Ludger said nothing.
Elira went on.
“You’re strong. Busy. Always doing something important. People talk about you constantly. You leave, come back, leave again, fix things, build things, fight things…” She tilted her head slightly. “And when they see you, what do they see most clearly?”
Ludger’s expression flattened. Elira answered her own question anyway.
“They see someone who moves forward by becoming stronger.”
That sat there for a second. Unwelcome. Reasonable. Annoying precisely because it was reasonable. Elira glanced at him with a faint little smile.
“So yes,” she said, “I do wonder why.”
Ludger looked back toward the twins and clicked his tongue softly. That explanation made far too much sense.
He disliked it. Not because it was wrong, but because it meant the change in them had not come from nowhere. It had come from inside the house. From proximity. From watching. From the ordinary, steady way children absorbed the shape of the world around them and decided what mattered before anyone ever formally explained it.
Which meant this was not just them becoming more disciplined. It was them following a path they had already started associating with the people they admired.
Troublesome. Very troublesome. Beside him, Elira seemed entirely pleased that he had gone quiet.
Then she added, with just enough lightness to make it worse, “You should be happy. They clearly think you’re impressive.”
“That isn’t the problem.”
Elira gave him a sidelong look.
“It sounds a little like the problem.”
Ludger ignored that.
Because if he answered honestly, he would have to admit that the real issue was not that the twins admired him. It was that they might be learning to imitate the parts of his life he was not sure children should want.
And that was much harder to argue with using ordinary logic than he preferred. While Ludger was still trying to sort through exactly what Elira meant by that, her gaze shifted past him.
Then she said, “It looks like your other sister has arrived as well.”
Ludger blinked.
For half a second, the words did not settle properly.
Then he turned his head to the side… And saw that Luna and Viola had, in fact, arrived.
Luna stood with her usual composed stillness, taking in the yard, the twins, Elira, and him in one clean sweep that probably missed nothing. Beside her, Viola looked exactly like the sort of problem a person did not need arriving unannounced in the middle of an already annoying moment.
Elira stared for a beat longer and said, with clear fascination, “Your sister really does look like the rumors.”
Ludger facepalmed so hard his fingers nearly ripped some skin off his face. Of course. Of course this had to happen now. Not later. Not at a more manageable time. Not in some setting where explanations could be given in the right order and with the right amount of preparation.
Here. In the yard. With the twins training. With Elira standing beside him. With Viola arriving at exactly the wrong moment to turn a mildly troublesome conversation into a complete mess.
His hand stayed over his face for a second longer than necessary.
Behind his fingers, Ludger could already feel the disaster taking shape. Elira’s curiosity. Viola’s instincts. Luna’s observation. All of it colliding in one place with him in the middle.
Annoying.
He lowered his hand slowly and looked at the three of them with the calm expression of someone who had already accepted that peace was not going to survive the next few minutes.
The twins, meanwhile, had also stopped and turned toward the newcomers, wooden swords still in hand.
Viola’s eyes had already moved from Ludger, to Elira, and back again. Which meant she had understood enough to become interested. That was bad.
While Ludger was asking himself why fate always insisted on making his life harder than necessary, Luna and Viola were both busy staring at Elira’s chest.
Not discreetly either. Just openly. With the kind of fixed, unblinking attention that made the entire situation immediately worse. Viola was the first to speak, her voice low with the sort of grave seriousness usually reserved for battlefield observations.
“Those look like weapons of mass destruction.”
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Ludger closed his eyes for half a second. Of course she said that.
Beside Viola, Luna’s gaze shifted away from Elira only long enough to study Ludger with visible suspicion, as if trying to determine what exactly he had been doing, why this girl was here, and how much trouble she should assume had already happened. Viola, meanwhile, looked down at her own chest for some reason, frowned faintly, then lifted her chin and corrected herself.
No. Not corrected. Adjusted. As if she had momentarily entered some private internal competition and needed to reassess the rankings.
Ludger rolled his eyes. Apparently some women cared about their own sizes too. Or maybe Viola was just that stupidly competitive.
Honestly, with her, either explanation was equally likely.
Elira, to her credit, did not immediately lose composure. She only blinked once, then looked between Luna and Viola with the cautious expression of someone realizing she had just stepped into a completely different category of nonsense than the one she had been dealing with until now.
The twins, meanwhile, had no idea what any of this meant and were simply watching with open curiosity.
Ludger exhaled slowly through his nose.
Yes. This was exactly the kind of scene he had not needed today. Elira recovered first. Of course she did. She stepped forward with a smooth, composed smile, the kind that looked warm without becoming careless, and gave Viola and Luna a polite little bow of the head.
