Chapter 76 – Waiting Maidens (Tamara)
I hated him first.
I need to say that clearly, or I'll start lying to myself again and pretending it was always this soft, aching… whatever this is.
No.
At the beginning, I hated him.
The way he looked at me like I was background noise. The way his eyes slid over my title, my family crest, the way everyone else bent around "Lady Tamara of House Orvel," and he just… didn't.
I remember grabbing his sleeve.
It's stupid, the things that stick in your head.
The rough texture of the Academy-issue coat under my fingers. The way his arm didn't even budge when I yanked, when any other boy would've stumbled. The tiny pause before he turned his head—slow, like he already knew what he was going to see and was just deciding how annoyed to be about it.
Then those blue eyes on me.
"What?" I'd snapped before he could say anything. "You have something to say, commoner?"
He looked down at my hand on his sleeve.
Then at my face.
"You're being noisy," he said. Calm. Flat. Like he was commenting on the weather.
I felt my cheeks burn.
"Do you know who I am?" I'd demanded. "I am Tamara Orvel, daughter of Duke—"
"If you have that much energy," he cut in, "put it into something that isn't pathetic."
Then he just turned and walked away, dragging my hand with him for a few steps until I had to let go or fall on my face.
No one ever spoke to me like that.
The words lodged under my ribs and stayed there.
I spent weeks trying to convince myself I hated him.
Some days, I still manage it.
***
Four years.
From twelve to sixteen.
It feels longer, when you stretch it across waiting.
The Academy kept moving after he left. Classes, exams, duels, gossip, festivals, all of it. Life doesn't stop because one boy walks out the gate with a sword on his back and a plan in his eyes.
It just… rearranges.
I still train.
I still spar.
I still study tactics and politics and all the boring things Father says I need to know if I ever want to stand beside him instead of behind him.
But under all of that, there's a thin, constant thread:
If he saw me now, would he still call me pathetic?
My body changed first.
I'm not tall—Annoying Truth Number One—but I'm taller than I was. My legs are longer. My balance is better. Muscle has settled under my skin in places that used to be soft. The mirror shows someone who looks like she's supposed to be holding a sword, not just posing with one for portraits.
My hair's still that ridiculous bright blue. Mother insists it's a "distinguishing trait." I call it a beacon for trouble.
It's longer now, usually braided tight down my back for training. When Lyra gets her hands on it, it ends up in loops and twists and things I don't have names for, and somehow we always end up matching, her red hair and my blue like some stupid poster for "fire and water" or whatever nonsense the Staff campus poets are babbling about this week.
We really could pass for twins if you squint. Same height. Same build. Same uniform. Different colours.
We weren't always like this.
I used to resent her.
The way she clung to Erynd. The way she looked at him like he was gravity and oxygen and every other necessary thing. The way she pretended to be shy and harmless when I knew perfectly well she could cut a man's throat in three strokes if she had to.
Now she's…
…still terrifying.
But she's my terrifying.
Somehow, in all the blood and screaming and waiting, we ended up on the same side.
***
Noelle was the first to change her name.
I think that's when it really hit me that time was passing even without him here.
We were in the common area. Random day. Random conversation. Some new Staff campus student misgendered her three times in a row and then made it worse by apologizing to "Lord Noel."
She didn't flinch.
"I'm Noelle," she said. Calm. Steady. Like this was always the truth and she was just… adjusting the world to match it.
The room went quiet in that awkward, brittle way people get when something important happens and no one wants to be the first to say the wrong thing.
The new student stammered an apology.
Noelle smiled, this small, tired, brave thing.
"It's alright," she said. "It's new for me too."
Later, when it was just the three of us on the stair landing, I asked, "Since when?"
She fiddled with the edge of her sleeve.
"Since always," she said. "I just… didn't have the word. He—"
She stopped, cheeks colouring.
"—helped," she finished quietly.
Of course he did.
Even gone, he keeps changing us.
