Chapter 59: Letting it linger
Third person’s POV
Kara blinked, then she opened her mouth but no word came out.
For a moment she just stood there, caught between whatever she had meant to say and whatever had actually settled in her chest instead.
Jonquil watched her face without offering anything to help her find it. She never did. Words weren’t something Jonquil gave freely, and she wasn’t about to start handing them to someone else when she barely had enough of her own tonight.
Then Kara turned around and walked away, leaving Jonquil standing there in the corridor with the sound of her own words still hanging in the air.
Jonquil didn’t call after her. She didn’t say anything either. She simply turned the other way and walked back toward the celebration, her back straight, her face unreadable, the way she always walked, the way she had walked through every corridor of this palace since she was old enough to be trusted with a blade.
She found her seat and reached for the cup of herbal wine still sitting where she had left it. She grabbed it and gulped everything. Then she grabbed the jar, poured more, and drank again.
Her face stayed straight. It always stayed straight. But under the table, between her thighs, there was a tingling she hadn’t asked for and didn’t know how to name, a low pulse that hadn’t faded since she left that room. It came in slow waves, rising every time she thought she had finally settled, then rising again the moment her mind drifted anywhere near the memory of his hands.
She sat with it, drinking, staring straight ahead at nothing in particular, at the dancers moving somewhere past her line of sight, at the drums she could hear but wasn’t really listening to.
But there was only one thought in her mind.
"What exactly has that Alien woken in me?"
She drank another full cup.
The wine did nothing to dull it. If anything, it loosened something else in her, some small crack she usually kept sealed tight, and through that crack came flashes she didn’t ask for either. The weight of him buried between her breasts. The sound he made when she rode him harder than she meant to. The way her own body had betrayed her, clenching around him like it had a will separate from her own.
A warrior at the next table leaned over, catching the stiffness in her posture, and asked her in their beast language if she was well.
"I am always well," Jonquil said, her voice coming out flat as usual.
The warrior didn’t press further. No one pressed Jonquil. That wasn’t how it worked between them.
Then the Queen rose, and the whole courtyard quieted at once, drums falling silent mid-beat, dancers freezing where they stood.
She stood tall in her golden robes, the crown on her head catching the torchlight, her presence enough to still a room full of warriors who feared nothing else on this planet.
"Six full moons," the Queen began, her voice carrying easily across the courtyard without needing to be raised, "since I sent my General beyond our borders."
She let the words settle before continuing.
"Six full moons since the raiders who have bled our farms and stolen our sisters’ peace for longer than most of you have drawn breath, finally faced someone who would not let them return home to boast of it."
A ripple of approval moved through the warriors’ tables. The noblewomen watched more quietly, composed, waiting, hands folded in their laps the way they always sat, poised even in celebration.
"General Belladonna did not simply meet them," the Queen went on. "She followed them back to where they slept safe and certain no one would dare come for them. She burned that certainty to the ground. She has returned to me with victory, with new Bounds for our yards, and with every one of her Flowers who left with her still breathing." She paused, letting her gaze move slowly across the warriors’ tables, resting a moment longer on the faces that had returned scarred. "That is no small thing. I have led long enough to know how rare it is."
The praise was proud and unhurried, each word placed like a gift being set down carefully so it wouldn’t break. The noblewomen smiled at that, murmuring their approval to each other, some of them raising their cups toward Belladonna’s table.
"For this," the Queen said, "I have decided on a unique honor."
She turned, reaching a hand toward her left, toward the lady-in-waiting who was meant to be standing there holding it.
There was no one standing there.
The Queen’s eyes moved once across the space, quick, searching, then settled back into place before anyone could be certain they’d moved at all. Her face didn’t change. Not a flicker of surprise. Not a shadow of suspicion. Whatever she felt in that gap of silence, she buried it somewhere no one in this courtyard would ever find it.
"I have decided," she said, as smoothly as if the pause had never happened, "that General Belladonna and her Flowers will remain here in the palace for two days. Long enough to enjoy the comforts my noblewomen have always kept for themselves, the comforts of stillness, of soft beds and flowery baths and hands that are not their own tending to them for once. Comforts you have not had time for in six moons, and comforts my Flowers deserve to remember exist." She looked toward Belladonna. "Then, on the day you return to the Bloomhold, the honor will be given."
The warriors erupted into cheers at that, weapons raised, voices carrying over each other. Two days of rest inside the palace, tended to the way the noblewomen tended to themselves, was no small gift after six moons of war.
Belladonna only bowed. She never smiled. She accepted the words the way she accepted everything, with her spine straight and her face closed.
Jonquil didn’t smile either. Neither did Zinnia, standing a few paces behind Belladonna’s shoulder, her eyes fixed somewhere past the Queen, unreadable.
The noblewomen cheered loud enough for all of them.
The celebration wound down not long after, drums slowing, dancers filing out, warriors rising from their tables in twos and threes to find their spaces within the palace walls for the first time in six months. Jonquil rose with them, her cup empty now, the tingling between her thighs finally dulled to something she could ignore if she tried hard enough.
She didn’t try very hard. She let it linger because, actually, she didn’t want it to go away.