"Come in. Just remember to wipe your feet."
Two days had passed, and at last the oracle Nkiri led the couple into her personal hut.
It was smaller than Firion expected for someone so revered, but every inch of it spoke of a long and well-traveled life. Carved idols of lions stood watch from shelves and corners, some in dark wood, some in polished stone, one cast in iron and dulled with age. Tapestries covered the walls, woven in deep ochres, crimsons, and golds, depicting lions on the hunt, rivers of stars, and figures with outstretched hands. In the center of the stone floor sat a round fire pit, and the flames within it did not burn orange. They shifted and shimmered through every color, violet to emerald to gold, like light passing through a prism.
Against one wall stood a neat row of wooden barrels. Firion caught their sweet, heady scent at once. It was the same coconut rum that had flowed freely at the village banquet the night before.
Perhaps the distiller is someone from their clan, he thought.
But it was neither the idols nor the flames that caught Kaida's attention. On one of the woven carpets, curled in a sunbeam, lay a tiny kitten. Its fur was snowy white and dappled with dark rosettes, and its round belly rose and fell as it slept.
Kaida's heart melted on the spot. She ached to scoop it up, but she held herself back. It belonged to someone, and it would be rude to touch it without asking.
"Oh, that leopard cub belongs to one of my daughters," Nkiri said, following her gaze. Then she turned her head and bellowed, "NEEMA! COME GET YOUR KITTY!"
Quick footsteps pattered through the doorway, and a young yumbo girl hurried in. She wore a simple green dress, and her white hair was woven into a neat braid that swung down her back. She gathered the drowsy cub into her arms, gave the guests a polite little nod, and slipped back out.
The lioness snickered at their expressions. "Most people assume she is one of my grandchildren. But she is my youngest child. I bore Neema only seventy-seven years ago."
Firion's jaw slackened. Kaida's eyes went round with wonder.
Elf women were generally fertile only until their fourth century, while elf men could father children for far longer. Deva women, however, could remain fertile well into their eighth century. It was yet another reason Aldenburg's nobles coveted them so.
Nkiri lowered herself onto a cushion beside the fire and gestured for them to sit.
"From what Emani and the others have told me, the two of you have lived sheltered lives, each in your own way," she said. "So first, I will explain the breeding practices that have gone on between elves and devas for tens of thousands of years. I know you came to learn what your future might hold. But for me to see such a thing, you must first understand how this world truly works."
They settled on the cushions around the fire pit. Up close, Firion saw what lay at the heart of the strange flames: a cluster of glittering crystals, glowing from within. Fire mana stones, he realized. And very high quality ones. It struck him as odd. Most of the townsfolk he had met seemed to avoid such things.
But for oracles, these precious stones served a purpose. They allowed a seer to project her mind into the flames and give shape to what she saw.
Nkiri held her hands over the embers. Slowly, her fingers began to move, and the colored flames bent and curled to follow them, as though she were weaving threads of light into a picture.
"Let me start with the basics," she said. "I cannot tell you which union between elf and deva was the very first. But the earliest marriage between the white fangs and the first elves who came to Junai dates back at least forty thousand years. And in all that time, far more yumboes have been born than deva children. Do you know why?"
The flames twisted into the faint silhouettes of a lion and an elf, standing hand in hand.
"Because whenever a deva, man or woman, has a child with an elf, that child is always born an elf. An elf with a renewed bloodline."
"I already know this," Firion said quickly. "When Kaida and I fled, we overheard soldiers speaking of it. Aldenburg's ruling families have been secretly taking blue horn women as wives to produce highborn elf children."
"So you are beginning to see the truth." Nkiri's violet-tinged flames flickered. "Aldenburg's nobles keep the secret of the devas from their people because their power rests on blood purity. If the common folk knew that ANY child born to a deva parent is a pure elf, with a bloodline as sacred as their royalty's, perhaps even more so…" She let the words hang. "Well. You can see why they guard it so closely."
Firion nodded slowly. Then, for the first time in a very long while, he began to speak of his past.
He told the oracle what he had witnessed over the centuries: the cruelty and hypocrisy of Aldenburg's highborn, the way they treated those beneath them. He told her of the day his childhood ended, when he was not yet a century old and the wildfires swallowed the Jade Forest whole. He had watched the flames devour his home and his family before his very eyes. And he told her of the prejudice that followed him for every year he lived in Aldenburg afterward, a forest elf among high elves, never quite one of them.
