[Fic] "An Unexpected Meeting" -- Enchanted Forest Chronicles

[edenfalling]

wistfulmemory said: I would love to claim the "picnic" prompt with Cimorene, Morwen, and Kazul having to deal with unexpected ambassadors.

Note: So that took way too long to write... *sigh* Also, if you find yourself curious about Thelistra and Andovan, you can read their earlier adventures (and the tale of how Morwen met Kazul) in The Affairs of Dragons, a story I wrote for Femgenficathon back in 2008. (3,525 words)

[ETA: The AO3 crosspost is now up!]

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An Unexpected Meeting
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One Monday morning two months after Kazul's coronation (and all the chaos leading up to it), Cimorene woke up completely and utterly out of patience for wrangling her new responsibilities. She was fed up with all of them: organizing the royal caverns, handling knights and princesses, talking excitable dragons down from rash ideas, translating and transcribing Kazul's responses to foreign correspondence into something slightly more diplomatic, and every other petty yet vitally important thing she'd shouldered so Kazul would only be somewhat overwhelmed rather than utterly inundated.

Eventually she hoped to get the dragons' old bureaucracy -- sadly neglected by their two previous kings -- back into working order, but for now she, Roxim, and Marchak were shouldering the same amount of work that her father had spread among three score advisors and staff, and Cimorene needed a break or else she might go crazy.

"We are taking a day off and inviting Morwen over for a picnic," she said as she cleared away the breakfast dishes.

"Not that I object to company or the chance of Morwen's cider," Kazul said in response to this pronouncement, "but why a picnic? And if you're set on a picnic, why here? Morwen's garden seems like less work for the same result." She idly picked her silver teeth with a wishbone left over from her meal.

Cimorene looked up from wiping the table and said, "A picnic because neither of us has been outside for more than five minutes at a time in the past three weeks -- possibly longer, but I only started keeping track then. Here in the Mountains of Morning because you're not a private citizen anymore. If you travel to the Enchanted Forest, we'll have to explain to the King why foreign royalty is visiting his country without visiting him, and I don't want to deal with diplomatic headaches on our day off."

"Fair enough," Kazul agreed. "But when will we have time? I need to call a council meeting tomorrow so everyone can shout about the latest border incursion from the Frost Giants; once they wind down, we might be able to start thinking of a practical response. The ambassador from Kaltenmark should arrive on Wednesday, which means we'll need to work up a formal dinner. On Thursday I have to meet with the delegation from Otterton about student research trips into the Caves of Fire and Night and Kalkiz wants to ask you about--"

"Tomorrow," Cimorene interrupted firmly. "Marchak can sit at a table and listen to people yell just as well as you can. Roxim is perfectly capable of organizing a formal dinner. And the longer we wait, the more chance of something unexpected happening that really does need your attention. Let's not give trouble more time than it needs to sneak up on us."

"You realize you've just invited trouble to show up as another picnic guest," Kazul pointed out.

Cimorene blinked, then thumped the heel of her palm against her forehead. "Bother. You're right. I blame overwork and lack of sleep; normally I'd have caught that before the words got anywhere near my tongue. But I'm sure we'll manage. After all, what could possibly be enough of a problem that you, Morwen, and I together couldn't... and I'm going to cut myself off before I gild and engrave the invitation as well."

Kazul laughed smokily and went off to inform the relevant people about their plans.

Cimorene finished cleaning the kitchen, opened the royal caves for Kazul's public audience hours, and went back to bed for an obviously much-needed nap.

-----

Tuesday dawned bright and clear, which had Cimorene casting suspicious glances at the sky all morning, wondering when narrative irony would whip up a drenching autumn thunderstorm. But the sky seemed determined to remain bright and clear, and eventually Cimorene resigned herself to the thought that whatever trouble she'd invited would take a less convenient form.

Weather was only weather, after all. People could get complicated.

