Episode 30: Aadya, Hunting, & Nellie (Konrad)

Konrad sat in his office. The air tasted of leather and metal and old paperwork. He mulled the week, turning events in his mind like rocks in a polisher.

Spence, in training.

Twins with plant names, a signature of the last Salamander queen. He was glad they were with Spence. Spence noticed things that mattered.

All those vanishing siblings scattered around the world.

There was a critical piece. Some sort of pattern that would emerge if he looked at things just right.

Aadya knocked on the door. She stood in the doorway, her hair pulled into a knot at the back of her head near the top. She smelled like cinnamon today.

He’d need to talk to Aadya soon. Another week or two, at most.

She held a bottle of kahlua.

Nell always got him new liquors, but Nell and Aadya both seemed to prefer that she play the middleman in delivering the bottles to him like they were her idea. He wasn’t sure if that was Nell’s way of saying he was okay with the arrangement between Konrad and Aadya or if Nell just liked giving gifts in quirky ways.

His vision was phenomenal when it came to others, but when it came to the ones closest to himself he was lost.

He reached for the bottle in her hands. “Thank you.” As she walked into the room, he slid a chair towards her, angling it so that they could face each other as they talked. “How are you today?”

He took a drink. It tasted of chocolate and coffee and a deep heady mood he couldn’t name. Leaning forward, he passed the bottle to her.

She sat and took a drink. “Ready for a few hours off. There was a land dispute that required measuring to satisfy both parties. How are you?” She took another drink and kicked her shoes off before she passed the bottle to him.

He lifted her feet onto his lap and began the work of kneading the tension out of them.

These meetings were partly his job, of keeping the queen happy and the kingdom running smoothly.

They were partly the gancanagh magic, which worked to bind them together.

They were partly sheer affection.

Where obligation turned to love and passion, he wasn’t sure.

He loved Nell, like the moon followed the sun across the sky, unending and inevitable.

He loved Aadya like a summer rain, warm and refreshing and good.

After he had removed her socks, he smiled. “Recovered from yesterday.” He ran his hand through his beard, debating how to spend the night. He needed to ease himself away from her, and her away from him.

It wouldn’t do to have the queen unhappy over him.

“Hunting?” he asked her. “Or are you not so free tonight?”

She stretched like a feline, moving her feet against him, and smiled. “I was counting on hunting. Something big or small?”

“Out of realm?” he suggested. “Something big. Nell recommended a place.”

Aadya leaned across her own lap and kissed him. She meant it to be quick, but he caught the back of her head in his hand and deepened the kiss.

She drew away, a smile in her eyes. “I have everything ready in the conference room.”

Konrad took another drink.

He had no idea how to do this.

In nearly forty-five hundred years, he’d been in three relationships. Khale, he had lost as a consequence of his own actions. Nell, was ongoing and he intended never to lose.

Aadya…

In this moment, what he wanted was to kiss her again. Not to talk about their future.

He steeled himself to get up. “Alright,” he said.

She gave him one of her little grins he so loved. “Do you want to go now?” she teased. “I have the whole night.”

She may have the whole night, but she’d left the door open. He stood and closed it before he turned his attention to her fully.

Next time. He would talk to her about it next time.

For now, he lifted her onto his desk and kissed her. She made a contented humming noise against his mouth.

He became locked in the sensation of her touch, in the precise placement of his own hands and mouth and body. His eyes trailed the delicate arc of her neck as she moved with him in heat and hunger.

When she stilled against him, he held her longer than he meant to.

He kissed the dip between her clavicles as their hearts slowed to a steady beat.

“Better?” he teased.

She pressed her face into his shoulder and laughed. “Much. You?”

“Yes.” He thought about their night, without the need distracting them. “Hunting should be easier.” He lifted her to standing and pulled his clothing back into place. “Will you tie my shirt?” he asked.

When Nell tied his shirt, he followed one of the many weaves practiced by the pixies. Each weave had its own meaning: love, fidelity, ownership, affection, joy…so many more which Konrad had yet to learn.

Aadya always tied them in three square knots.

There was nothing wrong with square knots.

It was the publicity of it. A weave tied by Nell told anyone and everyone that he had been with his husband.

He worried what people thought when they saw Aadya’s knots.

He worried what Nell felt when he came home and asked him to unlace them.

Nell might say it didn’t bother him. He might say it didn’t matter. He might even mean it, which he seemed to.

Nell was a complex tapestry of deep emotions he rarely cared to examine.

Complex and beautiful and capable of self-deceit.

