I might have miscalculated.

  I had known Alys would enjoy the concentrated torture juice, but I hadn’t realized just how much she would enjoy it. As soon as we finished dinner, she leapt up from the table, raided her tree, and rushed to me with her arms full of fruit. Her eyes were twinkling, her wings were fluttering, and her tail was swaying so fast that it reminded me of Nasha’s.

  “Did you leave at least one piece of fruit on the tree?” I wondered with a sigh.

  “No!”

  “And you won’t take no for an answer, will you?”

  “No!”

  “Well… I suppose, as your kobold, I ought to take care of my dragoness’s every whim.” I sighed again, much more theatrically, as I accepted the fruits. “Why don’t you go take a bath while I get started? We need to make a delivery to the elders, so we should start heading over soon, and I want a bath as well.”

  All of a sudden, my much more serious dragoness was back.

  “A delivery? Did you manage to work out the powder for Nelaeryn?”

  Her worry for the elf was obvious in her tone of voice. I was struck again by how much Alys cared about the people of Swiftband, despite preferring to live outside town and focus on her work.

  “I have not,” I said gently. “My apologies. I made some nutritional supplements for Grafton.”

  “Oh. That’s fine.”

  I knew she meant it, but I didn’t like the way she drooped slightly. Leaning forward, I placed a kiss on the tip of her snout.

  “I will focus on Nelaeryn first thing tomorrow,” I promised in a whisper.

  “I didn’t…” She crossed her arms and glared at me. “Don’t feel pressured just because I’m worried. And don’t feel guilty about it, either!”

  “As my mistress commands,” I purred, leaning forward for another brief peck, which was made somewhat awkward by all the fruit I was holding.

  She didn’t seem fooled by my immediate capitulation to her demand, and to be fair, she was right. I did feel guilty about making her worry. Giving her my best smile, I promised myself silently to put more effort into my alchemy so I could remove that concerned look from her eyes as soon as possible.

  She studied me for a few more seconds, then nodded. “Hrm. I will take a bath quickly. Leave the dishes alone. I’ll clean them up while you are bathing.”

  Without waiting for a reply, she bounded up the stairs, displaying more energy than she typically showed. I was glad to see that not even our brief meandering into less pleasant subjects could ruin the meal we had shared.

  To help maintain that positive mood, I deposited the fruits on the table and started pulling items out of my storage bag. Concentrating the horrible powers of the torture juice was neither difficult nor unpleasant for the environment, and it would make my dragoness happy. I saw no reason to delay.

  By the time Alys came down the stairs, I had already removed the rind from all the fruits and was in the process of extracting their liquid bounty. She gave me a curious look, but said nothing, merely running her tail across my back as she passed.

  The gesture put a smile on my face. This smile only grew as I began processing the juice, and the admittedly pleasing smell of the fruit intensified in response to the beetle’s flames. The next moment, the juice started to boil.

  I had already noted the flame’s differing effects on paste and juice. With paste, the positive elements were condensed, while everything else burned and flaked away as ash. With juice, I had expected the excess liquid to evaporate as steam, but that was not the case. The liquid churned furiously, then simply… shrank. It wasn’t condensing, since the juice maintained its consistency, but the volume was visibly reducing. And, as with paste, the end result would be far more potent.

  I had no idea how that worked yet, and it fascinated me.

  Of course, I had no chance of processing the entire stock of juice before Alys finished bathing. She truly had stripped the tree of all its bounty. I had only gotten through a third of the juice when she came inside, though I had managed to fill one jug fast enough that the intensely hot liquid had cooled sufficiently. I had just placed the jug in her cold cupboard when she walked through the door.

  “I set aside some of the juice to cool for you,” I told her. Turning, I pointed at the other jugs on the table. “The rest is still too hot to put in the cold cupboard just yet. It needs to come to room temperature first.”

  The cupboard’s cooling enchantment wasn’t terribly potent. If I put the freshly processed juice inside, the liquid’s temperature would eventually come down, but not before its heat had permeated the entirety of the cupboard’s other contents.

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  “Hrrrm,” she rumbled contentedly. “Thank you.”

  “Just try not to drink all of it before I even finish my bath?”

  “I will make no promises!”

  —

  “You know, you could have stayed home and enjoyed a quiet evening,” I mused later as we walked into town, our fingers locked together and her tail in its customary place around my waist.

  “I like spending time with you,” she rumbled, making my smile grow.

  Nothing else needed to be said. We strolled the rest of the way in silence, simply enjoying each other’s company. Occasionally, I ran my fingers over the tail wrapped around my waist, delighting in both the freedom to do so and the small shiver it often elicited from my dragoness.

  I wanted to savor every moment of this tranquility before encountering Grafton. The human elder hadn’t seemed particularly pleased to accept my help, and had only done so at his wife’s insistence. I expected at least some unpleasantness from the upcoming visit.

  What I didn’t expect was to walk into an eerily quiet Town Hall. The townsfolk who were currently present were all keeping their heads down and their voices low. Scanning the room, I spotted what I guessed was the source of the subdued atmosphere.

  Arandel was standing in her usual place in the kitchen area, but she wasn’t alone. She was glaring viciously at a certain kitsune, whose expression was far too smug. The two were facing off like they were about to duel.

