I flung my staff down as I entered the cottage, lighting the fire in the fireplace with a wave of my hand and growled word. I started peeling my cloak off when Sunset entered, her hair damp. The bottle of water from the cove caught the light as she turned to close the door to the veranda.
“Oh, hey Aria,” she said, setting the sandals she had been wearing to the side. “Welcome back…what is that on you?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I growled, tossing my cloak down with a wet splat. “But the next time I get sent to deal with golems, I want a more accurate portrayal of just what kind of golem it is.”
Sunset’s nose wrinkled as the stench of the goo coating my staff, cloak, armor, pants, boots, and hair reached her. “Poseidon’s Grace, Aria. What in the sea was it?”
“Muck golem.”
She tried to keep a straight face, but the absurdity of such a creation was too much for her to ignore. I enjoy her laughter, honestly.
But she wasn’t the one covered in proverbial shite.
“Can it,” I growled as I stripped most of my clothes off, leaving me in a simple undertunic and small clothes. “I need a bath in the worst way.”
“What about your clothes?” Sunset asked.
I bundled the items up and flung them into the fireplace. As I walked by the slack-jawed Siren, I patter her on the shoulder.
“My cloak and armor have a protection enchantment on them. They’ll be fine.”
My front and side yards were filled with various trees — and a few magical alarms — but my backyard held two interesting views. Behind my cottage was a large field of waving grass and wild wheat. It was tall enough to brush by my hip if I walked through it but it wasn’t my destination. I was heading to a pair of stony basins hidden by some of the grass. When I had gotten the land I walked every inch to familiarize myself with it and I had found a small natural spring bubbling in a tiny stone outcropping. A few days worth of earth spells had let me hollow out a couple large depressions and line them with stone. The water filled them slowly before flowing back to the nearby stream and a few enchanted stones set into the bottom of the basin kept the water at a nice warm temperature year-round. The larger of the two was for soaking, but I didn’t want to climb in there caked with filth. To the side, hidden by the stony outcropping was a bucket and a stool.
Sunset joined me as I washed my hair clean of the offending muck and slid her loose overrobe off before sliding into the hotspring I had made. Her skin took on an iridescent shine through the steam and I knew her lower half had returned to the fins and scales of her kind. The only clothing she wore was the leather cord that held her hair back and the leather thong holding the bottle of her birth waters at her neck.
“So, I’ve noticed lately you’ve not been having the best of assignments.”
“That’s an understatement.” I dumped the bucket over my head to rinse the suds from me before shucking my clothes and armbands as well and dropping into the heated water, muscles sighing in the warmth. “Ever since the incident with you it’s been a rough go.”
“She wasn’t happy, huh?”
I submerged and resurfaced, pushing my hair behind my shoulders. “Not overly, no. She was outraged that soldiers in her employ would fabricate evidence or try to attack one of her agents. But she was also displeased with me, since I didn’t follow the letter of her orders despite having been given free will. It’s the worst, and I’ve fallen a few rungs in Queen Luna’s favor.”
“I never thanked you for that, by the way,” Sunset murmured, hand making idle circles in the steaming water. I waved it off.
“It’s done. You weren’t the creature terrorizing the shorelines and didn’t need to be hunted. You wouldn’t believe some of the crap I’ve seen. I once was hired to chase down someone accused of drinking unicorn blood.”
“Unicorn blood?”
“Some fool was seen trying to bind a wound on a unicorn and some blood splashed up on his face. The small villages are filled with silly superstitions and folk lore and not a lick of it’s true.”
“Then how do you sort out the truth? It can’t be as simple as it was with me.”
I sank to where my lips were just above water.
“I just take everything with a grain of salt,” I murmured. “The first rule my teacher taught me was that everybody lies, the difference is just what about and how much of it was conscious.” I held up a hand to stall the upcoming question. “Everyone has a bunch of information in their head and they’re all so certain it’s the truth. People believe the world is flat, despite the fact that ships have sailed clear around it for centuries. They just know it’s flat. Just like they distrust anyone that uses magic, even palliative magic.”
“So you assume everyone is just misinformed then?” Sunset crooked and eyebrow. “Kind of a haughty view. It can’t be that simple.”
“It’s not. The second thing I was taught is that people are stupid. In conjunction to everybody lies, people will believe anything you tell them because they either think it’s true, want it to be true, or are afraid it’s true. And that works against them most of the time. My first task whenever I go on an assignment is to find out how much is truth and how much is fiction.”
I stared off into space for a moment, remembering what the senior mage that had taught me and the sound of her voice echoing in the halls of her library.
“Master Sparkle never taught me anything until I could intuit my way in debates and sense illusions. She was a wily old witch, and even after she said my teaching was finished I still couldn’t beat her in a mock duel.”
“You sound like you miss her,” Sunset said.
I laughed wryly. “As if. Everytime I go to the court to answer a missive I have to see her standing ward at the side of the Queen. She’s only gotten more gentle in her criticisms of me.” I frowned. “And that annoys me for some reason.”
Silence fell on the pool as I sank to sit on a ledge, tilting my head back to rest on the rim of the spring.
“I caught some fish for dinner.” Sunset said simply.
I grunted in reply. I wasn’t used to talking so much. I wasn’t used to people being around all the time.
But mostly, I wasn’t used to her. And yet, strangely…
I wanted to get used to her being around.