Konrad needed to end this thing with Aadya. For the kingdom, for Nell.

For himself, he would grieve, but he knew it was best at this point. Aadya needed to repair her marriage.

She needed to find her passion with Meldrick.

Konrad knew from history, from memories Aadya no longer possessed thanks to the efforts of the last Salamander queen, that she was capable of passion and contentment with Meldrick.

It was both good fortune and bad that Meldrick was second-born of his line. Bad, because Aadya’s memory had been wiped by Queen Titania so that she could marry the first-born of the line. She’d lost track of her affection for Meldrick as a result, and trusted his brother Drey’s opinion of him.

Drey, who had fled the kingdom for seven hundred years and who had a male lover and no respect for any portion of his own family.

It was good fortune because it had been Drey and not Meldrick, who had died to defeat the last Salamander king.

What Aadya needed was some way to relearn that Meldrick would stand by her through anything. That he could bring her joy and and an intensity she would never find with Konrad.

What crippled Aadya most was Konrad’s own miscalculation. When she’d married Drey, his opinion of the prince had been based on intelligence reports. He hadn’t expected him to be thoughtful, or to put forth effort with Aadya.

He hadn’t expected his decency and likability. Most of all, he hadn’t expected his insight into the problem or his willingness to give himself up for the good of the kingdom.

The result was that when Drey had sacrificed himself nearly nineteen years ago, Aadya had been in love with him. Konrad suspected that she believed her marriage to Meldrick was in some way a betrayal of Drey because Drey disliked Meldrick.

It was a puzzle. Konrad had ideas, but no definitive solution.

The choice had to come from Aadya herself.

It wouldn’t come while she had Konrad in her life in that way.

So he leaned against her while she tied his knots, and he kissed her again when she finished.

Each kiss was a prequel to a goodbye.

“I recently sharpened the arrows,” she told him as she pulled her own shirt over her head, “and I have a new pair of compound bows if you’d like to try them. From Nell.”

“Alright,” Konrad agreed. He’d like to try a new bow today. “I’d like to get him a little something while we’re there.”

“A new pet?” Aadya guessed.

Konrad smiled. He loved the way Aadya’s mind worked. For her there was no struggle to understand needs and motivations. Often she gave gifts to people before they realized they needed the item. It was part of what made her a phenomenal leader.

“Perhaps a rare bird if we can find one.”

Really, he wanted to get Nell a grizzly. He’d seen the craving in his eyes when Spaden moved around the palace with his familiar, Cora.

He wouldn’t get a grizzly today, with Aadya there. He’d need to go back, use the pixie magic to coax one into cooperating. He was sure Aadya would enjoy the process, but he wanted this gift to come from him, without help.

He wanted it to say, I’m home, I’m yours, I’m committed.

“He’d love that,” Aadya agreed. “He recently requested an aviary.”

“Why not give him a planet instead?” Konrad teased. He held the conference room door open for her as they walked in to pick up equipment and transport. “What do you think of me training Spence?”

She handed him a bow and a quiver. “I’m hopeful. I think Spence is a good choice and his relationship with Ach will help Talise accept him.”

Aadya offered him her hand, and he transported them to the northwoods of Quebec province in Babylon.

A cacophony of animal minds greeted them. To Aadya, he knew, the woods would be alive with birds and other little noises. Konrad, now Nell had given him pixie magic by marriage, heard the sounds of their minds.

Their intents, their fears, their hungers.

“Bear, wolf, or caribou?” he asked.

He sent the nearby bear a warning, a scent-image of Aadya, and felt the bear change course to the west of them.

“Whichever we cross the path of first?” Aadya suggested.

It wouldn’t be a wolf either, Konrad would be sure of that. He shared Nell’s opinion that less intelligent animals were easiest to kill.

“Alright,” he agreed. He pressed his hand into her back once, to feel her warmth.

She walked ahead of him, following a deer trail through the underbrush. Her feet padded quietly through. After some time, she knelt in the path to examine a set of caribou tracks. She stood again and told Konrad what he already knew; that they were from this morning

He reached out with his mind and found a herd of caribou a mile or so north and east of them. They were near moving water, traveling along it.

“Perhaps across the road,” he suggested. “The map showed a river that way.”

They made their way down a sharp incline to the road.

Aadya stopped in the center of the road and stared at something. As Konrad emerged from the treeline behind her, he turned to look at what had caught her eye.

An automobile, sleek and blue, with rays of light where the curves of metal caught the sun.

It lay on its side. Instrumental music played from one of the doors. A body lay sprawled on the pavement a few feet from the car.