As he spoke, Kaida's heart grew heavy. She already knew he had lived a life full of injustice, but watching him drag those memories back into the light was something else entirely. Through her horns she felt the old grief rising in him, grey and cold as ash.
Just as he always sought to protect her, she longed to protect him too, to help him forget that horrible place for good. She shifted closer and laced her fingers through his, gently stroking the back of his hand with her thumb.
The tension in his shoulders eased at her touch. He went on to tell Nkiri how he met Kaida, and why Aldenburg's soldiers might be hunting them. If he was right, Kaida's mother had been promised to a member of the ruling family, and now the ruling family wanted the daughter in her place.
Nkiri turned her gaze to Kaida and chuckled. "Our villagers notice outsiders quickly enough, but few of them pay attention to the finer details. In all my years, I have seen many blue horns with silver hair. You are the first I have ever met with red."
She leaned closer, studying the young maiden's face in the shifting firelight. Then recognition dawned in her eyes.
"Wait a moment… You were the girl in the mud bath! The one who wanted to touch my ears!"
Kaida's mouth fell open. "That was you?!"
Firion blinked. "You met her at the bathhouse?"
"She came right over to where I was enjoying my weekly mud soak," Nkiri said with a wave of her hand. "I could have revealed myself then and there, but I do like to enjoy my day without someone begging me to read their future, or asking what the weather will be like for the next seven weeks, or whether their goat will…"
"Ah, Bibi! I did not travel all this way to listen to you drag out such a boring conversation!"
A man's voice. It came from somewhere inside the hut.
The oracle's face twisted into a snarl, her lips peeling back to reveal sharp lion's teeth. "Watch your mouth, boy, when you address me like that."
A curtain at the back of the room stirred, and a figure stepped out from behind it.
Firion's blood ran cold. He had not heard a single heartbeat. Not one breath, not one rustle of cloth. Someone had been standing in that room the entire time, and his ears, the ears he trusted more than any blade, had caught nothing.
Worse still, he knew that cloak. It was the same eerie, hooded figure from the market, the one who had spoken to them beneath the statue of Ogun.
"There is no need to look so horrified. I have not done anything to you… yet." The figure's voice was smooth and faintly amused. "I am here with the oracle's permission, so long as I behave myself. But I have simply been DYING to speak with the forlorn elf who fell in love with the very last blue horn of noble blood."
He reached up and pulled back his hood.
Beneath it was a tall, fair-skinned elf with neatly combed chestnut hair and sharp green eyes, framed by a pair of round glass monocles. Even standing in a humble clay hut, he carried himself as though he were walking the marble halls of a palace.
Sweat beaded on Firion's brow. In one swift motion he pulled Kaida behind him, shielding her with his body.
"Derek Moonspeaker," he growled. "Of all people. What are you doing here?"
Moonspeaker. The name struck a memory loose. The ducal family whose farms fed most of Aldenburg. The daughter who used to visit the barracks to collect the army's produce ledgers, with her snow-white hair and dark skin, so foreign that half the soldiers forgot their drills to stare.
"Now, now," Derek said, raising both hands. "I am not showing any hostility, am I? So why don't we all calm down a little… former Twelfth Captain of the Lustrodos army?"
Behind Firion, Kaida had begun to tremble. She had no idea who this man was or what was happening. Emotions crashed through her horns from every direction at once: Firion's fury, the oracle's irritation, and from the stranger, a tangled, unreadable knot. They pulled at her mind from every side until she could barely think.
Derek noticed the girl shaking, and his expression shifted. He seemed to realize he had made the situation far tenser than it needed to be.
"Alright, alright! Please, calm down!" he said, his tone softening. "As I said, I mean you no harm. I am actually here to help you!"
Firion was not convinced. The few times their paths had crossed in Aldenburg, Moonspeaker had always struck him as unsettling, even domineering. He had been cold and stern with military officers and never tolerated anything he took as disrespect.
Firion's lip curled. "Why would a duke be in a rural town like Taraji? The ruling class taught me that Junai was full of uncultured savages. So why are nobles like you welcomed here with open arms?"
Every line of his body said the same thing. Why should he trust a man who had always looked down on him?
"Please, listen to my husband."
A warm, feminine voice drifted in from the doorway.
"He can be eccentric with his words, but he speaks the truth. He truly wants to help you, and to keep that red-haired blue horn from being found by the ruling family."
