Chapter Three
"Oh. It's you."
Katrana Prestor wasn't Katrana Prestor without an armoury of chilly greetings stashed inside her sleeve.
She unlocked the door and led Bolvar into her dim study, and already he felt his resolution to be kind to her grow thin at her tone, but he kept his temper in check. He had to be patient. Chances were nobody else had ever been patient with the poor woman in her life. Especially Daval Prestor...
Ever since speaking with Leonardo, Miss Inkweaver and Miss Peddlefeet, his insides had marinaded in guilt. He'd forgotten about his first meeting with Feral Kat so long ago - forgotten how she'd paled at the mention of being in trouble with her father. He was so young and stupid back then, had forgotten about her, forgotten her reaction. But now, years later, jigsaw pieces fell into place, and the partly-formed picture they implied disturbed him…
A picture he could have prevented, if only he'd been intelligent enough to see it.
"This dragon drama is quite inconvenient." Her voice cut into his thoughts. Bolvar blinked in the bright daylight as Katrana Prestor opened the curtains, light spilling into the room.
"Yes," he said, unable to plug his leaking sarcasm. "Black dragons in Stormwind Keep are mighty inconvenient, wouldn't you say?"
That earned him a dirty look, and his conscience reminded him to hold his tongue. He almost smiled at her to show it was in jest, but… no. She'd think it implied mockery, and that would only make her angrier.
Even a fool such as he, who was stupid enough to press her buttons every once in a while, knew when to let sleeping dragons lie.
Besides, he thought, another familiar pang of guilt tapping him on the shoulder, I provoke her enough already.
"This is going to get in the way of everything," she hissed, gesturing to a seat in front of her desk as she threw herself into her own chair, opening and shutting rattling drawers. She fished out some parchment. "Was there something you wanted to see me for that could not wait until the meeting later?"
Here was his chance to convince her. She never responded well when people ganged up on her - on the extremely rare occasion he had converted her to his point of view, it had always been just the two of them speaking. "The House of Noble are likely to want to send a force out to the Steppes."
Katrana Prestor sneered. "What did I tell you yesterday?" she said. "That the dragons are probably looking for revenge because Withering's Lightforsaken guild insists on poaching them. If a collective of dragons walked right in here and slaughtered our people and captured our young, would you merely stand by?"
And yet, Bolvar thought as he suppressed a sigh, Katrana Prestor had seemed completely fine with gifting Anduin Wrynn a whelp for the boy's tenth birthday, much to Bolvar's indignation, but he didn't want to argue over trivialities. Best to save his energy for the more important things. "Lady Prestor, with all due respect - "
"Ah, that means you're about to employ none."
Damn her wit. "We had an infiltrator in Stormwind Keep. If nothing else, that is a serious security breach." What did he have to do, hit her over the head with a giant sign?
"I still await an update from Rivers," said Katrana Prestor. "From what it appears so far, the dragonspawn merely appeared one day in disguise, made his attempt shortly after and then he was killed. Our security has been increased accordingly, do not fear. Maeqa has received a raise and will be working around the clock to protect Anduin until Mathias Shaw can present to us additional bodyguards."
Anduin was going to be thrilled about that. In spite of having Maeqa or Soris help bathe him in his very young years, he hated the lack of privacy that having a bodyguard brought him. Sometimes it seemed like Anduin was suffocating under all the company. Anduin could deal with Maeqa or Soris pacing the bathroom and averting their eyes as he bathed - but a stranger? He'd be humiliated.
... But it was necessary. He was the prince, after all. The only Wrynn. If anything happened to him...
Gods. It'd be hard to keep Katrana Prestor away from wrangling fully-fledged power in the political shitstorm that would surely follow. Bolvar let her have her way far more often than he should as it was, and she took initiative - like now - more than he liked. Half the time he didn't even know how she did it - he could be standing up to her one moment, and in the next he'd grant her permission to do something or other and half the time he barely remembered it afterwards. Infuriatingly enough, Katrana Prestor had always been his weakness. He always hated arguing, and Katrana Prestor exploited that mercilessly.
But he was a sodding politician. He was practically paid to argue.
"It is also time to end the search for King Varian," Lady Prestor continued.
Bolvar Fordragon's train of thought ground to a halt. "I - what?"
Lady Prestor sat opposite him with her elbows on her desk, chin propped up in her hands. That had to be the most casual position he'd ever seen her in - but then, whenever Prestor felt like being unprofessional, she damn well did as she liked and nobody dared argue. The severe look, as it always did, remained. Bolvar sometimes wondered if the cold stare was tattooed into her face. "There has been no sign of him in eight months. So much energy and money, too much, has been poured into a man who is surely dead."
