“Do you have any idea how much money you cost me?” Kali asked.

  “A lot?” Alarion asked from across the table.

  “A lot, yes.” Kali’s voice was dripping with venom. “Several lots. Enough to buy several lots of my choosing at-“

  “Enough,” Lily scolded. “If you were foolish enough to bet against a boy with more points invested in luck than you have put together, you deserve the loss.”

  “L-Luck does not-“

  “I am aware, Ivor,” the girl turned her steely gaze on him, though it softened quickly. “It was… You know what, never mind. The point is, it is profoundly unwise to bet against him.”

  “If I’d bet against him the other ninety-seven times…” Kali grumbled into his long-stemmed glass.

  They’d moved from the dusty courtyard to a small dining room tucked off to the side of the officer’s quarters. Like most of the fortress, it was a space meant more for function than grandeur, filled with furniture that had been old before Alarion had been born. The walls were bare and beige, the floor creaking whenever any of them shifted their weight.

  It was a far cry from the opulence of Lily’s villa, but Alarion felt far more comfortable. This was familiar and filled with the closest thing he had left to family. Sure, there was something green growing between the gaps in the boards, but it was where he belonged.

  Strangely, Lily seemed just as comfortable. He’d expected a woman of her background and station to balk at military accommodations, but Nessa had complained far more than Lily. She was either stoic or tactful, but Alarion couldn’t figure out which.

  One comfort they did have was wine. Good wine, or so Alarion was told. The bottles were a gift from Bergman’s family, supposedly a thank you for protecting their son. To hear the merchant boy tell it, they’d have sent the bottles even if he’d died; for the Bergman family never failed to capitalize on an opportunity to ingratiate themselves.

  Whatever the motive, the gift was well received. Kali had drowned his sorrows in three separate bottles over the course of two hours, while Bergman and Lily had split a bottle between them in the same period. Even Nessa had enjoyed the drink, though setting a glass aside for her had, understandably, earned him odd looks.

  For his part, Alarion was unimpressed. If this were good wine, he would hate to see what bad wine tasted like.

  And he liked grapes.

  They lingered a while on the battle, on Alarion’s unorthodox victory and what either of them might have done better, but eventually they began to meander. First it was war stories, then Lily’s equivalent, her tales of nightmarish clients gone wrong. Bergman told them about his family, a long list of cousins and half-siblings, then Kali spoke at length about his homeland.

  Alarion said precious little. He sat with a glass in hand, watching the wine catch the firelight as the others regaled him. These were good stories, good memories. It was… nice. But of course, it couldn’t last forever.

  “Your turn,” Lily said, tipping her glass in his direction. When Alarion shook his head, she continued, “We have told you plenty. For Mother’s sake, you have even met my terrible mother, and yet everything I know about you comes from a file. Tell us something new. A dream, a fear, a story. Something embarrassing. You cannot be the only one sitting out.”

  “I can,” he assured her.

  “N-not really f-fair,” Bergman said.

  Alarion scowled. “Life is not.”

  A small chorus of boos erupted, but it was Nessa who spoke through the noise.

  “Come on. It will be good for you,” she promised. “I would if I could.”

  Her double meaning was not lost on him; his frown softened. “I do not know what I would even talk about.”

  “Tell them about your sisters,” she suggested. “All my memories of them are… hazy. But yours are probably better. I would like to hear it too.”

  Rather than respond, Alarion took a short sip of his wine. He grimaced at the taste and eyed the glass as if it had offended him. All eyes were on him, and even Kali was patient for once.

  Just one more unwanted expectation.

  “I do not like lightning,” he began.

  “Does anyone like being shocked?” Kali asked.

  “No, not electricity. Lightning.” Alarion gestured skyward to reinforce his point. “It has scared me since I was very young. I try to stay indoors if the skies are dark, but even the sound…”

  Stolen novel; please report.

  He shuddered at the thought. At his rank, it wasn’t a rational fear, no more so than his dislike of spiders, but it clung to him all the same.

  “You know that you-“

  “Hush,” Lily chided Kali. “I assume there is more to it than just a dislike?”

  Alarion’s nostalgic smile confirmed it well before he found the right words.

  “We lived on an orchard in Imuria, about a hundred trees over a few acres. It was old, inherited through my father’s side of the family for… I do not actually know how long. Long enough that the trees were old and tall.”

  He scooped up a bottle, a plate, and a few utensils as he spoke, placing them to set the scene as he described it.

  “Our house was here, bordering a main road, with the orchard behind. Most of the trees were laid out in even rows, like this.” He laid a few forks parallel to the rear of the ‘house’ as he spoke. “They were stubby little trees, not tall but very wide and old enough that their branches tangled with one another.”

  The memories flooded back to him as he spoke. The sour tang in the air. The vibrant pinks and reds of the orchard in full bloom. The trees had been vicious little bastards, covered with thorns that poked and tore at anyone foolish enough to try to climb or harvest them.

  “And on the other side of the field, we had one other tree. We called it the grandfather tree, but it was much, much older than that.” Alarion paused as he considered his own memories. He knew things that had seemed large as a boy were nowhere near that big as an adult, but the memory of the tree still loomed impossibly large. “I am not sure how large. At least two hundred feet? Maybe more?”

