Things pick up exactly where they left off last chapter, with Magna given a brief respite by her majesty. The yankee will exploit this opportunity for all he can, and who's about to blame him?
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Near the castle walls, and five hundred yards away from the Witch Queen, a man whose ass was currently being thought about climbed toward the Guard station; wading through none of the usual mists that filled the Forest's canopy after they'd dissipated in the harsh afternoon sun.
Being situated on the outskirts of her Majesty's castle, and part of the same massive tree, Magna had gotten away with racing to this destination alone after being dismissed by Sangue, which he was thankful for— any longer in that office with her and he would've blown his gunshot's cover for sure. Even now the ambassador was perspiring heavily, and more from the full, returning pain of his wound than any exertion from the run over. With a wince and a whimper, Magna leant against the building's exterior and ate another painkiller— desperately hoping it would last longer than his last dose. He wondered why these things were barely taking the edge off if they were for 'that' kind of cramp, because like, didn't those hurt like all Hell? His arm still felt like it was filled with pissed-off hornets.
Either way, he just prayed he'd be able to enjoy this break when he walked through the stone-and-birch archways that made up the Guards' base; venturing lost in circles until the sounds of revelry drew him toward, and then into a leisure chamber right next to the entrance. The rec room shifted away from Magna in a single mass as he entered, impolite stares abound; the guards within evidently unnerved by him like he was by Miss Sangue. And again with the cautious, battle-ready postures, acting like he was somebody important as he adjusted his ascot.
It was an unsettling feeling to command so much attention, but upon further consideration, the fire mage from Podunk-Ass-Nowhere wasn't faking at his dignitary status; despite his peasanthood, Magna realized that he was in fact important now. Which was a deeply disconcerting thought.
But also an empowering one…
Going on what we in the industry know as a 'power trip', the Clover ambassador decided it was time to start screwing with these unfortunate soldiers. Snapping his posture to be somehow more bolt-upright than he'd kept his spine on the trip over, Magna shot his best attempt at a withering glare at some young woman whose knees were already knocking together like a Newton's cradle. The poor lady fell back with a quiet shriek as this dour, scar-faced man leaned in to scare her.
The ambassador smiled like the asshole he was at her reaction, and sent another witch into palpitations by extending his rough, calloused hand out for a shake. She accepted the greeting in kind, but looked like she was about to keel over as sweat gushed from her pores. A man wearing a pointed hat cowered away before Magna could make eye contact, which to the yankee was absolutely hilarious. He beamed like a serial killer, which sent more people either retreating away, or putting on their bravest faces while they trembled in place.
God, this punk almost forgot how much fun being the scariest one in the room was— seeing as how The Witch Queen was kind of unbeatable competition in that regard. Although, come to think of it, another person who'd been making any amount of fear mongering nigh-on-impossible was six and a half feet of rock hard muscle, replica school uniform, and punch ghost.
Now that he'd given it more thought, Magna hadn't yet forgiven that general for almost murdering him for shits and giggles.
Also, the Boo lady in question was in the rec room right now; Magna was looking right at her massive silhouette, right at this exact moment. She was standing as far away from the building's center as she could, huddled in the corner and perfectly silent. Though Magna figured that none of the Witch Generals were people-persons (or would that be people-people?) the massive witch actually seemed to be engaged in a one-sided conversation with somebody half her width.
And she was losing.
A closer inspection during which Magna left his frightened victims alone revealed a slight, gangly woman wrapped in a lab coat who was looking up at Boo with sparkles in her eyes. As the man with two-toned hair stalked over, he caught sight of matching wedding bands on the duo's hands, and thought a little vengeance could be had on the massive General. Jaunting up to the smaller woman—who appeared to have a minimum of three knees per leg—he caught the pair's attention with an unjustifiably polite wave.
"Goodness gracious, General Boo? It is such a pleasant surprise meeting you here." Magna said in a cloying, utterly unctuous tone; teasing the lady who beat him within an inch of his life with greasy politeness, "How've you been today? Have ya' almost murdered anybody else lately? Like I said Boo, it's a pleasure just to see you."
The tacit Goliath of a woman just grunted, trying to pretend the man bothering her was a mirage, or some kind of rare, obnoxious species of bird. When she blinked, the ambassador was several feet closer.
"And who is this lovely lady with you?" Magna powered on, casting an inquisitive gaze at the woman hanging off Boo's giant arms; pleading the question with innocent doe eyes. "Wait, don't tell me— is this wonderful wittle woman here your spouse?"
Before any words could escape the bizarre general's mouth, her wobbly arm candy gave the envoy an enthusiastic answer, "Yup! I'm this massive glass of water's darling wife! We're Boo and Hilda Radley— and aren't we just the cutest?"
An evil smile crept across the yankee's already sinister features at Hilda's words, and he asked the general, "Wait a second, your name is 'Boo Radley'?"