She spent the morning preparing sandwiches and finger foods in both human- and dragon-sized portions (plus some cat treats, since at least some of Morwen's familiars were bound to tag along). Meanwhile Kazul indulged in a rather melodramatic novel about a long-lost princess and a poor woodcutter's son that she'd been putting off since her coronation, occasionally reading a passage aloud for Cimorene's amusement.

When Morwen walked into the royal caverns at precisely half past noon, trailing a trio of cats, she caught them in the middle of laughing at a particularly improbable declaration of eternal love. "Do I want to know?" she asked, raising one eyebrow above the rim of her glasses.

"Possibly, but it would take at least fifteen minutes to explain the context," Cimorene said. "Hello, Murgatroyd, Miss Eliza, Aunt Ophelia." The cats mrowled in greeting, and Miss Eliza deigned to twine briefly around Cimorene's right ankle. Murgatroyd simply leapt from a chair to the kitchen table to Kazul's shoulder, where he promptly began washing behind his ears. Aunt Ophelia remained on the table, tail twitching, and attempted to look uninterested in the contents of the human-sized picnic basket.

"Some other time, then," Morwen said. She clapped her hands, calling the cats' attention back to herself. "I've brought two gallons of cider, and I presume you have appropriately sized mugs somewhere in the room. Shall we head outside so we have half a chance of finishing our meal before the inevitable disaster finds us?"

Cimorene blinked as she fetched three mugs (one much larger than the others) and a bowl from her cupboards. "You think there's bound to be trouble, too?"

"I think two months isn't nearly enough time to set a reliable routine for a new job, particularly not for a job as big as Kazul's," Morwen said. "And on that note, I trust you're both setting up a system of delegation instead of trying to do everything yourselves."

"It's taking longer than I'd hoped to weed through Tokoz's staff and install some people with a bit more initiative," Kazul said as she slipped a bookmark into her novel. "But yes, we're working on that. I haven't developed any sudden love for politics, and I insist on carving out enough free time to attend my grandchild's hatching next spring."

"Another grandchild? Are your son and his partners having a third, or has your daughter finally found someone she's willing to reproduce with?" Morwen said, in tones of great interest. At her feet, Miss Eliza added an inquisitive chirp.

"Now you've done it; we won't hear about anything else all day," Cimorene said wryly. "Let's head out. You two can gossip while we walk."

"Don't be insulting. Dragons don't gossip about our families. We boast about them," Kazul said. She edged slightly closer to the table and added, "Anyone who wants a ride should climb on now. I won't stop to let you up later."

Miss Eliza and Aunt Ophelia joined Murgatroyd on her shoulders, and the small party headed out into the midday sunshine.

-----

Twenty minutes (and a temporary break from Kazul's bragging as her description of her son's cave renovations detoured into a discussion of Morwen's recent difficulties with finding a construction company willing to build extensions in magically indeterminate spaces), they stopped at the edge of Cimorene's chosen picnic ground: a short, narrow valley filled with wildflowers and a small pond at the base of a slow, rock-seep spring. It was a lovely location, which wasn't at all unusual in this portion of the Mountains of Morning.

What was unusual was that this particular location was currently occupied, and not by dragons.

At the far end of the valley, two humans were shaking out an impractically gorgeous embroidered blanket over the grass and remnants of late summer flowers. The man was lanky, ginger, and wore a mail shirt; a sword in a slightly shabby scabbard hung from his belt and he had a shield slung across his back. The woman also wore a mail shirt (which clashed a bit with her full lavender silk skirts) and had her blonde hair cropped short about her ears, but instead of a sword, the only thing hanging from her belt was... an embroidery bag? Surely not. But it did look exactly like a larger version of the fabric bags Cimorene's own mother and sisters used. (She'd never much liked embroidery herself, and had happily 'forgotten' enough bags that even her mother had given up making her carry one.)

Morwen peered thoughtfully across the valley. Then she wiped her glasses with a handkerchief pulled from her left sleeve and peered some more. Finally she said, "Kazul, you have better eyesight than I do. Am I imagining things, or is that Thelistra and Andovan?"

