Tiny Raven

Askarion’s glare could have curdled milk.

He stood like a vengeful statue, arms crossed, brows lowered, watching as the last crumbs of evidence vanished into Stella’s defiant mouth.

Alessia, sprawled on a cot with her ankle up, had the decency to look sheepish.

She made zero effort to hide her own half-eaten honeycake.

“Really.” His voice was low and thick with disbelief. “You thought this was a good idea.”

He unfolded his arms with the slow inevitability of a surgeon approaching an amputation.

“A woman whose blood has the consistency of watered wine and a child who hasn’t met a vegetable she wasn’t terrified of, and you decide to break your fast with compressed sugar and air.” He jabbed a finger toward the honeycake crumbs clinging to Stella’s chiton, then at the half-devoured evidence in Alessia’s hand. “That’s not breakfast. That’s a declaration of war against your own blood.”

Stella noisily swallowed the last bite of honeycake, licking a smear of sticky glaze from her thumb with deliberate satisfaction before fixing Askarion with enormous, innocent eyes.

“Uncle Patch said special sick people need extra honey for healing!” she announced, her voice ringing with the absolute conviction of a child who had definitely not just fabricated the information on the spot. She patted her stomach for emphasis, honey-sticky hand leaving a faint imprint on her chiton. “It’s medicinal.”

Patrian stopped mid-stride at the tent flap, one hand still holding back the canvas, and turned his head slowly toward Stella with the focused, dissecting gaze of a man who had just had his professional reputation invoked in defense of confectionery larceny.

“Did I.” he said flatly. It was not a question.

There was a moment of silence before he added, “…I may have suggested honey was soothing.”

Askarion whirled on Patrian with the fury of a man who had just watched his sole ally defect to the enemy camp.

Patrian entered fully, his expression unruffled, and moved to Alessia’s side with economical grace.

“Soothing,” he repeated, his voice dry as kindling. “Not substituting.”

He set down his satchel and checked Alessia’s ankle, two fingers against the pulse, a brief inspection of the new wound, before glancing up with a half-smile that managed to be both gentle and immovable.

“A body consuming its own muscle for six months cannot process heavy protein immediately. Sugar is a poor, sticky bridge, but it is a bridge.” He brushed a crumb from Stella’s chiton, his thumb lingering against her small shoulder. “Tomorrow’s honey is earned with today’s eggs and fish. Understood?”

Stella looked between Patrian and Askarion with honey smeared across her cheek like war paint.

“Understood, Uncle Patch,” she said with the solemn gravity of a king signing a treaty. Then her chin lifted, her eyes narrowing with sudden, dangerous calculation. “But the eggs gotta be scrambled. And the fish gotta have no eyes. Admiral Stonebelly says food with eyes is staring at you, and that’s rude.”

She leaned forward, planting both sticky hands on her hips. “And if Mama eats all her fish without hiding it under the blanket like last time—” she shot Alessia a deeply betrayed look, “—then both of us get victory honey. That’s the rules.”

Askarion’s head whipped toward the corner of the tent where Odrian had been ostensibly studying a wax tablet, and Dionys had been running a whetstone along a belt knife with monkish devotion.

“You two.”

The whetstone froze mid-scrape. The tablet developed a sudden crack along its edge.

“Don’t,” Askarion snarled, stabbing a finger at them, “pretend you haven’t been funneling contraband honeycakes into this tent like it’s a damned festival. I know it was your caches she raided. I inventory the medical stores. I also inventory the quartermaster’s shelves.”

Odrian squinted at his tablet as if it contained the secrets of the Oracle.

Dionys studied the bronze grain of his blade with an intensity typically reserved for battlefield triage.

“Look at me.”

Neither looked.

“I am surrounded by traitors,” Askarion announced to the canvas ceiling, throwing his hands up with such violence his leather apron straps creaked. “One physician. Two kings. A thief who thinks scurvy is a character flaw she can bully into submission. And not a spine between them.”

He spun back, planting both fists on his hips, and fixed Odrian and Dionys with the full glare of a man who had stitched them both back together at least twice and therefore owned their souls.

Stella quietly slid another honeycake from behind Dionys. He lifted his elbow so she could reach it.

“You—” he jabbed at Dionys, “—did you just help her?”

Dionys tested the edge of his knife against his thumb and returned to his whetstone.

“No.”

“I watched you,” Askarion said.

“You watched wrong.”

Odrian made a small, interested noise at his tablet as he read the same line for the fourth time.

Askarion exhaled through his nose, long and sharp. A bull preparing to charge.

“Fine. Fine. I will remember this when one of you inevitably arrives at my tent with a spear in your gullet.”

He rounded back on Alessia and Stella, scooping the empty honeycake cloth with a snap.

“Fish. Eggs. No eyes, no arguments. You eat it, or I tell your daughter that honeycakes are made of boiled beets and mashed turnips.”

Stella gasped dramatically, then folded her arms across her chest.

“The fish still can’t have eyes.”

Askarion pinched the bridge of his nose.

“The fish may be blind,” he said.

Stella squinted at him, considering, and then she held out her hand.

“Deal.”

Askarion let out a long-suffering sigh and took it.

─ ·⋆˚☆˖°· ─

Alessia combed through Stella’s hair, sectioning it to braid after finally convincing the girl to have a bath.