Laughter was being held within Magna like his mouth was a broken dam, and when the boy raised a hand to add something to his unanswered first question, he totally lost it. "Ppbfft! Boo Radley! Hahaha! Oh, that's rich!! Hahaha!"
Turning away with her scientist wife holding onto a tree trunk-like arm, 'Boo Radley' tried to hide a gathering blush under her hat's brim. "Good grief, Hilda, he could've never found out…"
Soldiers who'd crowded around the little scene when they heard Boo speak for the first time in hours were laughing as loud as they could without getting their skulls crushed.
"Aww, come on Boo, your name is so cute though~" Hilda said to the pink-faced woman, teasing her further. The first Witch General then plucked up her giggling spouse in the same way one would pick up a cardboard cutout, and fled the building—and that odious little ambassador—as fast as she possibly could without sprinting.
"Yare yare daze. You're all a buncha' rat bastards…" was a fading imprecation at the edge of Magna's hearing when the other people in the room agreed on his 'it's funny when it isn't me' philosophy of mean jokes by laughing along with the asshole-ish man.
Until, that is, he decided to make yet more witches his target. Sidling up to a few people who stopped chuckling when they realized he'd gotten close, Magna swiped a deck of playing cards off their table and gave an invitation to game, "Hey, how about we play some cards? Have a little fun, maybe relax with some poker. But I warn you… I don't lose."
The guards he challenged looked to each other with nerves and sweat dripping into their shirt collars, but mustered all their gumption together and accepted the ambassador's game.
After losing twelve consecutive hands, Magna was in the hole rather than simply flat broke. He moaned in utter defeat as the other players tried calculating how much he'd lost—getting dangerously close to the conclusion that the game could retroactively be considered strip poker—but, just then, the sound of a door slamming open saved his life.
"Hey everybody! I'm here~!" Came a squeaky, excitable voice from the threshold. "I heard the ambassador's in the house? Let me at 'em!"
Magna's card opponents immediately forgot their equations, and leapt from their chairs to greet the newcomer with a screech, "General! You're back!"
"Hell yes! Hell yes!!"
"Pierrette makes her grand return!"
"General!!"
Putting as much distance between himself and the cursed poker table as he could, Magna joined everyone else in welcoming his savior; examining the witchy figure in the doorway, he saw that the woman was blue-haired, barely exceeded five feet in height, and looked like she was wearing clown makeup. Magna was practically certain she wasn't in a jester's face paint, because that would be a ridiculous thing for a general to do— the Queen at least had to have laws against that, right? She was definitely wearing the trademark pointy hat, though that was offset by her poofy, polka dotted sleeves. In any case, she commanded the absolute respect of her fellow witches.
The clown-esque General waded through the crowds toward Magna with honks marking each footstep, and extended an arm in greeting. Her smile was stuck somewhere between guileless and diabolical, and the boy couldn't believe his eyes. With more trepidation than could be justified when reaching inside a wasp's nest, the fire mage reached out to meet her waiting hand.
"HelloMr.Ambassador WingSirMyname isPierrette!" The blue-haired woman said in one mangled word as she shook his entire arm like a spaghetti noodle. "Ahem, uh, I'm Pierrette, the third Witch General, and master of balance magic. I specialize in parties both birthday and war!"
"Umm… Hi." Was all Magna could respond with, stuck in utter disbelief as this literal clown dragged him to the door by the shaken hand she hadn't yet let go of. When his head collided with a stone archway, the yankee's stalling mind started up again, "Wait a sec— what's happening!?"
"The Witch Queen says we're gonna reconnoiter together! How exciting!" The shorter woman shouted as she helped right Magna. And Pierrette, in her exuberance, also gave him a love tap on his left arm, which sent the princely boy into a state of agony so exquisite that it could only be expressed by laughing whilecrying; which the witch didn't seem to catch as she strutted down the branch in front of him.
Magna stumbled after the unknowingly torturous clown in a haze, and tried hiding the sheer volume of tears moving down his cheek. They'd walked halfway down the wooden stairwell when Magna was nagged by a question that sent his mind far enough away from the pain for him to slow the waterworks.
"Wait, wait wait up." He said until the blue-haired girl turnt 'round. As her face prepared itself for a question, the ambassador asked her, "So, what does 'reconnoiter' mean, and why am I allowed to do it?"
"You know how the Queen uses all those weird old -timey words, and people have trouble knowing what she means?"
With a shudder, and a brief flashback to his status as a 'hostage' the young man said, "Yep."
"Well, this time she's just using the wrong word." Pierrette honked a horn—presumably for emphasis—then pointed to the birch road, saying, "Reconnoiter is a tactical military search, but… We're just gonna mosey on over to the border to check out some fancy peeps, say 'howdy', and then scram."