Aadya dropped her bow and ran.

Konrad ran as well. He stopped first at the person in the road – a man, bearded and pale – and felt for breathing, a heartbeat, anything.

He was dead. He’d begun to stiffen from bloating.

There was no sense in efforts to save him.

Konrad moved to the other body, which lay beneath the car. Given that it was in two large pieces – one beneath the car and one beside it – Konrad decided not to worry about a heartbeat with her.

He looked at her instead. She was pale enough to be a member of the family he protected. She had suffered such an unnecessary death.

He would return once Aadya was content with the results of her hunt, and ensure that someone found these bodies.

“Konrad,” Aadya called from within the car.

She emerged holding a frail child’s body, no larger than Merlyn and Eowyn.

Konrad stood. “Dead,” he said. He pointed to the woman’s torso where it lay, and the man’s body in the road behind him. “Both of them.”

“She’s alive,” Aadya said. She clutched the little girl against her.

“Careful with her neck,” Konrad reminded her. Without warning her, he touched her arm and transported them to the conference room. He cleared a stack of papers away so that Aadya could set her on the table.

He called for Zero by dragon. The man was in-realm tonight, holding some sort of family celebration for Spence and Acheron.

“I’ll let Zero set that arm,” he told Aadya.

She nodded her head. “Do you think she’ll be okay?”

He looked at the bruised body. Her breathing was even. He doubted either of her lungs had collapsed. It was her head which was most concerning. Based on the condition of the man’s body it had been hours since the accident, and yet the girl remained unconscious.

“It’s difficult to tell without knowing why she’s unconscious,” he said.

He stepped away from the table as Zero entered the room.

“What happened to her?” Zero asked.

Aadya stood near the girl’s head and held her hand. “She was in a car accident. Still inside the car.”

Konrad checked the clock, aware of the passage of time. If anyone discovered the wreck before they returned the girl to the car, it would complicate matters. “She’s Babylonian,” he explained to Zero. He hoped the man understood the urgency in this. “We’ll need to return her without it being obvious she’s been treated.”

“But her parents are dead,” Aadya argued.

Konrad ran his hand through his beard. Aadya…He sighed, exasperated by her line of thought.

She was his queen.

He was her advisor.

“Someone will find the car,” he assured her. “We can ensure that they do. If she vanishes, people will notice.”

Aadya looked at the little girl again. Konrad could see that he’d lost the argument before she said, “Or the car can experience a fire.”

He shook his head. He ought to at least protect Elesara from repercussions. “Their forensics can test for bones. We should make the entire car disappear if you’re keeping her.”

Perhaps an underground cave here in Elesara, the bottom of the sea, a hidden realm…

“I’ll handle it,” Aadya promised.

He sighed. He could all but see the strands of attachment that already bound her to the little girl. “I’ll help,” he insisted.

She took his hand and returned them to the scene of the accident. Luck was on their side; no one had come upon the aftermath yet.

“Bottom of the sea?” he asked. “I can pick up whatever pieces remain here.”

“Off a ledge,” she suggested. “They can be found, or parts can be, but people missing. People at the bottom of the sea.”

“Alright.”

He approached the woman’s torso where it lay. In silent apology, he lifted her and placed her in the passenger seat of the vehicle.

He had vowed to protect her body, be sure that it was discovered and returned home to the people who had loved her. It was common practice in a battle as well.

The agreement to push them off a cliff pained him. He longed for the comfort of Nell’s wings. Not that they would assuage his conscience, but they would be a comfort nonetheless.

He placed the woman’s two legs on the floor of the car and said a silent prayer. Let them be found. Let those that love them at least be able to grieve in the certainty of their fate.

As precise a language as Elesarian could be, Konrad found it odd that there was no word for the type of anguish that accompanied a disappearance, the grief-hope that was neither one nor the other.

He supposed that scholars rarely did battle, and soldiers rarely wrote texts. There may have been such a word once, but it had been lost in the tides of time.

Now he lifted the man into the car. This was more difficult; his body did not care to bend to fit the shape of the seat and the floor space beneath. Konrad glanced at Aadya to be sure she was distracted; she had walked down the road to retrieve their hunting equipment.

With a grunt and a swing of his sword, he severed the man’s legs just above the knee and fitted him into the car. The door was closed, his blade wiped clean, before Aadya returned.

Silent, he offered her his hand and closed his fingers around hers. He transported them to a ledge a few hundred miles from the site of the accident.

He shifted the car into neutral, and together they pushed it from the overlook into the sea.

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