#gwynris

She lets midday come without having shifted and without allowing herself to dwell on it much. The sheets are in a perpetual state of just-the-right-temperature. She stretches. Her muscles ache pleasantly. Already, she is losing some of her tone, which discomforts her. Maybe this is what she should do with her days: she could use the space of Eris’ rooms (or are they their rooms now?) and work through the basic cadences; go to the gardens; smuggle back some stick with good weighting like that of a training sword, but now she considers it, the idea of leaving this room alone makes her feel violently ill. At least, she should keep her instincts sharp. So far, she has not had to attend any public gathering with Eris, but the day is coming, and she wants to be prepared.

Idling has taken that from her. Being here has taken it. Eris has taken it. His father, Rhysand, everyone. She should have let Emerie hide her. She should have listened when Nesta came to warn her. No good to think on it now. Only on what to do about it, but the idea of doing anything feels mostly impossible, which shakes through her as a reminder of how it was the first time round. Nothing can break me... She sighs. At some point, she dozes again.

She half-dreams of home. The library. Sometimes, she catches herself missing even Merrill, but mostly, she misses her friends. Nesta. Emerie. The other priestesses. Cassian. Azriel. It’s only been a short time, but she struggles to hear their voices properly in her head, as though she is forgetting them. The dream warps. She feels as though she is in her bed in the library. Her head is mean-spirited like that. She is prone to blurring the lines drawn in her life. Something wakes her before she can be plagued by visions of Catrin, before the pit can hollow out in her stomach.

It’s an odd sensation of… wetness, worrying at her hand, slipped from the covers and over the side of the bed, that pulls her away from the edge. Then, sniffling, like—oh.

A dog. A huge dog, with shifting, grey fur, so deep it’s almost black, and eyes some dark red. She stares at it, lips parted for a moment. It seems to suddenly notice her looking and withdraws a little to sit. Its ears, once pointed up in alert, flatten against its head. Quite clearly, Gwyn can hear its tail swishing against the floor. She had known Eris keeps dogs, because everyone knows that he does, and everyone has a healthy amount of apprehension, if not fear, about them, but she hadn’t known they were so… normal. If red eyes can be considered normal.

‘Good morning.’

She jumps at the sound. Eris. He’s over by his desk, not even looking at her but rather reading some letter, his hands braced against the wood as he stands, his face drawn into tight concentration. Fully adorned in the crimson colours of his family. Very… well-put-together. It occurs to her that she might have to wear the same one day. She wonders if she might be allowed to wear blue instead.

The dog shifts closer to her, as though needy.

‘She won’t hurt you,’ Eris says, still not looking, ‘she’s just curious and you’re… unexpected.’

Gwyn looks back at the dog. Its tongue lolls from its mouth in a pant.

‘It isn’t morning,’ she says absently, but her throat scratches. Her voice is croaky from disuse.

‘No.’ He scratches out a note on his papers. ‘But for you, it seems, two-in-the-afternoon is morning.’

When every day is the same, two-in-the-afternoon, she thinks, doesn’t mean much to her, and Eris’ mornings seem to start earlier even than those in the library, so what would he know?

Gwyn sits up. Her wrist twinges when she gingerly peels away the covers and swings her legs over the side of the bed. She must have slept on it strangely. The dog shifts in front of her, looking up, tail still wagging.

‘Does—the dog—does it have a name?’ she asks. Something keen flashes in its eyes, as though it can tell she’s talking about it.

For a long moment, Eris doesn’t answer her. In fact, when she looks over, he’s no longer frowning at his papers, but at her.

He says tritely, ‘She’s a hound.’ Then: ‘And yes, she has a name.’

If she had the capacity to be irritated by his obtuseness, she would be. Instead, she simply reaches out and lets the dog—hound—sniff at her hand. It considers. Moves to inspect her knees and her feet. And with a huff, it seems to find her presence acceptable and patiently waits. Gwyn pats it on the head stiffly. It closes its eyes with the contact and pushes up into her hand when she withdraws, so she pats again, then holds her hand against its strange fur and runs her fingers along by its ears. The hound seems to enjoy it when she scratches it just in the spot behind them.