"Oh." Magna said, stepping back into her rhythm in understanding, "Heheh, mosey."
The freakish pair walked through the market atop the thick branches that comprised the Forest paths, winding past treehouses and potion shops; taking in all the lovely or odious smells that wafted up from the witches' pockets of commerce. It was so much easier to check out their stalls and hawkers without a personal phalanx blocking his view, and suddenly, the scar-faced ambassador had another little question vexing him. How was this tiny, goofy witch so powerful that she could accompany him alone?
"Okay, so I know better than to judge a grimoire by its cover, but what does 'balance magic' do? How's a clown become a General?"
Pierrette touched a gloved finger to her white-painted chin, and looked like she was searching for the appropriate words; after nary three seconds pondering, the General said, "Hmm… balance magic? Let's see… it's like, uh, umm, you know what? It'd be a lot easier to just show you. Do you have a knife, or a pin on you?"
Her ascot-clad charge looked dejectedly down at his boots, and said, "I'm not allowed to touch any sharp objects."
"Really? Then what are these?" Pierrette asked as she yoinked a pair of bladed paraphernalia from behind Magna's ears.
"Whoa! You had those in your sleeves this whole time?"
"Aw come on!" She whined, "You're supposed to be surprised!"
"Sorry! I just hang out with a guy made of lightning!" He said, throwing both hands up in defense of his outburst.
"Oh well, at least it wasn't my real trick. Watch this." The clownish witch said as she stuck her knife a quarter-inch into the tree branch that made up the street. She then balanced a pin atop its handle, and so far, Magna was intrigued yet confused. What she did next f*ked him up for life. Lining up her left boot with the pin's head, the lady slowly rose up so that she was standing on only the stacked blades— as if they were a solid, stable platform. From her impossible position on the two pointy objects, she summoned a baton from her grimoire and placed it on the tip of her red nose so it was pointed straight skyward.
As Magna's jaw unintentionally slacked open, the woman grinned, pride painting her painted features at the audience response. "Cool, right? Now push me over! Come on, push me over!"
Feeling nervous about it, but with no inclination to spoil Pierrette's spectacle, the yankee put one hand on her shoulder and pressed forward— already bracing himself for the crash that was sure to follow. But the littlest general didn't fall over, and even when she'd hit a full ninety degree angle, her foot stayed resolutely on the pinhead.
"Balance magic." She said, making finger-guns at a gawking Magna from her horizontal perch. "Great for party tricks; great for kickin' ass."
She hand-sprung backwards off the blade stack, which fell over as soon as her boot left their surface, and caught her baton on her nose again, managing to wow Ambassador Wing so thoroughly that he just stopped moving; frozen in space, his mouth agape, and his spectacles off-kilter.
"I'm glad you liked my show, now let's get moving! Back to work!"
Waving a hand in front of his face proved fruitless in altering the man's stunned expression, as did snapping an inch from his glasses, but the witch needed him to move.
"Come on, Magnus! It's time to do your job!" Pierrette shouted before dragging her motionless charge by the ascot. "We're right next to the border now— so get ready to greet the Diamond Kingdom's diplomats!"
With a single blink, Magna began to move again. He then adjusted his spectacles, and screamed. "The Who!?"
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Several guards ushered Magna back into the castle after his busy, daylong excursions, and they gradually dispersed from around him the deeper they ventured. Once the man hadn't a soul crowding around in their human phalanx, he knew where he wanted to visit before bed.
Swallowing a lump he didn't know was in his throat, Magna knocked on a beautiful mahogany door at the end of a candlelit hall. After a few seconds without any response from within, he creaked the barrier open as politely as he could. Inside the austere office, Magna saw the Witch Queen stretching and yawning at her personal desk; papers scattered across its surface in a meticulous array.
The man almost excused himself without a word, embarrassed to catch her busied like this, but stood his ground when he noticed that she'd already noticed him. Piercing blue eyes like those of wolves carved into Magna, and it took everything he had not to flee from the Queen's gaze. He focused on not letting his legs wobble, and spoke up.
"Hello, Sangue, I'm… I'm sorry I didn't see you last night, I was just…" the ambassador juggled a couple phrases like 'scared' or 'frightened' around in his head but decided on, "Acting childish."
Taking a step closer to the steely-eyed woman he was fated to marry, Magna said, "You seem great, and I'd love to get to know you better, but I can't do that if I'm avoidin' you. So I, uh, guess I wanted to see you again before bed."
"Really?" Her eyebrows raised at his words, seemingly with genuine surprise, "I'm actually rather pleased to hear you say that."
The Queen adjusted the ridiculously wide brim of her hat as she stood up and made her way across the study to Magnus, whose pulse quickened as she stalked near. Once the two were scarcely a foot apart, she continued quite sincerely, "I'd like to know you better too, Magnus. There's a very small list of people I could claim to know well, and I want you on it. Although… that should wait until after we've had some sleep."