Kazul stopped her attempts to shoo the cats off her shoulders and craned her neck around. A startled hiss of smoke escaped from between her teeth. "You're not imagining things. That's definitely Thelistra and Andovan. What on earth are they doing back in the Mountains of Morning?"

"Before we speculate on that, can someone tell me who Thelistra and Andovan are?" Cimorene said. "A pair of adventurers?"

"No, my last princess and her knight," Kazul said in a distracted tone.

Cimorene blinked. "Oh. Really?" The two didn't look much like any princesses and knights she'd seen in Linderwall or among the dragons: Andovan was far too lightly armored and Thelistra wasn't nearly delicate and frothy enough. Even aside from that, once a knight rescued a princess, the traditional procedure was for them to return home, claim the promised reward from the princess's family, and settle down to manage their new lands, not go blithely picnicking in lands claimed by the same dragons they'd previously had trouble with.

"Yes. They moved to Kaltenmark about five years before you left Linderwall, and I didn't expect to ever see them back here," Kazul said. "We parted on awkward terms."

"'Awkward,' in this case, means that there was a mix-up involving a magically disguised artifact that a previous king of the dragons had given Thelistra's grandmother. I helped them untangle the mess," Morwen added.

Cimorene thought this explanation raised more questions than it answered. However, the two strangers had caught sight of them and were waving their arms in greeting, so she shelved her curiosity for later. "Well, they seem to have noticed us. We should go say hello and ask why they've returned."

"Yes, let's," Morwen agreed, and hurried downward toward Thelistra and Andovan, calling hello as she went. Kazul caught up within three strides, cats still clinging to her shoulders.

Cimorene followed at a slower pace, willing to give the others time to get reacquainted. She could always get their own picnic set up while she waited for a good time to introduce herself. Lugging a filled basket didn't seem like a lot of work at first, but by this point she'd be glad to set it down.

-----

When she reached the far end of the small valley, Andovan was trying to coax the cats off Kazul, to mixed success at best. Meanwhile Thelistra had slung her embroidered blanket back over her shoulder and was so engrossed in conversation with Morwen that neither of them noticed Cimorene's approach.

"--municipal sorceress of Elsburg for three years now," Thelistra said in a voice that chimed like a choir of tiny bells. "It turns out I'm happier doing magic professionally and sewing as a hobby than the other way around."

"I know how that goes. I enjoy cross-breeding magical flowers, but I don't think I'd want to do it on order," Morwen said. "Are you still self-taught or did you find a mentor?"

"Kaltenmark's a bit short on magicians right now, unfortunately, so no mentor." The bells that wreathed Thelistra's voice shifted briefly into Phrygian mode, then brightened to Mixolydian as she continued. "I do write to my father's court sorcerer for advice now and then, and of course I inherited a very good (though slightly outdated) library from my predecessors."

"Which I've been organizing," Andovan added over his shoulder, in an improbably cheerful tone.

(Cimorene, busy shaking out a picnic blanket and shooing Aunt Ophelia away from the basket, thought of the state of Kazul's library when she'd first encountered it, and bit back a remark on Thelistra's good fortune in marrying someone who understood filing systems. Judging by the meows drifting down from Kazul's shoulders, at least one of the cats shared her opinion.)

"Which my darling Andovan has been organizing, as part of his duties as municipal clerk," Thelistra agreed. "We've been researching fairy blessings most recently, since I'd like to get rid of mine. Ethereal chimes aren't really appropriate for anyone except damsels in distress."

Morwen nodded sympathetically. "Remind me to introduce you to one of my old classmates from Stokey's Academy. She had a similar problem, and while each blessing needs its own personalized counterspell, you might find her research helpful."

