Sophie
Her teammates always said they never knew what to expect whenever they showed up at Sophie's house. Sometimes it would be full of people. Sometimes it would be full of food. Sometimes it would be full of clothes (Sophie had only a passing interest, but her mother was a famous fashion designer and it was not unusual for the finishing touches to be done by hand). Sometimes it would be full of other members of the team, who always seemed to take up far more room than was strictly necessary, especially Wales.
So today it was both a surprise and not a surprise to find her house full of –
"Sophie, why are you living in a tree?"
Sophie looked around with a jolt, almost dropping the basket of ribbons in her hands. "Oh! Julian, you're here! Sorry, I'll just – hang on, let me – aaargh, how have these managed to get all over the place, I organised them only this morning!"
Julian stayed very still as his only female teammate looked around at the piles of branches and leaves everywhere, then sighed and pushed a box of fir cones off the piano stool. "Um, sorry. This is going to have to do for a chair if you want to sit down. I wasn't expecting you until this afternoon, we'd have tidied up a bit by then."
"It is this afternoon. It's 2pm."
Sophie blinked and looked at her watch. "That… would explain a few things. Again, sorry. We're making wreaths in the dining room, I got distracted."
"Wreaths? How many are you doing? You've got half a forest in here."
Sophie smiled. "There are over thirty doors in my house, Julian. Every door gets one. And then we make ones for the front doors of all our neighbours' houses, and I make some extras. So… about sixty altogether?"
"Sixty wreaths." Julian said flatly. "Sixty."
"We do it every year, it's fun. Except getting pine sap all over my clothes, that's less fun."
"And why do I get the feeling I'm going to be roped into this?"
"Because you are," came Klaus' slightly mournful voice from the doorway to the largest dining room. "I've been here since nine and we haven't stopped yet." He had a trail of ivy wrapped around his upper arm. "I was supposed to be here for coffee."
"That's nothing, I've been here since yesterday," said Wales, coming down the stairs behind them. "Hello, Konzern. Good to see you again. There's no more gold baubles, by the way, Sophie, I checked everywhere."
That was odd. Sophie was certain she had ordered enough for all of the wreaths. "Oh, I'll look again later, they might be in one of the bedrooms. Anyway, we should get some lunch, I hadn't realised how long we'd been working."
"Food!" Klaus cheered, pulling the ivy off.
.
Considering that the wreaths were technically only being made in the largest of Sophie's family's three dining rooms, Sophie was slightly concerned to discover that the only room in the house that had chairs that weren't covered in large amounts of greenery was the second kitchen, and even that had a few stray strands of tinsel. Somehow, her craftwork had spilled out into almost every room in the house. Team Excalibur gathered something resembling lunch together and settled down at the table. Wales in particular looked very relieved to be out of the chaos for a while. Sophie felt a little bit guilty about that – he had arrived earlier than she expected, but taking advantage of that and getting him to help her make nearly twenty wreaths the day before was a little bit mean when he had only come because she'd promised to take him to the Lyon food markets as an early Christmas present.
"Is the operation always this huge?" Julian asked, taking a bite of his trout tartare. "Sixty fresh wreaths is a lot."
"It's not normally sixty," Sophie said. "Normally we'd have a wreath on each of the front gates, one on the main front door, and then one on all of the downstairs internal doors because those are the only ones people will see when they visit, plus the ones for the neighbours and my spare ones. That's about twenty in all. But it's my family's turn to host the extended family for the big Christmas party, and most of them will be staying a whole week so everywhere has to be decorated this year. Hence the sixty." She smiled. "I'm looking forward to seeing my cousins again, though. We don't have the big party every year, so I haven't seen them since I joined Excalibur. They're bladers too, or they were last time I saw them, it'll be nice having something to talk about that isn't the weather or how fast my third cousin's baby is growing up."
"How big is your extended family?" Wales asked. "Sounds like a crowd."
"Forty three at the last count?" Sophie guessed. "Not sure. Some of my distant cousins seem to have a new partner and-or child every time I see them. And then there's the question of exactly where the extended family ends because if we're inviting the third cousins twice removed then you can imagine it gets big pretty fast."
"Christmas is really small in our family," Klaus said. "It's only me, my brothers, my parents and my father's parents. We call other people in the family on webcam, but there's only eight people actually in our house on Christmas."
"That sounds nice," Sophie sighed. "Way less prep, I guess. Even with the servants, it takes days to get this place up to my mother's standards. I've been tidying up non-stop since last Saturday, this is the last bit of mess I'm allowed to make before everything has to be perfect."
Wales seemed to be giving her an evaluating look. "So by all of us helping with the wreaths, we're helping you finish up faster so you don't have to spend so much time cleaning?" he guessed.
"Something like that," she agreed. "I can't remember the last time I had an evening to do nothing. I barely have evenings to train now. Now, we have to get back to those wreaths if we're going to be able to have any time at all later for doing... non-wreath related things."
She led the way back to the greenery-filled dining room, absently noting that Julian was taking his chair with him. Well, the piano stool wasn't the most comfortable of seats, she thought. Klaus immediately returned to his place at the end of the table, where massive trails of ivy wove around every surface and post, and resumed his task of teasing the breakable leaves out of their knotted vines. Wales sat down in his chair and started weaving the framework for what would be the forty-third wreath. Julian, still carrying his chair, looked hesitant, a very unusual expression for someone as self-assured as he was. Sophie cleared a space on the coffee table and dumped the basket of ribbons in front of him. "And what exactly am I doing with these?" he asked.