It could've been his eyes playing tricks on him, but Magna swore he saw the Queen smiling. And unless it were further delusion, he thought Miss Sangue was pretty darn cute when she smiled. A hint of emotion that even the yankee could recognize was shining through the Queen's façade; the corners of her lips raised ever so slightly as she said, "Goodnight, Magnus."
His fear finally abating in at the sight of her being honest, Magna smiled right back at her and said, "Goodnight, fiancée." Unaware of just how happy his own expression made him look. His face was radiating sunshine and rainbows despite the tiredness that was sinking in. He needed sleep, and began heading out for some.
"Wait, one more thing." The man heard Sangue say as he turned the handle of her office door; he tried looking back at her, but the motion was stopped halfway by the Queen giving him a great big kiss on the cheek. Smooth lips grazed Magna's skin ever so gently, and his face heated up like molten goddamn lava.
"Have pleasant dreams, Magnus." She ordered, staring straight into his gray eyes.
The bashful man couldn't speak except for a curt whimper as he bolted out the door; heart thumping uncontrollably in his bone-dry throat. He prayed it wasn't too horribly offensive to just run away, but he needed to get like, a million feet from everybody right now. Or at least to bed.
Yeah, sleep would be good.
Magna actually had to make a quick stop to panic on the trip back to his guest room/cage/tower, thinking about how few times his nerves had been so frazzled before. That lady didn't even need to touch him to make his every hair stand on end, and then she freaking kissed him. Walking without his knees going limp had become a struggle, and his cheek kept buzzing like an angry bee, but he'd be lying to himself if he said that it didn't feel kinda neat.
Once at his destination in the tower, he found Deandra waiting by his nightstand; flipping through the pages of the children's book Luck had gifted him. Looking up from the little tome as Magna's bootsteps clicked across the misshapen, warped marble, the witch greeted him with a cartoonishly exaggerated wave. When he drew close, she'd calmed down enough to ask him, "So… how's your day been? I've just been sitting here since twelve P.M."
"Apart from the crippling pain, I'm actually feeling pretty great." Magna replied as Deandra prepared her clothes changing spell. Scratching at an itch-less part of his handsome face while thaumaturgy glowed around them, Magna followed up, "I know I was terrified this morning, and I think I still am, but… if it's for everyone back home, I don't think marrying the Queen'd be too bad."
"Aww, that's nice to hear! I'd ask what made you decide she wasn't scary, but I gotta go right now! Bye!"
"Wait! Don'tchya' wanna stay a little longer?" The convalescent man asked, trying not to seem desperate, "I think that accordion ghost might play again soon."
"Sorry, but I must check on Jackass again. It is an awful lot of work to maintain a secret when that secret is a person. Farewell, Magnus." Deandra said, employing her uncharacteristic serious tone for the first time in a while. After a second's pause wherein she regained her goofy demeanor, the small woman ran away from her charge sing-songing, "Bye-bye~! Don't let the assassins make you die~!"
Watching the chipper chamberlain wave enthusiastically goodnight at the exit to the chamber, Magna crawled into his bed, and under the covers; wishing he had somebody to talk to. He cursed silently to himself as he got back up to put his glasses on the nightstand, but he was swearing for different reasons entirely when a minor scale danced through the walls. That ghost played damn beautiful music.
At least Deandra could listen to it while she went ahead and covered up Magna's latest mistake. It still felt bad though, going straight to bed when your partner in crime had to do all the heavy lifting. Although… that was probably for the best, because falling asleep with his arm like this was going to be excruciating. Not to mention the memory of a kiss throwing his mind and guts into disarray.
The young mage strained, wheezed and tossed from pain while those gorgeous melodies permeated the castle tower. The accordion's deft strains barely served as a distraction from the ache stabbing up his wounded arm, and it wasn't enough for the injured boy to rest until a new song began— one gentler, and far more soothing than the others.
With a simple melody, and a slow waltz rhythm, this particular piece captivated his complete attention. Magna couldn't put his finger on exactly why until the music reached its chorus, when his heart twisted itself into a knot.
This is the lullaby dad used to sing.
A wave of nostalgia crashed into him as each accordion note mirrored one from his childhood. Back in the day, whenever Magna had trouble sleeping from crying, or bruises, or hunger, or whatever else might bother a peasant boy, his old man would stay awake with him until he could rest easy— even if it took till the break of day.
Tears pooled in the corner of Magna's eyes, but he was smiling. All the pain in his arm was a distant memory as he was cradled in the sounds of his father's lullaby. Magna hadn't actually heard the song in years, but its familiar melody made this cage feel like a home.
For one beautiful moment in time, he was with his family, curled up by the fire back in Rayaka village, and nothing—no amount of pain or dread—could take that warm feeling away from him.