"Oh, thank you!" Thelistra said, beaming. "I've been looking at Sternberg's theorems of sympathy and antipathy as applied to intangible concepts, and I thought that maybe if--"

But before she and Morwen could dive into a full-on discussion of magical theory (which Cimorene would not have minded, even if she tended to have trouble following the more technical jargon; it would have made just as nice a change from royal responsibilities as Morwen's home improvement woes), Kazul interrupted.

"That sounds fascinating, and I'd even be willing to lend you some of my own books that touch on fairy magic, but right now I need to know why you're back in the Mountains of Morning. You're not a private citizen anymore, Thelistra, and as Cimorene reminded me yesterday, government representatives can't walk unannounced into other countries without starting diplomatic incidents."

"Cimorene?" Thelistra said.

"That would be me," Cimorene said. She rose from setting out napkins and sketched a brief curtsey in her plain cotton skirts. "Cimorene of Linderwall, Kazul's current princess."

"Drat, I got distracted and forgot introductions again," Thelistra said. "Please accept my apologies. I'm Thelistra, lately of Veritand, Kazul's former princess, and this is my husband Sir Andovan Marginalis, lately of Raxwel." She made a curtsey of her own, more graceful than Cimorene's even though the embroidery bag and blanket ought to have affected her balance.

"Pleased to meet you, and please forgive me for not bowing," Andovan said, as he attempted to juggle Murgatroyd and Miss Eliza, who seemed to be arguing over who got to perch on which of his shoulders. "I hope you and Kazul are doing well together. If you're not, I can send word around the hedge-knights' network and have some of them write to you, to see if you get along well enough to help them arrange a rescue."

Cimorene blinked. "Arrange a rescue?"

"Of course! It would be terribly rude to barge in and carry someone away from their home and friends unless the person agreed to that beforehand," Andovan said, still sounding improbably cheerful. "Besides, the comparative natural advantages of humans and dragons are such that, without a fair bit of jiggery-pokery, the dragon almost always wins. It's much easier to set up favorable circumstances if you have an ally on the inside."

"Exactly," Kazul agreed. "It's against the rules to interfere in honorable combat, but there aren't any prohibitions on getting magical aid beforehand. Hedge-knights notice that loophole a lot more often than knights from noble families."

Cimorene blinked again. "Clearly I should have spent more time talking to hedge-knights and less to the princes my parents dangled me and my sisters in front of."

"Oh, princes," Thelistra said, and made a terrible face. "I had one of them try to rescue me every day for nearly a month even after I told him I'd rather be turned into a toad than marry him. I finally convinced him that I couldn't leave Kazul's service for another seven years without dishonoring my family, which was ridiculous but fit his silly misinterpretations of chivalry. I think he went off and got himself killed fighting a sphinx down in Serethryn because he was too proud to buy the standard riddle guidebook."

"It's astonishing how many people can't follow simple advice, assuming they think to ask for help in the first place," Morwen put in.

Thelistra smiled, a bit ruefully. "Yes, well, I have gotten better, especially now that I tend to be the person giving advice. But in any case, Andovan was much more respectful, and didn't have any trouble asking me for some magical assistance in battle." The smile she turned on him was practically soppy with love; he returned the expression with a similar level of sentiment.

At this point, Cimorene had a realization which she later compared to knocking herself silly on a low-hanging tree branch, but without the accompanying pain: namely, the stone prince and Alianora weren't as much of a statistical anomaly she'd assumed. Thelistra had also found a man who respected her, and who was both intelligent and sensible enough that he didn't make Cimorene want to tear her hair out after less than five minutes of interaction. Happy endings didn't have to be a stark choice between accepting or rejecting every last piece of the traditional roles Cimorene had run off to the Mountains of Morning to escape. It was possible to pick and choose. There were other people out in the world also picking and choosing, and presumably some of them would want whatever set of options she eventually settled on.

