It was a nice day outside. The air was warm but not hot, the sunlight softening the chill of a light breeze. Vellner would have been soaking in the sensations, if he weren’t so focused on keeping his balance where he sat on Kiran’s shoulder, and his own confusion.
The fact that Kiran had left his room with Vellner on his shoulder wasn’t necessarily surprising. And Vellner supposed that even princes wanted to walk beyond the castle walls every once in a while. Even the fact that Kiran had firmly refused a guard, informing the castle patrolmen that he was only going for a walk, wasn’t beyond the prince’s normal stubbornness.
It was the fact that Kiran wouldn’t even tell Vellner where they were going that the fairy found irksome.
Still, Vellner had let it be, until he realized that the field they were crossing – and the forest they were steadily heading towards – was familiar. He’d seen this field from the air once, after a… rescue. Somewhere deep in those familiar trees lay the fairy village.
“Hey, hold up!” Vellner blurted. He looked up at Kiran’s face, though of course couldn’t catch the human’s eye from this angle. “I know where you’re headed. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m taking a walk,” Kiran casually replied, seemingly unbothered.
“Bullshit.” Vellner squinted at him, finding himself suddenly much more invested in this outing. “I don’t know what your plan is here, but you should just turn around and go home. Haven’t you bothered the other fairies enough already?”
There was a moment of silence, the only sound the brushing of the long grass up against Kiran’s boots. Eventually the reply came, an admittance spoken much more quietly than Vellner expected. “I likely have. This still has to be done.”
Vellner didn’t like the sound of that. “What has to be done?” he asked warily.
Kiran just shrugged slightly, bobbing Vellner up and down on his shoulder and making the fairy scramble for a tighter grip on his collar. “You’ll see.” After that he refused to talk about it any more. By the time they reached the tree line, Vellner’s attempts at asking questions had fallen off into a surly silence.
They eventually reached a clearing: the one where Kiran and Vellner had met after Kiran ran away, the one that Lyra had chased Kiran away from, the one where Kiran had changed his mind about setting Ebby free. The one where Vellner had lost his freedom again. The fairy shivered slightly, all these memories colliding, only to jump out of his skin as Kiran shouted, “Lyra!” at the top of his lungs.
“What the fuck are you doing?!” Vellner demanded, his heart still pounding in his chest from the scare. Kiran ignored him, just calling Lyra’s name again, loud enough that he could probably be heard all the way in the fairy village.
Then again, that was probably the point.
Kiran yelled again, and when Vellner’s ears stopped ringing he demanded, his voice tight, “Seriously, what are you up to? If… if you try to hurt Lyra, I swear…” He didn’t exactly have an end to that sentence, knowing all too well how little he could influence Kiran’s decisions, but he couldn’t just let it slide without saying something.
“I’m not going to hurt her,” Kiran countered. Vellner couldn’t quite see the prince’s face, but he frowned at what sounded like offense in the prince’s voice. “I just… I promise it’s nothing bad, I just need to talk to her.”
