A/N: Here is the thrilling conclusion of the Accountant and the Merchant trilogy (or is it?!)! Ages to remember are Johan at 71, Clara at 52, Olly at 27, Lena at 21, and Astra at 19.

Chapter Thirty-Three: The Accountant and the Merchant (III)

Nearly a week went by with Olivier and Astra spending time in close quarters. He would fetch every meal from the nearby tavern, the snow and wind in varying degrees of storm, while she worked on the audit. They moved operations to the room in which they slept, to manage the fuel better by heating only one stove instead of two, and the combination office and lodgings became a little haven for them. Laughing and talking by day, they would lay together at night. Olivier had shoved their bedframes together, making it so that they could easily cuddle with their blankets dutifully between them, or lay facing one another and holding hands while they talked until they fell asleep.

Astra was finishing her second-to-last record book when Olivier came back with their lunch one day, a giant grin upon his face. He placed the warm cloth bundle on a nightstand and bent down to kiss her excitedly.

"What's that for?" she giggled.

"Totter's Pass should be open by tomorrow afternoon," he replied. He waited for her to stand before grabbing her into a spinning hug. "I can go home!"

Astra tried not to frown as she was put down, the words cutting through her. "Oh yeah… home."

"Will you come with me?" Olivier asked. He held her by the shoulders and hunched slightly to look her better in the eyes. There was trepidation staring back at him, and he wanted to make sure she was alright. "I'll gladly wait until after you're done with the audit—it's not that long now. You can come and meet Mum and Uncle Antoine and—"

"Olly… I can't," she replied, voice growing quiet. "I can't just take off… the March…"

"You don't have to live your life according to the March's whims," he said, attempting to keep her gaze. It was becoming increasingly difficult, as she was trying to avoid eye contact. "I'd like to give you an opportunity at something else… if you'd let me."

"What do you mean?"

Olivier took both of her hands in his and bent down on one knee in the southern fashion. "I want to do more than just court you, Astra; I want to marry you. Will you, please?"

Her brown eyes went wide as the words hit her. She wasn't stupid; of course they were already courting and courting often led to marriage, though to be finally hit in the face with the finality of it seemed… frightening, in a way.

"…Astra…? Are you alright…?" he asked carefully. "Are you having second thoughts? It's okay if you are—just tell me."

"I'm fine Olly, it's just…" She sat down at the edge of the bed and tried to breathe slowly; if she let it all out now, the entire relationship could be done for. "Mama will be happy, but Papa will be afraid."

"Fathers should always be afraid for their children though... aren't they?"

"Not like Papa—he didn't think we were going to exist before he met Mama, let alone thought that she would ever exist. The first one of us to announce an engagement is going to need to be careful about it, whether it's because of his temper or his health."

"Oh…" he frowned. "I didn't think about that… dangers of only having Mum around, I guess." He sat down next to her, holding her hand. "Maybe bringing you to Rhylls is a little sudden. We can still write to one another, and it might be better with you easing your papa into the idea of me in your way. I don't exactly know how families in the north differ from the south…"

"Probably not as much as we think," she said. Astra leaned into Olivier, prompting him to hold her tight. "We will write until you come back next, which is when you will meet my family, and we will then take it from there."

"Until then, we can knock out some of the more serious conversations we need to have over lunch," he mentioned. It brought Astra's thoughts to the food cooling on the nightstand and she nodded in agreement.

Now, if only the food could help her figure out how she would break the news to the ones up in the castle.

That night, which was agreed to be their final one together for the time being, Astra and Olivier stretched the limits of their chastity as they laid in bed, touching and fumbling as they did their best to create memories that they would hold close to their hearts while apart. It was nothing short of exhilarating for either of them, although for Astra it was a night beyond her wildest dreams. Even fully-clothed it was beyond whatever she'd read in books or the vulgar stories she heard from Tara—it was bliss.

She grazed her mind with Olivier's as they languidly kissed, nearly asleep, and found not only adoration and desire, but nervousness and trepidation. If anything assured her about their decision, it was his unfiltered emotions spilling out of him, not so very different in feel from when her own parents deigned against shielding their minds from the world and she easily picked up on their desires for one another. She knew she would eventually tell him about her gift, and apologize for her secret use of it, though if he truly was the man she was figuring him out to be, then everything was going to be fine.

The following morning was painful, as neither Olivier nor Astra wanted to part. He did eventually leave, giving her one final, tender kiss at the room door before forcing himself from the building and onto the road to Rhylls. Neither of them slept well that night, or the night after, and knew they were not going to wholly sleep soundly until they saw one another again.

