Chapter 27: 27. Ren Smiles
Later that afternoon, Ren went out to the courtyard to admire Jack's chalk drawings. They were surprisingly ordinary: big and little stick figures holding hands against a city backdrop, with only a few stick figure corpses scattered around.
"Exactly what I hoped to see," Ren told Jack, who beamed before scampering off to take the nap she'd been anticipating.
The outer curtain wall of the fortress had mostly been repaired, but Ren could identify the exact point, two thirds of the way through, where Merlin had gotten distracted by redesigning the courtyard instead. What had been an expanse of packed earth, ancient cobble and piles of rubble had been transformed into the skeleton of a garden. Unbroken stone walkways opened onto a central court that still had plenty of space for drills and inspections, but rows of not-quite-flowering shrubs set off the central area from, on one side, a grassy lawn that looked perfect for sparring, and, on the other side, a more extensive set of shrubberies including some berry bushes that curved around the side of the keep.
"What happened here?" Ren asked the magus, who sat in a wide wooden swing on the far side of the sparring lawn.
"It's your own fault," Merlin said, yawning. "You told Jack to go draw but there wasn't exactly a good surface that I wasn't already using. This was exhausting, too." He yawned again, pointedly, and then peeked at her with one eye.
Ren still felt the lingering glow of her earlier triumph over Merlin, and it made her inclined to look kindly on his sulkiness. "Aw. It's very nice, though, and if it wouldn't be utterly useless to you, I'd even brush your hair." She gave him a sweet smile before bending to inspect one of the shrubbery flower buds.
After a long silence, he said, "All right, I may have gone a little overboard. But this is not the reaction I hoped for!"
Ren glanced up, bemused. Merlin slouched in the swing, looking annoyed, so she tried again. "Hey, I said I liked it! It's beautiful. And the walls are over half done. You worked hard. Take the evening off! I just wish I could help restore your energy."
After a moment, he said, barely audible across the lawn,"You can, you know."
She was about to ask him what he meant when she met his lilac eyes and flashed back to lying almost nose-to-nose with him after they'd crashed through the trees together. She'd felt his breath on her face and realized what a dangerous, attractive trickster he was.
"Never mind," said Merlin abruptly, standing up. Then, in a very different voice, he said, "Eheheh, just thinking of your attempt yesterday. No good at all! Here, let's finish up Jekyll's bracelet. Have you decided on your grand plan yet?" He strode across the lawn to Ren's side. "You'll want to give us plenty of time to point out all the ways it can be improved."
Ren scowled. This was her reward for trying to be nice, obviously. "I don't think it's going to be very complicated. Ouch!" she exclaimed, as Merlin ran his hand through the back of her hair, snagged a few hairs and pulled them right out. "You jerk! What happened to brushing out loose hair?"
"Your secret weapon is snuggled up in your blankets right now," Merlin informed her, turning his attention to blending her hairs with the glowing strands of light he summoned from nowhere.
"So you just pull my hair out?" demanded Ren, now truly outraged. "What the hell is wrong with you? Are you that pissed that I didn't yell at you for making a garden? Don't worry, I won't ask you to do it again."
Merlin's flashing fingers stopped moving. After a moment he raised those lilac eyes to hers. "Your first and second reactions this morning to my walls were perfect. I shouldn't have hoped to hit that twice in one day."
Ren tried to remember how she'd felt about the walls that morning, but that entire stretch of time was overshadowed by the bout of acrophobia Merlin had triggered. Annoyance that he treated her emotions like a game raced through her, followed swiftly by the realization he'd certainly intended to annoy her.
Without thinking, she reached out and grabbed him by the mantle, shaking him. "What is wrong with you?"
"You already know the answer to that," he told her, and fastened a yellow bracelet around her wrist beside the other two as she held his mantle. His fingers knotted the strands swiftly, and then lingered a moment curling against the back of her hand, as if he wanted to clasp it but wouldn't let himself. "Now if you'll let me go, I have some portal upkeep chores to get done."
Ren relaxed her clenched fingers and Merlin immediately pulled free. She watched in frustrated confusion as he walked into the keep. She was still in the same state, although she'd moved onto shredding budding flowers, when Ritsu came out a few moments later, her foxette on her shoulder.
"There you are!" announced Ritsu. "Merlin threw me out of the portal chamber and told me to find you and get some fresh air. You folks are really wound up about fresh air. It's like you don't understand that rain and snow and lightning bolts and giant birds and big dragons come from the fresh air." She looked around. "Wow. This is amazing. Is that a swing? Ooh, it is. Come on!"
Before Ren had a chance to say anything, Ritsu had grabbed her wrist and dragged her across the lawn to the swing, where she plopped down. The foxette scrambled off her shoulder and up to the top of the swing, where it sat up like a meerkat.
Sighing, Ren sat down beside Ritsu. "Remember if you want to thank Merlin, you should yell at him about messing up your careful piles of rubble or something." She gave the swing a push with her feet and then pulled her knees up to her chest. "I can't believe the famously lazy magus would rather go do chores than talk to me."
Ritsu gave her an odd look, kicked her legs to keep the swing moving, and then carefully said, "You two had a fight?"