... Anduin wasn't going to like this either.
"We are wasting resources should be put into other things." Finally, Prestor leaned back in her chair, tapping the wooden arm. She commented sardonically, "Like slaying dragons, apparently."
Talking to his chief advisor and trying to maintain the flow of conversation was like herding cats. Hadn't he been speaking about the not-yet existent team just a moment ago?
"I..." He sighed. "Perhaps you are right. Varian Wrynn isn't coming back."
Once upon a time, he pitied whoever would end up with Katrana Prestor on their hands. Somewhere, out there, the personification of karma was having a good snicker at his expense.
Lady Prestor's tapping nails were stark against the backdrop of silence. Varian... he'd grown up with Varian. So had Kat, in a way. To know someone who'd been practically a brother to him was never coming back, would never be found...
It pained him, and branded him with more guilt. He should have done better. There were so many things in retrospect they could have done when Varian first went missing that nobody had thought to do at first. He'd done nothing but let Varian down again and again.
"Anduin is not going to be happy," Bolvar murmured, recalling the sullen pre-teen to his mind's eye. "But it will be arranged. I'll send out letters to the appropriate people. He's gone. We should let him go." He felt a vague warmth at his throat, but as soon as his mind registered the faint weight of the amulet he wore there, the memory slipped his mind and the sensation was forgotten.
"Anduin will cope."
That was Katrana Prestor — a strong woman to a fault who assumed everyone else was the same. In an odd way that was a good influence on Anduin. While everyone else coddled the boy, Katrana taught him independence and self sufficiency.
"He's only ten," said Bolvar.
"Hardly 'only'," said Prestor. "Children are much more capable than we adults give them credit for."
"You were very developed for your age at ten, that does not mean Anduin is the same."
"And he isn't?" Prestor rose her eyebrows.
She was right. Again. Anduin Wrynn wasn't a genius, by any means, especially not to the extent little Kat had been, but the boy was bright. Sometimes he acted several years older than he was, with wisdom that even some adults lacked - though that did not stop him from acting as a boy occasionally. When Sam Inkweaver had become his nanny he'd stood up to those who would have given her grief just like Katrana had. It was odd, almost, how much he could be like Katrana Prestor, be the goodness she wasn't. The boy rarely allowed himself to call her "Aunt Katrana" as he'd been invited to, since the woman was as good as his adoptive mother, but as time wore on Bolvar could, more and more, see Katrana within the boy.
And, perhaps, the other way around. Perhaps it was thanks to Anduin that Katrana had showed a rare sliver of kindness…
"Why did you help Samantha?" he said.
Lady Prestor's hard eyes narrowed. A jaded part of Bolvar thought, uh oh. "Why do you preach of nobility?" she said, leaning back in her seat and crossing her arms, looking at him critically. Another bad sign. In anyone else it would mean a dressing down was imminent, but in Katrana Prestor it meant he was about to be eaten for breakfast. "Of doing what is right?"
He couldn't see where this was going. One would think Prestor was merely saying she was doing the right thing, but her posture and her body language said otherwise. Bolvar Fordragon was about to be ripped a new one. "Because it's what should be done," said Bolvar carefully.
"Oh?" Katrana Prestor rose her eyebrows, and Bolvar knew by that small gesture he'd failed whatever invisible test she'd set him. "And where were you when Norris boasted loudly to his friends of sleeping with a 'desperate kitchen maid?' Where were you when she spoke of her pregnancy to him, and his response was to drag her name through the mud?" Prestor spoke calmly, holding his eyes, refusing to let him look away. "Where were you when she was fired and thrown out of the palace for it? Where were you when his nitwit friends ganged up on her, labelling her a whore and encouraging others to do the same?"
She sneered. "How can you speak of doing the right thing when you stood by and let it happen? I saw none of this so-called 'Stormwind nobility' this city likes to speak of. I didn't see you stand up for her." Her voice rose. "I didn't see you show some spine. How is she in the wrong, how was she in the wrong at all?" Her fist clenched. "Why did he walk away unscathed? Is that what true Stormwind justice is, is that what Stormwind, the so-called beacon of humanity, stands for?
"Oh, no, Fordragon. I'm not letting that injustice happen. Not while I'm alive, not while I'm here. I removed him, the true criminal. And I will not let him near her again."
Shame burned a passage through his chest.
Nobody had spoken up for the little maid who'd been so used by a playboy noble. Nobody had warned the lovestruck girl, nobody had stood up for her when her superiors fired her for the shame of being pregnant out of wedlock.
Bolvar hadn't. It hadn't even occurred to him she was a living, breathing human being who would suffer, so caught up in his mind and his own stresses he had been. She'd just been another person. Another extra on the stage of life. Someone who faded away when he was not looking.