When Astra finally made it back to Castle Gallifrey, it was the day before the Festival of the Violet Sky, meaning that everything was in a tizzy. Her parents barely had the time to welcome her back before dinner and her siblings were wrapped up in what they were doing for their studies or the festival itself for her to make certain of anything other than that she was physically present. "We'll hear everything when it's less hectic," was the standard answer, and it was all Astra could do to smile and concede.

After dinner, when everyone had retreated to their quarters and their own little worlds, Astra sat alone with her tea feeling lonelier than when Tara had first gone away on deployment. Since then her twin had returned and left again, and though she was now used to being by herself, it wasn't something she cherished. Not caring that she was in her night-things, she left her room and went to Lena's, knocking timidly at the door.

"Lena… do you have a moment?"

There was the sound of shuffling and Lena quickly opened the door. She began to panic when she saw her sister, pulling her into the room and closing the door securely behind them.

"What's the matter?" she asked quickly. "Do I need to call back Tara from the front? We'll make sure whomever did this will pay."

"Wait, what…?" Astra gasped. "No, no, it's not like that…"

"…then why are you crying?" Lena watched as Astra put a hand to her face, realizing that her sister's worry was far from unfounded. "The night you return from your audit, which keeps on getting more and more brilliant the further into the report I look, by the way, and you show up at my door late in the evening in tears? What am I supposed to think?"

"I'm not hurt, if that's what you mean," she replied. "It's just… I want to get something off my chest, and I don't know who else I can talk with about this…"

"You've got me—come and sit down. We can't have a proper chat standing here." Lena led Astra over to her work table and cleaned it off as she ordered more tea for them both. The results of the audit were there, which the earlessa kept chatting on and on about while the fresh tea and biscuits were on their way. Once the maid was gone and she had draped a blanket across her sister's shoulders, Lena sat down and looked Astra dead in the eyes. "What happened while you were doing that audit?"

"It wasn't… it wasn't anything bad… it's just…" Astra grew quiet and stared into her tea; it was their mother's blend, the same thing she had with Olivier so many times now.

"Astra…?"

"The guild shut down due to the snows, right?" she began, the dam finally giving way. "Naturally, this stranded some people, and of course there was someone from the south who was still boarding in the guild when this happened. We had dinner the night before, which was just supposed to be dinner, but once he was stranded and decided to stay in the guild lodging we kept one another company so as to not go insane, and as it turned out between all our talking and whatnot we fell in love and now we're engaged to be married, and while I don't regret it, I don't know how Papa is going to take it, or Mama, or anyone else, and I'd talk to Tara but she's miles away, and—"

"Okay, stop right there," Lena said, cutting Astra off. "You just said you're engaged to be married."

"Yeah."

"…to some random man none of the rest of us have met yet."

"Yeah."

"…whom you couldn't have spent much more than a week with."

"…yeah…?" She cringed, having now heard it aloud for the first time. "It's better than it sounds, really. We talked a lot about important things once we realized what was going on."

"Now what is stopping me from heading over to Mama and Papa and having them put a complete halt to this nonsense?" Lena asked.

"Olly doesn't know who we are," Astra insisted. "I gave the story Tara always used at the Academy; he wants to be with me, not the Earlessa of Gallifrey's heir… I felt his emotions and everything. There's no way he knows."

"So his name's Olly?"

"Olivier Lakertya; he was here on an errand for his uncle Antoine—he works for him. They transport dry goods, and…"

"Wait, Lakertya?" Lena repeated. She stood when her sister nodded, going towards the other end of the table and shuffling through the papers. "What did you say his uncle's name was?"

"Antoine… um… stars, he said his surname. Pelagon? Peladon? Pelatahn… something like that." She watched as Lena located an envelope and nearly tore the contents from it. "I screwed up, didn't I?"

"That all depends on your perspective," the elder sister said idly. She scanned the letter as she returned to her seat. "What do you remember about Uncle Antoine?"

"Lena, what is that?"

"You're not in the position to be asking questions: now what do you remember?"

"He's his mama's brother, but has been almost like a dad since his wasn't around much," Astra recalled. "The siblings have kept the family business afloat, though it's mainly through the work his uncle did with traveling and negotiations."

"…and this Olivier didn't scare you or put pressure on you or anything like that?"

"No, not at all." Astra drew her legs up and hugged her knees. "This is looking worse as it goes… I'm such an idiot."