A small smile pulls at her lips when it starts to thump its leg against the floor in response.

‘Enough.’

The dog ignores Eris and so does Gwyn.

‘Biscuit.’

As though pulled by some invisible lead, the hound dodges out of Gwyn’s hand and—she snaps her gaze over to him. The sound is bizarre, but she bursts out laughing, gripped by an uncontrollable impulse.

‘Biscuit,’ she repeats, still laughing at him. He’s staring at her. ‘The dog is called Biscuit?’

Biscuit, on hearing her name, seems torn between staying with her and padding off to Eris.

He schools his face intently. ‘The hound is called Biscuit. I didn’t name her, believe it or not.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘it is. Are you getting out of bed?’

Gwyn sighs, stands, and bothers to stretch. ‘Does Biscuit always accompany you about the House?’ she asks. ‘Or do her siblings Crumpet and Cookie sometimes join you?’

And she catches it: a slight twist of his lips. ‘Oh, you’re very clever, aren’t you?’

‘I suppose Rhysand didn’t warn you.’

She watches his mouth open, then snap shut very suddenly. ‘I’d have thought there’d be no need to warn me about the childish moods of a priestess.’ He folds his papers and tucks them under his arm. ‘Former priestess, I should say.’

Gwyn is reminded of a favoured word of Emerie’s that starts with C and ends with unt, but she tempers herself. Eris might not want anything to do with her, but she’s well-versed in not pushing her luck too much. She settles for something Nesta might say. Something confident and cutting and dignifying.

‘I’m still a priestess,’ she tells him, giving Biscuit—Biscuit, for the sake of the gods—another pat on the head before she stalks off towards the washroom. She steadies her shaky hand on the door and turns to him. ‘You do understand that, don’t you? It doesn’t matter what you say or what your father or Rhysand or anyone might want. I will decide what I am.’

A pleasant, uninterested kind of tone... ‘Certainly.’

‘And I want Biscuit to accompany me today.’

…which dips into carefully placed suspicion. ‘Accompany you where?’

‘The Temple.’

And there it is, a full, wry smile. ‘No.’

She blinks at him. ‘No?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘Because,’ he says, tapping his papers, ‘I need to go and see the High Priestess about something. So you will accompany me—unless, of course, you weren’t planning to go the Temple at all.’

She wasn’t. She was just being contrary. ‘Of course I was.’

‘Then you will accompany me.’ He sits against his desk, watching her. ‘Happy?’

‘No.’

‘A pity. You’ll have to stay here then—’

Some forgotten urge to move and complain and do something rouses within her, almost from complete spite alone. ‘I will be going to the Temple,’ she says. Why? She’ll figure it out on the way. ‘I’m just not thrilled that you’ll be with me.’

‘No changes from the usual then.’

A wry smile of her own in response.

‘Go on,’ he says, ‘some of us have things to do and places to be.’

Gwyn takes an hour in the washroom and even runs herself a bath, making sure to clean every part of herself with meticulous precision and to figure out which soaps were Eris’. Natural, woody scents. When she returns to their rooms, she finds Eris still waiting for her, reading through those letters again. Though she’s only in a bathrobe, he doesn’t look up to see, and something about that is… comforting.

‘Wear blue,’ she hears him say from where he’s sitting on his couch. ‘Red doesn’t suit you.’

She wears red—a wonderfully styled garment of crimson and gold that unfortunately matches him and has frustratingly fiddly ties at the back—and she pulls her hair back, out of the way. It isn’t pretty, but it is functional, as she would wear it in the library. It feels good, deep in her chest, to wear it like that again.

Eris doesn’t comment, but he must notice, because he stiffens when he stands and catches sight of her. Then, with his jaw clenched in some kind of indignation, he says lowly, ‘Come on,’ and beckons her out of the door.