  Bergman scoffed at the idea, but Kali quickly came to Alarion’s defense.

  “White wood, black rings?”

  “Mm.”

  “Celesian Whitewoods,” Kali said. “Two hundred is on the small side for an adult tree. They don’t grow this far south. Bookwork doesn’t know everything.”

  “I never claimed to,” Bergman protested.

  “Those are royal trees, are they not?” Lily asked.

  “They were probably living on former crownlands,” Kali nodded. Then, seeing Alarion’s expression, he quickly clarified. “You’re no hidden prince. It simply means that someone wealthy used to own the land. Your family probably ‘inherited’ it in all the chaos after the fall.”

  Alarion seemed at once disappointed and unconvinced, but he continued on with his story.

  “The other trees were too valuable and too sharp to play in, so we made a fort among the branches. An ugly, unsteady little thing in a tree that was already brittle in a lot of places. My mother hated it, but my father convinced her. Best of a bunch of bad options, he said.”

  “Smart man,” Lily remarked.

  Alarion’s expression darkened. “No. He just liked to take the easy way out.”

  He felt Nessa’s hand on his arm, and it took everything he had not to flinch away. He didn’t often think of his father, but when he did, the anger was like nothing else.

  “You could see the grandfather tree from the house, but not our fort, not with all the other trees in the way. You had to climb about halfway up before the angles were right.” Alarion explained, trying to move past his rage as he drew an imaginary line between an empty plate and the half-full bottle of wine. “Which became a problem when the storm hit.”

  “We were supposed to stay the night with one of our neighbors. But then I saw a storm coming in. First flash of lightning, and I started throwing a fit.” Alarion said, ignoring Kali’s sudden grin. “They tried to calm me down, and when that failed, Atra said she would take me home.”

  “A-Atra?” Bergman asked.

  “My sister,” Alarion answered. “The oldest of the three of us. She would have been… nineteen now? I think.”

  “She is nineteen,” Nessa insisted. “You are too much of a pessimist.”

  “Maybe,” he admitted.

  “You did not make it home,” Lily said, having seen where he was going.

  “We did not. The storm was one of the worst I can remember. A wall of rain and whipping wind. Thunder so close and so loud that it shook my bones. Atra managed to drag me to the grandfather tree, and we hid there for an hour, through what I thought was the worst of it.” Alarion felt the wet and the cold on his skin as he spoke, and he could see the flashes illuminating the orchard as if he’d been there only yesterday. “But it was not. It started to hail, and the clouds were so low you could touch them.”

  Bergman winced. “A t-tornado?”

  “The start of one. We were too scared to run for it, lest we be caught in an open field. But no one knew where we were.” When Alarion smiled this time, it was rueful and genuine. He chuckled to himself. “In my infinite wisdom-“

  Lily barked out a decidedly unfeminine laugh before covering her face. “You did not.”

  “I did.”

  “Why!?” She demanded through barely restrained laughter.

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Alarion shrugged slightly, his eyes distant. “It was my fault we were stuck there. I felt guilty, and I did not want Atra to get hurt. And I had climbed that tree a hundred times.”

  “So, you fell?” Kali suggested.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Meaning?”

  “A branch fell,” Alarion cringed at the memory. “… onto my sister.”

  That was too much for Lily. Whether it was the wine, the absurdity, or just the way Alarion said it, she dissolved into helpless laughter in a matter of moments. Bergman followed her shortly thereafter, and within moments the whole table had been captured by the moment.”

  “You dropped a… tree. On your… on your sister!” Kali stammered out over three separate attempts.

  “A branch.”

  “Oh. L-like a t-twig?” Bergman teased.

  When Alarion started stretching his arms out to the side to suggest the size, the table lost its mind all over again.

  “And this is the one that is still alive?” Nessa asked after catching her ‘breath’, “Not for lack of trying, hmm?”

  “It was not that bad,” Alarion protested, smiling from ear to ear despite Nessa’s dark humor. “A bump on the head and… she bit through her lower lip.”

  “Stop… talking,” Lily begged, one hand on her side, clutching desperately. “I should not be laughing, this is horrible…” She covered her mouth again, fighting for some measure of control that just would not come. “Please tell me that is everything.”

  Alarion scratched at the back of his neck, driving Lily into another fit of giggles.

  “She may have stepped on a nail,” he said, enduring the renewed uproar. “But that one was her fault. I told her that the board was loose and-“

  There was no sense in finishing. They weren’t listening. Lily was fully incoherent, and the others were not far behind her. It took a few minutes, and more lighthearted ribbing than Alarion had endured in a decade, before they finally calmed themselves. Even then, he nearly relit the blaze by claiming it was ‘not that funny.’

  “Alright, alright. Enough abusing the Orphan,” Kali said, taking a deep breath to steady himself. “Women?”

  “Is that a question, Sergeant?” Lily asked.

  “I thought that was obvious.”

  “Well, are you asking me, or them?” She cocked her head to the side.

  “It was them, but now... you.”