"I don't know! He's an alien. I was nice and he got mad at me." Reluctantly, Ren added, "I knew he didn't like being thanked, but he's never been such a jerk before."
"Hmm," said Ritsu. "You know, you said the other day he lied and teased because he didn't want us relying on him, but I wonder if it's also because strong emotions taste better than weak ones?"
Ren blinked, turning to look at her, and Ritsu added, "Well, he doesn't eat normal food, but he enjoys us enjoying our meals. He's really very relaxing to be around when he's not teasing, too." She considered. "I think he's almost always teasing you, though."
"He does eat emotions," admitted Ren. "From what I've heard, anyhow. But I can't ever trust anything about that one." She thought of what he'd said earlier: that it was good for her to stay out of his mind because of what he ate, and thought also about how, despite her words, she did keep trusting him. That was why his mercurial behavior had hurt her so much.
"Do you like him?" asked Ritsu, with her typical bluntness.
Ren clenched her fists as her face warmed. But she did her best to answer in a straightforward manner. "I don't know. I… I want to, I think, just like I want to like Jekyll. But neither of them seem to want me to like them."
It was Ritsu's turn to blink. "Is Jekyll mean to you?" she demanded. "How could he be? He's wonderful. He talks almost as much as me and he listens when I talk!" She sighed dreamily. "I wonder when we can get married."
"What?!" Ren spun toward Ritsu. "You're joking, right?" The younger girl had a little smile but Ren didn't know her well enough to interpret it.
Ritsu closed one eye. "Well… Maybe a little. I mean… there's a lot going on, and I'm still a kid to him, and Tora would probably get even weirder. But he's really amazing and he has such pretty eyes! They change colors, did you know?"
Relief and dismay mingled for Ren as she contemplated the topic shift. On the one hand, thinking about something other than Merlin was good. On the other hand, she didn't want to encourage Ritsu to focus on Jekyll. "I've seen, yeah. Hey, speaking of Tora… are you two all right with each other yet?"
Ritsu grimaced. "I haven't seen her much today, even once we finished our chores. Honestly, I don't think she's going to be all right until we sort out what's going on with that Sovereign guy."
Ren decided against telling Ritsu what Tora had been doing instead of spending time with her. "I'm sorry," she said instead. "I'd hoped that she would have been more willing to fight for you."
Ritsu gave her a jaded look. "I knew she wouldn't, ever since she came back to the village. Chaldice may not have been very supportive of us, but the Tora who raised me wouldn't ever have burned any part of it."
"Chaldice… the village is named Chaldice?" Somehow Ren had never learned the village or the Region's name.
Ritsu shrugged. "Yeah. We came here when I was a baby and Tora was about my age. Most of the villagers didn't want us around, because Tora already had her summoner's mark. But this old couple took us in and left us their house when they died. That's why we took in other orphans that arrived." She looked around. "They'll really like it here, though. When do you think we can bring them?"
"Well, the outside is looking nice but the inside needs a lot of work. Don't you want someplace other than the portal room to sleep? And I think the Servants should have rooms, too."
Making a face, Ritsu said, "I think they'd rather be here with me than all alone in the village. Ichigo, he's the eldest, he works hard, but he's still a little kid. He shouldn't have to be responsible for the others if it's not an emergency."
Ren looked at the adolescent girl beside her talking blithely of the even younger kids she'd chosen to care for, and shook her head. "Neither of you should have to be. Which is why I will be. We'll bring them over as soon as either the keep itself is repaired, or we deal with Tora's Sovereign Lord, okay? Until then, they're safer at the village."
"I suppose," said Ritsu. "Though really, if any grown-up is going to seize responsibility, I wish it was Tora. She made this mess, stomping in here with her ruffians."
"You really blame her?" Ren objected. "You said she was originally captured by the Sovereigns. It seems like that's where this all started."
Ritsu shrugged tightly. "Yeah, but if she did take responsibility, even if it was really stupid, she'd finally feel like Tora again, and not this sad, pathetic copy of her." She looked up as the foxette trilled on top of the swing.
"Yes," said Ren thoughtfully. "I—"
"Hallooo there!" came an unfamiliar bellow from beyond the wall. Ren sprang to her feet convulsively and then ran to the little door Merlin had installed. He'd modified it since that morning, adding a window to the upper half of the door. The angle wasn't great, but Ren could just make out a third figure joining the other two Sovereign champions. A third mounted figure, cantering up to the scrubby little campsite.
"You're late," snapped Shina. "I thought you'd be here by noon."
The mount circled the dragon: a creature Ren recognized distantly as a rainbow-colored kirin, with a mane and a thick, curving horn. It carried a large man in light armor, who had both a sword and a lance strapped to his back. And—
"Aw, I got lost on my way here," said the man, in a deep, rumbling voice. "I'd still be lost if it wasn't for these two little ones I met in the wood. Apparently they're looking for a summoner too!"
—And two tiny children mounted in front of him. As the kirin pranced to a stop, the big man dismounted and pulled both the children down, holding one in each arm. "We'll have to keep them safe with us for the time being!"
"Oh no!" said Ritsu from Ren's side, in a voice of quiet horror. "That's Pan and Lulu, the two youngest of my kids."
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