#moenori

I did, in fact. I manage to clear another little patch of table for my own mug and climb up onto the chair adjacent to hers.

She slides the top page of her notes– a diagram for some kind of a device, crystal in the middle, calculations and crossed-out lines filling the margins– sideways to me. “Here. What do you think?”

It… certainly is a diagram. “I couldn’t tell you,” I say. “I follow you about as far as ‘point this end at the Ascians’.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” she says.

“Not sure how else to sell myself,” I reply, and she laughs again. 

“Fine,” she says, acquiescing, “not everyone’s a scholar. I’d do well to remember that. But you understand more than you think you do. No, I don’t mean all this,” she adds, seeing the way I glance at the notes with apprehension. “I mean the aether itself, how it moves. How to move with it. This–” the diagram– “is just a theory. When I have something I can put in your hands, you’ll know what to do.”

“If you say so,” I say, although the way she says it I’m most of the way to convinced.

“I know so. I’ve seen you do it.” She gives me another long look, and this time I hold her gaze. It’s hard to breathe suddenly. I think if she asked me to go out and find an Ascian to test her theory right this second, I would. I can’t begin to think what to say.

And then she breaks the spell, Twelve be praised, by yawning widely.

“Gods, I’m tired,” she says. “What hour is it?”

“I don’t think you want to know.”

“You’re right, I don’t.” She takes a long sip of her tea instead. I do too, holding the mug in both hands. It’s held its warmth– even inside, it’s chilly in Mor Dhona– and the tea is as bracing as I remember it, even with no juniper.

“Tell me about your friend,” Moenbryda says, dropping the gentlest emphasis around the word. “The one who taught you to make this.”

“Well. Her name was Aislona–”

“Ah, a nice Sea Wolf girl, of course.”

I smile, remembering. “Her family were ocean fishers. They’d go out for a week at a time, two sometimes. I asked her to show me, so I could make it for her whenever she came back.”

“And you developed a taste for it?”

“The tea?”

“Sure,” she says, with a wink.

I know I blush. I blush easy. She looks at me, and her gaze softens a little. “You loved her,” she says. It isn’t really a question.

“Yes,” I say. “I did.”

"A taste-defining relationship, one might say?"

"One might," I say, "yes."

“So what I can’t figure,” she says, utterly casual, “is why you’re the only one in this merry band not standing in line at my door.”

She’s at least done me the kindness of waiting until I didn’t have tea in my mouth. “Professional courtesy,” I manage. “There ought to be at least one of us you don’t have to fend off with that axe.”

“And what if I’m not fending? Unless I’m wrong,” she adds, “and you’re really not interested?”

“No! I mean, you’re not wrong.” I practically trip over the words in my rush to get them out. “But– I thought you and Urianger–”

“Urianger,” she says, quiet now, serious, “knows exactly how I feel about him. And he knows that whenever he needs me, for whatever reason, I’ll be there.”

Then she shoots me a sly smile. "And meanwhile, I don't see a reason any of us should sit around pining, do you?"

“I don’t think I’m pining exactly—”

“Oh, now he wants to talk theory.” Moenbryda reaches over and takes my chin in her hand, and I shut up immediately. “Do you want to debate the point,” she says, “or do you want to kiss me?”

“Definitely the second one,” I say. 

She tilts my face up to hers. “Good choice.”

She kisses very thoroughly, it turns out, and I’m more than happy to let her lead. The world narrows down to her fingers firm on my skin, her determined mouth, and the lingering taste of birch. It’s an eon, and absolutely not long enough, before she pulls away.