***
It wasn't all soft moments and names and hair.
We bled.
The Academy is supposed to be safe. That's what they tell parents when they send their children here: the wards are strong, the instructors vigilant, the Goddess watching.
It's a lie.
Or maybe it used to be true and the world stopped cooperating.
We were fourteen when the demon came.
A proper one this time. Not just warped beasts at the edge of the grounds. Not some "rare accident," neatly contained.
We were walking back from the cafeteria. Lyra on my left, Noelle on my right. I remember because Lyra was stealing food from my plate and Noelle was scolding her and somehow I was the one getting lectured.
"I'm just saying," Lyra said, chewing, "if Erynd were here—"
"He isn't," I snapped. Faster than I meant to.
They both went quiet.
You could feel his name in the air between us.
"He isn't," Lyra echoed softly. "But if he were, he'd probably tell you to stop wasting training time lurking by the gate."
My face went hot.
"I do not lurk," I said.
Noelle coughed delicately.
"You rotate by the gate," she said. "Aggressively."
I was about to tell them exactly what they could do with their opinions when the screaming started.
The Academy has a lot of different screams.
There's the panicked "I failed my exam" scream. The outraged "someone spiked the stew with a prank potion" scream. The high, embarrassed "I walked into the wrong dorm bathroom" scream.
This wasn't any of those.
This was raw.
Animal.
The kind of scream people make when something is chewing on them and they are not ready to die yet.
We looked at each other once.
Then we ran.
Erynd called me "noise." He also called me "fast."
The second one was true even then. It's more true now.
We cut sideways through the crowd, Lyra grabbing Noelle's wrist and dragging her along as I broke trail. We vaulted a bench, ducked under a swinging practice blade from some idiot who didn't realise the world was ending, and followed the sound toward one of the old practice fields.
The ones with the bad wards. The ones the instructors say "we don't use anymore" but never quite seal off.
When we got there, the first thing I saw was blood.
It was everywhere.
Splashed up the wall in broad smears. Sprayed across the dirt. Soaked into the uniform of an instructor I recognised, though not well enough to name.
One student lay on the ground with his eyes open and his chest open too. Another… I couldn't even tell where his arm had gone.
And the thing that had done it turned toward us.
Demon.
Not demonkin. Not monster. Demon.
You can feel the difference.
This wasn't something that belonged here. Its body looked like a sketch someone had drawn over three wrong references. Too many joints. Too many teeth. Skin that kept shifting under my gaze, colour rippling between bruised purple and drowned grey and something like mould.
Its face—if you could call that mess a face—had a mouth that opened the wrong way, and nothing where eyes should be except two pits that still managed to look back.
My legs wanted to lock.
My throat wanted to close.
I almost let them.
Then my body moved the way it had when he shouted at me to move.
Years earlier.
Sweat. Blisters. The training field at dawn when even the instructors were still half-asleep. His voice, flat and irritated: "Again. Your feet are stupid. Fix them."
He'd grabbed my ankle once, physically moved my foot.
"Here," he'd said, tone clipped. "Your affinity is wind and fire, not stone. Stop pretending you're a wall. Be a knife."
I'd stared at him.
"How do you even know that?" I'd demanded. "Affinity, I mean."
He'd given me that look. The "are you really making me explain something this simple" one.
"Because you move like you're fighting air," he'd said. "And you lose to it. You're already using it. Badly. So use it well."
That day he'd changed everything.
He built me a stance from scratch, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Fire and wind coiled together—heat in my core, speed in my legs.
"Your sword isn't the weapon," he'd said. "Your body is. The wind magic is just propulsion. Fire for intimidation, for distraction, for your blade when you need it. But your legs, Tamara. That's where you're dangerous. So stop pretending you're a stationary turret and start acting like a storm."
Then he made me run.
Wind spells layered around my calves and thighs, tiny adjustments in vector and pressure until the world blurred under my feet. Over and over until I collapsed.