"Untangling them, then sorting them by colour and size. Any that are less than twenty centimetres long we don't need. Once you're done, give the blue ones to Klaus, any green or red ones to Wales, and the gold and silver ones to me."
She got one curt nod, and then Julian got to work as well.
The rest of the afternoon slipped past. Every wreath was similar but also distinct and unique. Privately, Sophie was quite impressed at how enthusiastically her teammates had taken to the strange craft. Wales' nimble fingers were excellent at weaving the branches together, Julian's eye for colour meant that all of the decorations matched, and Klaus was better than any of them at working out exactly how much greenery would be needed for each individual wreath without even having to measure it. All Sophie needed to do was tidy the wreaths up at the end.
"Sophie, I'm out of branches," Klaus said suddenly. "Oh, no, hang on, I found one!"
"No – Klaus, no, that's the Christmas tree!"
"…oops."
Luckily the damage was contained to a single broken branch, and with Klaus' prodigious strength available to them, it was easy enough to turn the tree around so that the gap in the branches was hidden.
"How many wreaths are we on?" Wales asked, leaning back and stretching his fingers out. "We've got to be nearly done by now."
"This is sixty-two," she said, indicating the one she was putting the finishing touches to. "So this is the last one. Actually, this one is yours."
"Mine?"
Sophie carefully tied off the last ribbon and held up her handiwork. The wreath was slightly thinner than the ones for the doors, mostly made of vines rather than twigs, and thin bits of gold tinsel shreds wove through it, reflecting the light like tiny pieces of jewellery. From between the blue-green fir leaves, dark green holly leaves contrasted against their brilliant red berries, almost the same colour as his hair. "Here," she said. "Put it on."
"Do I get one?" Klaus asked as Wales took the wreath from her and put it on his head.
"Of course," she said. "No, Wales, it's tilted – there, that's right."
Wales tilted his chair back to spot his reflection in the dark window. "Nice," he said. "This is really cool, Sophie!"
Klaus' wreath wasn't the same as Wales' one – his was mostly made of dark fir and willow, set with tiny, silver-painted fir cones and even tinier baubles. In the light from the chandelier, it looked almost black. He put it on himself with great ceremony, and then immediately went off to find a proper mirror.
"Don't you have one, Sophie?" Wales asked, and in answer she picked up one that was almost identical to his, except that where he had holly woven through his, she had oak and mistletoe, with its white berries matching her hair. "Very appropriate," he grinned. "It looks good on you."
"Now I understand the one you made this morning," Klaus said, stepping back into the room. "That was Konzern's, wasn't it?"
Sophie nodded and stood up, going over to the side where the spray-painted fir cones had been left to dry. "Here," she said, and picked up the last wreath and placed it on Julian's head.
Unlike the others, there were no fir cones or baubles or ribbons in this wreath. It was made entirely from leaves and branches, woven together expertly into a crown and then painted gold, like the laurel-wreaths of ancient Rome. A suitable wreath for the Emperor of Europe. Even with so slight a weight added, Julian automatically held his head higher and stood straighter, regal in his victor's crown.
Sophie glanced at the other two, looking equally noble in their black and fir-blue wreaths, and decided enough was enough.
"And now," she said, as grandly as only she could but grinning all the while, "sledging."
.
Her teammates always said they never knew what to expect when they showed up at Sophie's house.
They certainly hadn't expected to spend the dark winter's evening running around outside her house in the snow, wearing wreaths she had made for each of them on their heads, careening up and down the hills and contours of the garden on three sledges and generally not acting like the ridiculously wealthy European heirs they were. She was the last person any of them would have expected to even own three sledges, even if she did live near the Alps., and certainly the last person to suggest playing on them.
Wales flopped down on the snow, his wreath knocked over one eye, laughing helplessly. "This is the most ridiculous thing we've ever done, and that includes what happened on Julian's boat last summer."
"I thought we'd agreed to never speak of that again," said Julian sternly, but as he had a large amount of snow in his hair the impression wasn't quite as severe as it could have been.
"I said nothing about what actually happened. And anyway, we were all there, it doesn't matter that much."
"I am never allowing any of you back on any of my boats ever again."
"Not even the dinghy?" Klaus looked barely more dignified than Wales; he had lost his wreath several times and was now wearing it on his upper arm.
"Even the dinghy," Julian confirmed, just before Wales sat up, grabbed him around the knees and pulled him over into the snow. "WALES!"
Sophie collapsed gracelessly into the snow next to her three teammates, not caring for a second how she looked. This was the first fun she had had in weeks. Yet somehow she got the feeling that even if they had still been inside, making wreaths or tidying up the mess they'd made, or eating dinner, or training, she would still be having fun.
It was very hard not to have fun when she had all of her team with her. Victors and royalty and heirs and champions they might be, wearing crowns even in the snow, but ever since they had come home from Spiral City as a proper team, it was impossible not to have fun with them.
Klaus got to his feet and grabbed the tow ropes of the three sledges. "Hey," he said. "Climb on. I'll drag you all back up to the top of the hill."
Sophie had never thought she would be sitting on a sledge next to Julian Konzern, being pulled up a snowy slope by Klaus, wearing a fir-and-mistletoe wreath she had made herself. She put a hand up to her wreath only to feel it coming undone. Moments later, though, Wales had noticed and was already working to fix it, using a loose strand from his own wreath to tie it together more firmly.
Yes, she thought. As long as she had these three with her, there was nothing she couldn't do.