"A very lucky idiot, Serdaressa Peladon," Lena smirked. She placed the letter on the table and watched as her sister unfolded herself to look it over. "Out of all the men you had to fall in love with on a whim, you pick a future serdar's heir."

"I don't get it… what is this?"

"That is a notice Papa and I received from the King's Office while you were auditing," she said. "You don't know this, but every year we're given a list of potential serdars and serdaressas in the winter months, so that we may have enough time to make a claim against someone before they are sworn in during the summer." She pulled away the top page and pointed to one clump of text, the names in which Astra found chillingly familiar. "Antoine Peladon of Peladon Shipping and Freight took his family's struggling trading post and turned it into the very backbone of Rhyllish commerce within a matter of decades. He's divorced with no children, which has made him name his sister's son, one Olivier Lakertya, his sole heir to not only his company, but an inheritable title as well."

"Gods… this is Olly…"

"You found yourself love, wealth, and a title and didn't even realize it," Lena chuckled. She took a sip of her tea and watched her sister marvel over the notice. "What's he like?"

"He's very sweet and kind, and if he wasn't there, I likely would have gone mad since there was no one else around," Astra blushed. "He did steal a kiss, but when he realized it was my first, he immediately apologized. I could have thrown him out whenever I wished, and now I'm really glad he never gave me reason to. We decided that he'd return to Gallifrey in the summer to meet our family, so you'll meet him then, and that's when I'll tell him about… um… the things I glossed over."

"Papa's going to be furious, you know this, right? The first of his starlets getting married is something to fear."

"Papa has been in a constant state of furious ever since you came of-age," she reminded her. "Speaking of: are you considering going to Young Lord Romlan's wedding?"

Lena cursed in the ceremonial tongue. "I'm sending a gift and well-wishes with Sir Daniel and Lady Martha, but that's my limit. Why anyone would want to send a wedding invitation to someone he wanted to court at one point is beyond me…"

"It's probably to show he harbors no ill feelings against you," Astra shrugged. "You have to admit that his intended is your complete opposite—lucked out on that one. I didn't get the impression that he was a bad man though…"

"No, simply incompetent and insufficient when it comes to what I want in a husband," Lena said. She took hold of Astra's hand and held it tightly with both her own. "I'll keep your secret and not tell anyone about what happened unless you say so, on one condition."

"What's that…?"

"You better give me as many nieces and nephews as you can possibly stand, because with the way my options look, the marquisate's relying on your issue and not mine."

"Oh, not this, again," Astra groaned, trying to not laugh. "Lena, you're twenty-one—your intended could very well not have attended a social event yet!"

"I'm not taking any chances; you've seen what I have to work with!"

"…and maybe if you weren't cut from Papa's terrifying cloth like Tara was, you might have a chance."

The sisters bickered lovingly for a while before deciding it was a good time to turn in. Astra felt as though the pressure that had been building upon her had lifted, and that things were going to turn out for the better. She hoped it was to be for the better, but only time could tell.

The Violet Sky passed and winter endured. Astra went on another auditing trip to the builders' guild, which was much simpler a task than the merchants' one, and there was not a peep from her father about the propriety of her doing so. She took pride in her work, which seemed to bring the heads of the merchants' guild down a couple pegs after a third-party was brought in to double-check her work and show that they indeed owed much more in taxes than originally given and not simply the work of someone paid to find fault where there was none.

When she returned to her office within the castle, however, she found in her mail a simple letter addressed to "Miss Astra Smith, Department of Accounts, Castle Gallifrey, Kasterborous" in a familiar hand that she kept until late that night to open. Curled up in bed, she eased open the envelope and began to read, a small smile spreading across her lips.

"Dearest Astra," it read, "I'm home and safe. The address that this was sent from is a good one to post a letter to—probably shouldn't send anything to the house after all. I hadn't been worried about Mum, but Uncle Antoine was furious when he heard about us, even threatened to take me to a mental-physician, and I'm pretty sure he'd want to go through anything that comes to the house personally before letting me get my mail…"

It was just as they had figured before parting what felt like half a year ago at that point. His uncle was cross, but that was likely to be the easiest of their problems. She read the letter twice before carefully putting it back in the envelope and slipping it in her nightstand drawer. It felt indulgent, but she dreamt that night of the feeling of his lips against her throat and his hands caressing her through her clothes. The only thing Astra knew was that she felt confident about it all, and it was all she needed.