.
“Yes, I am,” he told her, writing down another single rune, then folding the paper and putting it in his pocket. He picked up his glass and looked to Astar. “What is the toast, Your Highness, Crown Prince Astar?”
As Rhy had hoped, the words shook Astar out of his flustered embarrassment. Salena flashed him a grateful look, and Gendra squeezed his forearm. There. A hero to his favorite women in the world. Who said he was a total shit?
Astar lifted his glass, holding it up, once again secure as leader of their small cadre. “I offer this toast, in the name of Moranu, on this, Her most blessed night, to the people I love best in all the world.” His summer-blue eyes lit on each of them in turn. “We’ve grown up together, traveled apart, and come together again.” With his other hand, he turned over his piece of paper and slid it to the center of the table. “This is my hope, my wish, and my promise to all of you: that we shall be friends all our lives. May Moranu make it so.”
They all lifted their glasses, repeating “May Moranu make it so,” though the words threatened to stick in Rhy’s throat. Hopefully far too many people were appealing to Moranu tonight for Her to pick out his insincere voice. Salena’s gaze lingered on him, her thoughts dark behind them, and it occurred to him that she might not feel enthusiastic about Astar’s vow either. At least not where he was concerned.
Well, he’d done his best to set her free before, and after their one dance tonight, he’d do his best to send her on her way again. Tipping his glass at her as he fingered the paper in his pocket, he caught her eye and smiled. Then drank to seal the promise.