“It’s an honor to meet the famous Viola,” she said, then turned slightly toward the other girl, “and her friend, Luna.”
Her tone was bright, respectful, and just self-aware enough to keep it from sounding fake.
“I’ve heard a lot about you two,” Elira continued. “Honestly, you both sound much more interesting than Ludger.”
Viola’s whole expression lit up at once. Naturally.
She smiled with immediate pride and said, “Famous? I guess I am.”
Beside her, Luna slowly turned her head and stared at Viola as if she had just been betrayed on a deeply personal level.
Not by Elira. By Viola’s complete lack of shame. The look was so flat and accusing that, for a moment, it almost became impressive. Viola, however, either did not notice or chose not to care. With her, both options were always possible. Ludger stepped forward before this could become even more idiotic than it already was.
He looked at Viola and asked, “Why are you here?”
Then, with perfect sincerity, another thought crossed his mind.
Should he really never trust Torvares again this time?
Not metaphorically. Truly. Because somehow, despite all the old man’s intelligence and experience, information involving Viola and Luna always seemed to end up traveling in exactly the worst direction. Viola folded her arms and answered with complete confidence.
“I could tell you went to talk with Grandfather.”
Ludger stared at her. Viola went on as if that explained everything.
“But Grandfather didn’t want to say what it was about. So we came to check it out.”
Ludger facepalmed again. Hard enough this time that he genuinely wondered whether dragging Viola back home by force would be the correct decision after all.
Not the polite thing. Not the diplomatic thing. The correct thing.
Because clearly, if left unsupervised, she treated mystery the way a starving wolf treated fresh meat. If something was hidden, she wanted to know. If someone told her no, she took it as an invitation to become more creative. And if Luna was with her, the odds of this turning into an exhausting problem only increased.
Through his fingers, Ludger let out a long breath.
Of course she had “come to check it out.”
Of course that was the logic.
Elira, standing just off to the side, looked far too entertained by the whole exchange. Luna, meanwhile, had regained some of her usual composure and was now watching Ludger with the expression of someone waiting to see whether he would answer honestly, deflect, or simply start throwing people.
Ludger lowered his hand slowly and looked at Viola in complete silence for a beat.
Then he said, “You realize that’s exactly why people hide things from you.”
Viola put a hand to her chest as if offended.
“That’s unfair.”
“It’s accurate.”
Elira covered her mouth, not quite hiding a smile. And Ludger, standing in the middle of his own yard with too many girls, two training twins, and one growing sense of doom, seriously considered whether this day could still be salvaged or whether fate had already decided to crush it out of spite.
Elira tilted her head slightly and said, with that same light, infuriating honesty of hers, “I’m interested in what Ludger is plotting too. He might be boring as a person, but the things he does are quite interesting.”
That was enough. Ludger stepped toward the three of them. Not fast. Not aggressively. But with the kind of directness that changed the air anyway.
When he stopped in front of them, the expression on his face was the same one he had shown Elira inside the labyrinth, the one that had made her flinch back then, the one that had stripped away all the dry annoyance and left only cold seriousness underneath.
Elira felt it instantly.
A small chill ran through her spine, and for just a moment she nearly took a step backward again on instinct, the same way she had in the guardian chamber when he had looked at her and made it clear exactly where the line was.
This time, she stopped herself. Barely. But she did. Instead, she lowered her gaze slightly. Not in submission. In understanding. The situation was not going to become more interesting. He would not allow it.
Viola noticed the shift too, though perhaps not with the same clarity. Luna understood it immediately.
Ludger looked at all of them and said, “None of you belong to Lionsguard.”
His voice was calm. That only made it heavier.
“So what I do or do not do as a member of Lionsguard,” he said, “is none of your business.”
That landed hard enough to silence the yard for a moment.
The twins stopped even pretending to reset their training stance and simply stared. Elira remained quiet, eyes lowered just enough to show she had heard the warning properly. Luna’s expression did not change much, but her attention sharpened in that quiet way of hers, as if she were filing away the exact shape of the boundary being drawn.
Viola, predictably, looked like she wanted to argue. Ludger could see it immediately. The tension in her shoulders. The spark in her eyes. The half-formed objection rising before it ever reached her mouth.
But then she met his gaze fully. And whatever she had been about to say stopped there.
Because there was no space in his expression for bargaining, teasing, or clever wording. No opening. No softness to push against. Just a flat, immovable certainty that told her this was not a sibling argument, not a social game, and not a topic she had any right to force herself into.
For once, Viola could tell she had no ground to stand on.
Luna understood that even better than she did.