“You know,” she said. “Askarion is probably right. We have been eating too many sweets lately.”

“Nooooo,” Stella whined dramatically as she flopped backward onto Alessia’s lap. “He’s evil and we should bury him with the crabs.” She paused before adding thoughtfully, “Only the spy crabs, though. They’re traitors.”

Alessia burst out laughing, tugging Stella upright.

“You’re terrible,” she said, though there was no scolding in her words. “If we bury Askarion, who’s going to patch up your next battle wound?”

The question was light, teasing. But her fingers lingered a moment on Stella’s shoulder. Checking Stella’s ruthlessness.

She’d heard the same casual cruelty in herself once. Had wondered, later, where she’d learned it.

Was it child’s play, or was Walus’s influence appearing in her daughter at last?

“Uncle Patch,” Stella declared, twisting in Alessia’s lap to fix her with a look of absolute certainty, her half-braided curls sticking up like dandelion fluff. “He’s got better thread, and he doesn’t make fish stare at you.”

Alessia’s shoulders eased.

She was still just Stella.

Stella patted Alessia’s knee with the same solemn gravity she used when negotiating honeycake treaties.

“I won’t need stitching anyway, ‘cause Admiral Stonebelly’s building me armor. Rock armor. From toes to nose.”

Odrian, eavesdropping outside the tent, choked on his wine.

Alessia glanced toward the noise of his coughing before placing a kiss on Stella’s forehead. “I’m serious, Starlight. We both need to eat less sugar. You skipped supper two days in a row because you were full of honeycakes.”

Stella twisted around in Alessia’s lap, wet hair slapping against her cheeks, and fixed her mother with a look of grave, sticky-fingered concern.

“But Mama, if I don’t eat the honeycakes, they might get lonely in the jar. Then they’ll go stale, and Uncle Odi will be sad because he stole them special.” She paused, her lower lip wobbling just slightly. “And before… we didn’t have jars. We didn’t have anything. So I have to eat them now, while they’re here. That’s inventory.” She nodded fiercely, using Alessia’s own logic against her. “You always say don’t waste inventory.”

Alessia stilled, her own logic turned back on her with the devastating precision of a five-year-old who had spent too much time listening to her count stolen coins in the dark. Her fingers paused in Stella’s curls, the comb hovering mid-stroke. Her throat closed on what she had been about to say.

“You’re using my own tricks against me now. That’s dirty, Stellaki.” She pressed her lips to the crown of her head, inhaling the scent of clean water and olive oil, so different from the salt and fear that used to cling to her hair.

Her hands resumed their work, sectioning her hair with fingers that were still trembling faintly.

“I know,” she said quietly, her voice dropping into the low register that meant she was being serious. “I know we didn’t have jars. I know you’re filling a belly that’s been empty too long. But here’s the thing about inventory, Starlight: You don’t spend it all at once just because you finally have it. You ration. You make it last. Because the worst thing isn’t having little.” She smoothed a strand back, tucking it behind Stella’s ear. “The worst thing is having plenty and making yourself sick on it.”

She finished the braid, tying it off with a leather cord, and turned Stella’s chin so she had to look at her. Her thumb traced her cheek, still too thin, the hollows of six months still visible.

“Here’s the new rule. We eat the fish. We eat the eggs. We eat the figs and the bread and the olives until you’re strong enough to carry all your rocks without getting tired. And then—” she tapped Stella’s nose “—we eat the honeycakes. As dessert. Not as armor, not as inventory. Just… sweetness because we earned it.”

Stella considered the rules for a long moment before she nodded.

“Okay.”

Alessia smiled and kissed the top of her head.

Scarcity had taught different lessons.

But Stella deserved to grow up learning better ones.

─ ·⋆˚☆˖°· ─

Odrian swiped the wine from his chin with the back of his hand. He didn’t move away from the tent.

Through the canvas, Alessia’s voice dropped into that low register, the serious, truth-telling one, and he found himself holding his breath.

The worst thing isn’t having little. It’s having plenty and making yourself sick on it.

He closed his eyes. In the darkness behind his lids, he saw another child. Bright hair and a gap-toothed smile collecting seashells on a shore hundreds of miles away.

Teiran.

Eight years old, a stranger he loved through letters that took weeks to arrive.

He’d gone to war when Teiran was three. Small enough to forget the sound of his father’s voice, old enough to remember the absence. 

And now, standing outside a tent in a war camp, listening to a young mother teach her daughter how not to drown in honeycakes… The map he’d carried for years no longer fit the ground beneath his feet.

He’d given his son a kingdom. He wasn’t sure he’d ever taught him how to live in one.

His hand settled against the tent pole, knuckles pressing into the grain. Inside, Stella giggled at something Alessia said. A bright, uncomplicated sound.

This was not strategy. This was a woman rebuilding a life one rule at a time.

And he was standing outside, eavesdropping like a thief.

His fingers found the empty loop on his belt where his signet used to hang. Collateral. He’d called it that. A king’s promise.

Tomorrow, he decided, the word forming sharp and clear as a blade in his mind. Tomorrow I write to Teiran.

He stood for a moment before pushing off the pole and walking away before they could find him listening. Before the warmth bleeding through the canvas could tempt him to step inside.

He had some fish to blind.