Unfortunately, this wasn't a convenient time for revelations, so she tucked it away as best she could (along with her curiosity about exactly how Thelistra and Kazul had parted ways) and said, "I'm quite happy where I am for now, but I'll keep your offer in mind if I ever want to move on to other things. Anyway, we've gotten off-topic. Like Kazul said, what brings you to the Mountains of Morning? I didn't think we were having any problems with Kaltenmark."

"You're not, unless one of the younger dragons has done something improbably stupid since we left Elsburg," Thelistra said. "But I suspect you are having problems with the Frost Giants."

"They have been testing our northern border more these past few years," Kazul admitted. "Several of us tried to get Tokoz to take measures, but he never got around to it. I assume they're causing similar problems for Kaltenmark, since we're expecting an ambassador tomorrow, but I don't see what that has to do with your visit."

"Well, you see," said Andovan (now with Miss Eliza on his left shoulder and Murgatroyd balanced precariously on top of his head), "when my darling Thelistra was appointed municipal sorceress, we had to meet with the Assembly of Notables for her official investment and then there was a party afterwards. When the Law-Speaker got onto the subject of dragons, I made the mistake--"

"We both made the mistake," Thelistra corrected.

"--of mentioning that we knew you personally, so naturally when your coronation was announced, the Assembly jumped at the chance to add a personal touch to a request to turn the current non-interference treaty into a formal alliance, and then knock sense into the Frost Giants before they do serious damage to either of our countries," Andovan continued.

"In other words, we're the ambassadors you're expecting. We arrived a day sooner than we planned, so we thought we'd take a little time for a picnic lunch before getting down to business," Thelistra concluded. She looked down at the blanket and dishes Cimorene had spread over the grass and added, "It looks like you had the same idea. Do you mind if Andovan and I join you? I can access our enchanted pantry in Elsburg through my bag, so food won't be a problem."

"So long as you don't talk about politics, that sounds fine," Cimorene said. "Unless Kazul objects?"

Kazul smiled, showing all her silver teeth. "Not at all! I was just getting ready to tell Morwen all about my third grandchild, and I never turn down a willing audience -- especially not if the audience brings lunch."

"A third! You only had one when I left," Thelistra said. "Two eggs in under ten years is awfully fast. Tell me all the details."

Cimorene, who had heard all the details a dozen times over, deftly plucked the embroidered blanket from Thelistra's shoulder and shook it out over the grass beside her own plainer and more practical picnic cloth. After a moment, Andovan grabbed the far corners and helped her pull the fabric flat, while Morwen began pulling cider bottles and mugs out of her sleeves. The cats prowled around, staring hungrily at the picnic basket and Thelistra's embroidery bag with its promised link to additional food (though considering how woefully underequipped Thelistra had left Kazul's kitchen, Cimorene had to hope her enchanted pantry did most of its own cooking).

Kazul would move on to other topics eventually. In the meantime, Cimorene intended to eat lunch, enjoy the sunshine, and relax in the knowledge that even the inevitable complication hadn't managed to spoil her well-earned day of rest.

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End of Fic

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Okay, that's one project down! Now on to editing "Second Chances," whipping up two original gift!fic outlines, and planning and writing my FandomTrumpsHate auction fic. (And by the time I'm done with all that, it will doubtless be time for WIP Big Bang, which I'd like to participate in again this year for reasons that should be obvious. *wry*)

Comments

[watersword]

This is adorable. I am charmed.

[edenfalling]

Thank you! :)

[the_rck]

This is fun! I wish I had someone else who's read the books handy so that I could make them read it, too.

[edenfalling]

Thank you! And that is the perennial problem with small fandoms, isn't it?

[wistfulmemory.livejournal.com]

I will squee longer and more in-depth when I'm less sleepy, but I wanted to let you know as soon as I read the story that I love it! Thank you so much for writing it!

Good luck with the other stories you mentioned.

[edenfalling]

Thanks! I'm glad you liked the fic -- as you've seen, it was a little frustrating to write, but I think in some ways it was useful to have something that kept prodding me to think positively instead of negatively this past month. :)