"Again," he'd say when I fell. "You want to call yourself fast? Then be fast enough that people stop seeing you as the Duke's daughter and start seeing you as a threat."
Now, staring at the demon, my body remembered before my brain caught up.
I slid sideways, weight light on the balls of my feet, wind magic whispering around my ankles. Not enough to lift. Just enough to push.
"Tamara," Lyra hissed. "Do we—"
"We hold," I snapped. My voice sounded steadier than I felt. "I'll run if I have to. You keep it busy. Noelle—"
"I know," Noelle said tightly. "I know."
The demon shrieked.
It lunged.
Lyra moved with that wild, too-sharp grace of hers, sword flashing in a red arc. Noelle's magic surged, a web of shimmering light that snagged at the demon's joints, slowing it just enough that we didn't all die in the first three seconds.
It still nearly killed us.
It was fast.
I was faster.
Wind coiled under my feet, little bursts of propulsion just ahead of my steps, turning every movement into something more. I darted in, slashed, darted back. The blade bit once, twice—not deep enough, but enough to get its attention.
It snarled.
It swung an arm too long and too jointed at me.
I should have been too slow.
But the rhythm Erynd had beaten into me took over.
Step. Cut. Burn.
Wind in the ankles, fire in the blade, body turned sideways to present less target, weight already shifting before the strike landed.
It looked effortless from the outside, I think. Like I'd always moved like that.
Inside, it was pain and panic and his voice in my head, insulting my footwork.
You're wasting speed. Stop leaning. Fix your line. If you die because you insisted on running wrong, I'll climb out of the grave just to tell you I told you so.
I almost laughed.
Instead, I shouted, "Lyra, left!" and kicked off the ground so hard the wind under my soles crackled.
Lyra slid under the swinging limb, aura flaring along her sword in jagged bursts. The demon's claws scraped where her head had been a heartbeat earlier, met nothing, and crashed into the barrier Noelle had thrown up behind me.
Light shattered.
The demon staggered.
"Go!" I screamed, and ran.
Not away.
Around.
I tore out of the field, every step a controlled explosion. The world blurred; the air burned in my lungs. I wasn't just running anymore—I was riding the wind at my feet, each spell-twist precisely where it needed to be because a boy who called me pathetic had sat me down and forced me to understand the difference between "fast" and "efficient."
I found the instructors.
I screamed until my throat hurt, the word "DEMON" tearing out of me like it was going to rip my chest open.
They came.
Maren with fire already in her hands. Hal with that terrifying stillness that means he's about to kill something. A priest whose name I never caught but whose eyes were already going hard.
We ran back.
Lyra and Noelle were still there.
Lyra bleeding, wild, grinning like a lunatic. Noelle white-faced and shaking, hands glowing as she held the demon in place by sheer stubborn magic.
They hadn't broken.
They'd held.
Because of us.
Because of him.
Because one boy with too many secrets and not enough patience had looked at three loud, broken girls and decided we were still salvageable.
The adults hit the demon like a hammer.
The fight after that was almost… simple.
Fire. Steel. Light.
It died screaming, flesh collapsing into a slick, wrong-smelling heap.
For days, the field smelled like burned ink and rotten meat. Even after the priests "purified" it, the air there felt thin.
We weren't allowed near it.
We went anyway, just to stand at the edge and stare.
"We would have died without him," Lyra said once, quiet, fingers white-knuckled on the fence.
"We didn't," I said.
"Because of him," Noelle added.
I didn't argue.
***
We changed after that.
Not all at once. Not in some dramatic "we are different now" ceremony.
Just… bit by bit.
Lyra stopped pretending to be shy around anyone who mattered. The mask she shows strangers is still there, but thinner. The real one—the one with teeth and claws and terrifying loyalty—is closer to the surface.
Noelle stopped apologizing for existing. She still stammers sometimes, still curls in on herself when the Church sticks its nose too far into Academy business, but when she lifts her hands and light gathers there, people listen.