A woman glided into the hut, and the room seemed to brighten around her. She was tall and beautifully curvaceous, with long white hair that flowed behind her like a river of silk. A pair of round lion ears peeked from her locks, and a tufted tail swayed lazily at her back. She was unmistakably a white fang deva. Her eyes were a striking violet, and there was something in the shape of her face, the line of her jaw, the proud set of her shoulders, that was strangely familiar.
She looked almost like a younger Nkiri.
"My niece!" the oracle growled, rounding on her. "You promised me he would behave himself! And instead he goes skulking about in costume, terrorizing everyone, and pops out unannounced just as I am explaining things to this elf and his red-haired blue horn!"
"You are mistaken, Bibi!" Derek protested. "I only kept my identity hidden so I could approach them myself and see what truly happened in the Untouched Forest. I needed to be sure the girl had not been taken by force!"
Firion listened closely. Now that the man stood in the open, his ears could finally pick up Derek's heartbeat, and it was slow and steady. No lie quickened it. He was telling the truth. Behind him, Kaida's trembling eased as well. The storm of emotions in the room was settling, and the knot she had felt from the stranger was loosening into something she recognized: sincerity.
Duke Moonspeaker let out a breath and nudged his monocles back into place.
"Firion, you were well known for your service on the front lines," he said. "And for your notorious history with the blue horns, and with the burning of the Jade Forest. Part of my purpose here was to see whether the girl was being mistreated. But from what I have observed, she clearly trusts you. I have also looked into your botched assassination. The one arranged by that imbecile, Adan."
The anger in Firion's face gave way to something closer to curiosity. Kaida, however, remained guarded. She had held him through too many nightmares to let her guard down so easily.
"Yes, I know about the crimes committed against you," Derek continued, "even though you served Aldenburg faithfully. I am not here to persecute you, Firion. I am here to help you and that Min-ari girl live your lives unbound."
Soon all of them were gathered around the glowing mana stones, their faces painted in shifting colors as the duke began to reveal the secrets that had brought him there.
The first concerned his wife. Her name was Nafula, and she was Nkiri's niece. As a little girl, she had been snatched away by traffickers who dealt in living flesh. They had murdered her parents and tried to carry her off. Derek had found them and killed the kidnappers himself. Then he had taken the orphaned child to Aldenburg, where she was raised in one of the kingdom's monasteries, alongside a number of young blue horn girls.
So it was true. Everything Firion had pieced together from the ancient tome and the soldiers' careless gossip was true. Deva girls, most of them blue horns, were being carefully raised to become the wives of elven nobles. When devas bred with elves, their divine-beast traits vanished in the child, and the nobles had discovered that deva spouses gave them pure-blooded elf children with stronger, mana-rich bloodlines.
Then the air in the hut grew heavy again.
Derek began to explain how the high elves had been able to take those girls from Mycean in the first place. And it all led back to the burning of the Jade Forest. The very fire that had destroyed Firion's life the first time.
Firion's face hardened to stone. He could feel it coming, something that would make his blood boil. Kaida felt it too, rising in him like heat from a forge. She wrapped both her hands around his, and the gesture soothed him just as it always did.
"You see, the burning of your homeland was not entirely one-sided," Derek said carefully. "There was friction between the forest elves and the blue horns long before the fire. One cause in particular: the forest elves built a dam along one of Mycean's borders, and it brought drought to several neighboring villages. The blue horns begged for the dam to be torn down. But negotiations were impossible, because at the very same time, word spread that a young elf girl and an adolescent deva boy had gone missing…"
He paused.
Firion's eyes narrowed to slits. "Wait. Children went missing? And what exactly led to the dam burning down? I was told the blue horns did it out of malice!"
Derek's gaze sharpened behind his monocles. "I came here to help you, Firion. But if you keep using that tone with me, I may change my mind. Would you kindly ease up?"
Firion clenched his jaw, but he held his tongue.
"As I was saying," Derek went on, "the burning of the dam was a stunt gone terribly wrong. The blue horns only meant to burn its foundation. What they did not realize was that the timber had been sealed with tree sap. The flames caught far faster than anyone expected. Within hours, the fire had not only devoured the dam, it had spread into the surrounding forest and poisoned the river." He shook his head slowly. "All of it could have been avoided, if only both sides had been willing to talk to one another."
The colored flames crackled softly in the silence.
"Hmph. So it was nothing more than a string of poor decisions?" Firion said at last, his voice low. "Then tell me. How did the burning of my home allow Aldenburg's nobles to get their hands on blue horn women?"