Chapter 1983: Rapid Expansion - Part 7
The wind stirred just a little more strongly as Oliver made that declaration to himself. Oliver nodded in reply, as if in conversation with it, and then finally, did he remove himself, to once more find his long forgotten target, that he had so easily been distracted from.
He found Lasha Blackthorn on the balcony opposite her room. The most obvious place to check, but Oliver found himself checking it last. Lasha, at her best, was a woman of the utmost unpredictability. A thousand different things she wanted to do and say at once, so much so that she often ended up saying nothing at all. When she was sombre, however, the raging torrent of all that she was slowed to a pitiful stream. She was a single drop of water, sliding down a slowly melting icicle, and when one stood next to her, she was as cold as the icicle itself, ready to stand frozen for a thousand years.
One would not expect that she was a woman that felt deeply, if they did observe her from a distance, with how tight a rein she kept on her emotion. She was the ideal of a noblewoman for that fact that she was all but unreadable.
Oliver had learned, however, that was a misunderstanding. If anything, Lasha felt more than a normal person. She was easily irritated, easily upset, and the smallest thing could have her frowning at Oliver for weeks. She was impossible to keep happy, and oftentimes sensitive enough that he found it to be like walking on a bed of nails trying to keep from saying the wrong thing around her. But for all of that, she was a woman that he relied strongly on. Her swirling emotions, and her sensitivity were the very things – though they made her suffer in the process – that made her such a valuable ally, for she saw the world entirely differently to the rest of them.
Even if she had declared earlier, that she was content with the way things were, and that she had sworn her service to Oliver, and would not be moved by whatever foolish thing that her father did, that did not necessarily mean that such words were true. Lasha pursued an ideal as much as the rest of them. There was a version of herself inside her head that she desperately wished to be – and it was that character that she played in speaking those words. The fallout of the pain that came with speaking them was something that she dealt with herself in private.
Oliver took care to make his footsteps just a little louder, so that she might hear his approach, and not be so readily startled.
She took in the cold winter air with far too few layers. She’d seen her armour removed, and only kept a sword on her hip. A thin navy wool dress, and an equally as thin black wool cardigan went with it.
She turned her head to look at him, the briefest little glance from the corner of her eye, and then she went back to looking down at the city beneath her, and back towards the mountains in the distance.
Oliver came by her side, and put his elbows on the balcony, looking towards that which she looked for, trying to discern what it was that kept her attention.
"I am fine," she said, almost impatiently.
"I know," Oliver replied.
"Then why are you here?"
"It is a beautiful city," Oliver said. "And I find this to be a good spot to look at it from."
Blackthorn heaved a sigh, knowing full well that Oliver was straddling that line that almost fell into poking fun at her, but she had not the energy to return fire. She shrugged her shoulders, and settled into a deep silence, as if declaring that she would say nothing further to him.
It made Oliver smile to see her like that. They were two things – and he was glad that she remembered that. She might address him as Your Majesty when there was business for them to attend, but in moments like these, she did not often need reminding that there was no need for a title. For, despite it all, they were friends. Friends that had endured a good deal of suffering together.
Oliver’s smile had a certain tinge of sadness as he reflected on that. For indeed, they had suffered, and they continued to suffer. The comforts of words were a distant thing now, for there had been holes carved into both their hearts, and every second of the day, they poured out the blood not of their bodies, but of their souls. They sank deeper into what they were as a comfort, but also as a threat, as if losing their minds might be the cure to it all.
Despite that, Oliver wondered if he was wrong to think that there could be a beauty in it. He could never say that out loud, he could never even say that to himself. To even think on it brought the tears back to his eyes. But when he was next to a comrade like her, and like Verdant, and when the two of them knew that they needed say nothing, for the other understood deeply just what it meant to suffer in the way that they did, perhaps things weren’t so bad after all. Their losses clawed at them like poisoned daggers, and still they had only need look in the eyes of their allies to see the suffering there, their own understanding.
The road that they had marched, they had marched it together. Beginning at the Academy, that long, long winding road, filled with more pitfalls and more surprises than they could ever imagine, and now that road wound and twisted once more, like a world eating snake, and it points its head and its fangs towards the Capital, and it declared finally, that there ought to be an end to it all.
"Your father is quite the man," Oliver said. "Queen Asabel would be proud of him, I think. To the end, he intends to see through her cause."