And me?
I stopped being content with just "fast."
It wasn't enough anymore to sprint and show off and preen when people gasped.
I wanted to be fast enough to matter.
Fast enough to stand in front of something from outside the world and make it pick me instead of the people behind me.
Fast enough that when he came back and looked at my stance, he would nod instead of sighing.
"Do you think he's dead?"
Lyra asked it once. Only once.
We were fifteen. Sitting on the dorm roof, legs dangling over the edge, the city lights blinking in the distance like fireflies too lazy to move.
"No," I said. Instantly. Too fast.
She raised an eyebrow.
"That sounded very confident," she said. "Almost like you've personally checked every grave on the continent."
"I'd know," I said.
It came out before I could think.
"How?" she asked quietly.
Noelle, lying on her back between us, watching the stars, answered instead.
"If he died," she murmured, "it wouldn't be quiet. The Goddess would… move. The wards would shiver. The whole world would tilt just a little to one side. We'd feel it."
We'd all gone silent.
Because we'd all felt smaller shifts before.
Dukes dying.
Cities burning.
Outer things pressing at the edge of the sky.
If Erynd Milton died and stayed dead, the world would absolutely do something dramatic and stupid about it.
So he isn't dead.
He's just… late.
I still go to the gate.
Not every day. That would be pathetic.
…Most days.
I tell myself I'm doing "speed drills." That checking the stone for cracks is "practical." That watching the road is "situational awareness."
Lyra rolls her eyes when she catches me.
"If you start carrying a sign that says 'welcome home, idiot,' I'm staging an intervention," she says.
Noelle just smiles this soft, knowing smile and brings me water.
We don't talk about how all three of us are waiting in our own ways.
Lyra waits in the training yard, cutting imaginary throats with that too-sharp smile on her face.
Noelle waits in the chapel, whispering prayers to a Goddess who occasionally answers by rewriting reality.
I wait by the gate.
Watching the road.
Feeling the wind around my legs, ready to move.
Sometimes, late at night, when I'm too tired to lie convincingly even to myself, I think about the future.
About him walking back through that gate.
Does he just… appear? Casual, like he never left? Drop his bag on the table in the cafeteria and steal food off our plates like he always used to?
Does he look older? Taller? New scars? Different eyes?
Does he look at me and see the same loud, angry girl he called "noise"?
Or does he see the person I've been trying to become:
A storm.
Not just the Duke's daughter.
Not just a fast pair of legs for fetching teachers.
Someone who can stand beside him while the world ends and not have him worry about whether I can keep up.
It scares me, how much I want that.
It scares me more, how much it would hurt if he came back and chose someone else.
Lyra, with her knife-smile and obsessive devotion.
Noelle, whose whole soul tilts toward him like a flower toward light.
Someone I don't even know yet.
I press my palms over my eyes and breathe until my chest stops hurting.
Then I get up and run drills until my knees feel like they're going to shatter and my lungs are on fire.
If I'm going to be pathetic, I can at least be pathetic with good footwork.
I still hate him, sometimes.
For leaving.
For changing everything and then walking away like we'd just… sort it out.
For putting his hand on my ankle, shifting my stance by a finger's width, and somehow altering the entire path of my life in the space of one sentence:
"Stop fighting the air. Make it fight for you."
I hate him.
I miss him.
I want to hit him and hug him and show him the way my wind magic curves around my legs now, the way my fire bites cleaner, the way my sword moves like it finally knows what it's for.
I want him to look at me and see me.
Not as "noise."
Not as "the Duke's annoying daughter."
As Tamara.
Storm-footed.
Waiting.
Ready.
Come back soon, idiot.
Before the next demon.
Before the next thing from outside the universe decides the Academy looks like a snack.
We're holding as best we can.
We're growing.
We're waiting.
But even storms burn out if they circle the same sky for too long with nothing to strike.