But life went on. Bolvar was not the centre of the world, was far from it, and her life played on when his curtains obscured her from his view.
"I'm sorry," he said quietly.
That only drew more of her ire. "Apologies fix nothing, and even if they did I'm hardly the one you should apologise to," she spat. "Do not believe I am oblivious to what they say about me, Fordragon, not for one moment. Them speaking of me as if I am some kind of black-hearted monster just because I don't coddle the infantile nobles in this keep, as if I'm some witch who wouldn't know what basic, so-called human decency is if it ran me down with a horse. I'm not some insect on the bottom of their shoes. Samantha Inkweaver deserved justice, and I was the only one who gave it to her. True justice would have been killing him." She sat back in her chair, still holding his gaze unblinkingly. "Be glad I refrained from that."
Sometimes, talking to Katrana Prestor was like asking the Light for a reason as to why you were a bad person, only for it to ask you to wait ten minutes as it wrote out a list. Poor, poor Samantha...
"It won't happen again," he said, standing up. "I shan't keep my eyes closed any longer. Lady Prestor - I want to be dependable. Someone worth working with, someone worth leading Stormwind. I regret what happened, our poor action - and thank you for doing what the rest of us did not."
That caused an odd flash in her eyes, and a slight cant of the head. Was she surprised he didn't defend himself? That he didn't argue back?
"There is no excuse for my behaviour," he said. "Or lack of it. It will not happen again."
She pressed her lips into a long, hard line.
"For now, I must go," said Bolvar. "The assembly will be soon, I shall see you there."
Appearing to remember herself, Katrana Prestor stood up. "Your Lordship," she said, with a stiff bow.
"Lady Prestor," he said, returning it, before he turned to leave.
On the way out, he almost bumped into Captain Adam Rivers, who nearly lost the grip of a thick book in his hands. "Pardon me, my Lord," said Rivers, quickly bowing.
"How is the investigation coming along?" said Bolvar. "Are you certain you do not need the aid of Stormwind Intelligence?"
"I'm about to report to Lady Prestor on that very issue, as a matter of fact, given her expertise on the subject of dragons," said Rivers. Bolvar's eyes slid to the book in Rivers' hand - that didn't look like a report, looked more like a biography of... someone or other, Bolvar couldn't quite make out the name hidden under the man's hand. "A verbal report, my lord," River's lip twitched in a faint smirk. "This is something else altogether." He rose his hand to knock on the doorframe. "My lady..."
"I want to hear this report as well."
Katrana Prestor, who'd heard from inside, sighed. "You better come in again, then," she said, fixing her glare on Bolvar as Adam Rivers put the book on her desk. She didn't look at it twice as Rivers gave his report - only to hear the entire thing was an embarrassment for Stormwind security. The so-called Ironforge noble had merely walked in like he owned the place, and nobody had once challenged him or thought to question his identity.
Rivers needed a good talking-to. By the look on Prestor's face, he was about to get more than that.
As Bolvar Fordragon walked away after having watched Rivers get an even more severe lecture than he had, he mused on the book placed on Prestor's desk that she had not even acknowledged. Adam Rivers often brought books to Lady Prestor - indeed, for all the woman yelled at him, Rivers seemed to be the only person she could tolerate for a given amount of time.
He sincerely hoped Rivers wasn't attempting to court her, for the man's own good. Bolvar shook his head sadly at the thought. Courting the woman must be like picking up a prickly porcupine that was on fire and had acid in its quills without trying to damage yourself, let alone kill yourself in the process.
"Captain," said Bolvar. "Before you go…"
Rivers had been about to peel away from the Highlord towards the training rooms. "My Lord?" he said.
"For all the years I've been here, I've never asked - why do the men and women who guard the throne room call themselves the Suicide Squad?"
Rivers' face twisted in a smirk. "Because if a Horde army charged up the corridor, it would be suicide to fight them!" He snickered.
Bolvar wasn't quite sure that was the answer. Fel - the Squad was very tight-knit and exclusive even socially, and only ever spoke to each other. For Reginald to even get a chance to get into their ranks had been a once in a lifetime opportunity. "I see."
"By your leave, my Lord," Rivers bowed.
Bolvar let him go, puzzling on the issue for only a moment. But there was a meeting coming up, and that quickly enough overtook his thoughts.
A/N: Thank you all for your kind reviews!
Kai: Whoops, yes - never fear, the Romathis thing shall be explained soon enough! Thank you, I'm glad you like it and I hope I can keep it up!
Etrg: Thank you! I shall most definitely continue, and I will make sure I finish, too!