  “Hello!” I spoke loudly on purpose to cut through the tension.

  The elven cook glanced towards the sound of my voice. When she saw us approaching, her eyes brightened.

  “You two! We’ve been seeing you a lot more often recently. I knew you’d be good for each other!” She beamed like she had personally introduced us. “Let me get you some food, all right?”

  The kitsune snickered.

  Arandel’s gaze immediately snapped back to the fox. “What?”

  “My, my. You shouldn’t push food on those who are already full.” Ritsu turned to us, his eyes gleaming gold. “You two have eaten already, have you not?”

  Alys sighed. “You can smell it, can’t you? Hrm. Your senses don’t even need to be that good to catch a whiff of the meal we had.”

  “Indeed! You smell rather nice at the moment. Can I ask what the meal was? Something citrusy, certainly.”

  My dragoness happily rumbled an affirmative, patting my arm with her free hand. “Hrrrmmm. He made a very nice sauce for me. Too bad he couldn’t eat his own creation.”

  “Just because I made separate portions doesn’t mean I didn’t have any. I just kept my use of the torture juice to reasonable amounts,” I groused, dramatically exaggerating my distress for the benefit of my audience.

  Even Arandel smiled, though she switched back to glaring at the fox too quickly for my liking.

  “We will work on it,” my dragoness assured me. Then she turned to Arandel. “Now. What happened to you?”

  The elf stiffened, shooting Alys an awkward smile. Ritsu’s smugness only intensified further.

  That smugness quickly faltered as Alys continued, “Need me to take care of the fox?”

  Arandel paused and looked at the kitsune. She seemed to be seriously considering if he would look better dressed in flames and nothing else. After a moment, though, she sighed and shook her head.

  “It’s nothing,” she said through gritted teeth. “I am being… silly. If you’ve eaten already, I’m guessing you’re here for the elders? They’re right where they always are!”

  She tried to keep her voice cheerful, but it was an unconvincing performance.

  I thanked her quickly anyway and started for the elders’ table, tugging Alys with me. My dragoness was reluctant to go. She kept turning her head to scowl at the kitsune.

  “I don’t like the way Arandel looked at him.”

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” I told her soothingly. “Arandel said so herself. Besides, I doubt anyone here would just sit there and ignore her if Ritsu really had done something to her.”

  “Hrrrmmm,” Alys rumbled.

  It was actually a variant of the sound I hadn’t heard before. Extremely reluctant acceptance, perhaps? I mentally filed that away, determined to decipher every single one of my dragoness’s quirks.

  Then we arrived at the elders’ table. All other thought briefly faded as I tried to suppress a wince.

  Grafton looked much worse than the last time we’d seen him. His cheeks were sunken further. The bags under his eyes had started to spread. Lines of blackened skin stretched down his cheeks in what resembled lightning patterns, but which I knew to be burst capillaries.

  Despite the foreign nature of Ferlis’ features, her anxiety was plain to see. I could read it in the way she sat subtly angled towards her husband. Her fingers kept twitching intermittently, like she was tempted to swoop him up in a protective embrace.

  “Thorn. Alys.” Hyel greeted us with a nod. The elf didn’t look as obviously distressed as the wendigo, but the lines of his face revealed his weariness. “What brings you to us this evening?”

  Yora said nothing, though I noticed her feathers looked less vibrant. The whole table was sharing in Grafton’s pain.

  I decided to borrow my dragoness' sense of tact. Letting go of her hand, I pulled a box of the nutritional supplements from my storage bag and slammed it down on the table.

  “This. Eat.”

  My tone was commanding as I pushed the box closer to Grafton. He looked down at it like I was trying to feed him a pungent carcass. Pulling one of the spheres out of the box, he scowled at its squishy consistency.

  “What is that?”

  “Something that will hopefully keep you from wasting away to nothing,” I said flatly. “And which I spent the entire day working on.”

  “I think —”

  “Thank you, Thorn.” Ferlis cut him off, her voice sounding extra cold and eerie as she stared at the side of his face. “My husband will happily partake.”

  Said husband looked like she had hit him over the head. But he did, reluctantly and slowly, start working his way through the ball of nutritional supplement. His expression did not grow more enthused after the first taste.

  “I made as many of those nutritional supplements as I could.” I directed my explanation to Ferlis, because she was clearly the one who would ensure Grafton cooperated. “One of their effects should boost how quickly his body digests them. I will make as many as I can over the next couple of days while working on other projects. If they work, meaning if he recovers to where he was before starving himself, I’ll slow my production and just focus on keeping him at a healthy weight.”

  “You do not need to ignore me, you brat,” Grafton spat. Almost literally, considering his evident distaste for my creation.

  I simply continued my instructions to Ferlis. “Please make sure he continues eating those, at the regular pace at which he consumes food. And do not let him starve himself more, please. Even if he complains about the taste.”

  “Feh. Like I would do that. Do you have any idea how much stew I’ve had, brat? At this point, I’m so sick of it, it tastes worse than whatever you stuck in these things.”

  Grafton’s sneer was, admittedly, blunted by his statement. Not even I could remain unmoved as the implications of the human elder’s words hung heavy in the air. It was difficult to enjoy his suffering when it was of such a magnitude.

  No matter how profoundly irritating I still found him.