Blood Shaper

Book 3: Chapter 44

“I’m not a princess.” Was the first thing Lydia Icerose said to Kay after they’d sat down together at a commandeered table some of the Blood Guard had “reclaimed” from a local tavern. At least, Kay thought it was a tavern of some kind; there was enough alcohol in it for it to be one. Although, the stereotypes of pirates did lean towards excessive drinking.

“Did you hear me talking to myself earlier?” Kay asked her. He hadn’t expected her to have heard him, they’d been far enough away, and Eleniah had been hugging her quite vigorously.

“No, Aunt Eleniah told me that that would be the first thing you thought about once you worked through the relationships. Her Majesty isn’t my mother, she’s one of my aunts, and I am not in the line of succession.”

Kay shot Eleniah a look, and she grinned back at him.

“I was right, wasn’t I?”

“Shut up.” He looked back at Lydia, then frowned as he realized something. “Wait, I thought she was your cousin? How are you both Lydia’s aunts?”

“Huh?” Lydia looked confused for a moment. “Oh, I’m not biologically Lydia’s aunt.” She threw her arm around the younger elf’s shoulder and played with her hair for a moment. “Technically, she’s my second cousin or something, but since I grew up with both my cousins like we were siblings anyways, all their kids call me ‘aunt’.” Eleniah glanced over at her ‘niece’. “And you are too in the line of succession.”

“No, I am not.” The ship captain shuddered. “I renounced it as soon as I could. I’m perfectly fine being captain of my ship and in charge of just my crew. Being in charge of a nation is too much.” She grimaced mildly at Kay. “No offense.”

“No, I get what you mean.” He shot a look at Eleniah, “When I got tossed into this world and ended up with my Class, I thought I’d end up being a fairly average adventurer, right? Do some jobs for the Guild, delve into some dungeons, all that stuff. Then I end up getting this maniac as my trainer,” He pointed at Eleniah with his thumb, “And next thing I know, I’m heading into the wilderness to found a city and start a new nation. It can be a total pain sometimes.”

Eleniah glared at him. “When are you going to stop complaining about that?” She demanded, “I didn’t force you to do anything!”

Kay couldn’t keep his face straight for more than a few seconds before he broke down, chuckling. “When you stop reacting to it, maybe?”

“Ass.” She huffed and rolled her eyes.

“In all seriousness,” He continued, “It’s a hard job. I’m still not totally used to it, but it turns out I’m not terrible at it, and I like the good parts of it. Seeing Avalon grow like it has been is really rewarding, and just imagining what we can grow into is really invigorating.” He glanced off into the distance with a grin before turning back to his audience of one. “In your case, if it’s something you don’t want to do, then obviously don’t.”

She nodded emphatically, “I saw enough of the burdens that come with that level of responsibility when I was younger.” She peeked next to her towards Eleniah with an old sadness in her eyes, which her aunt didn’t miss but also didn’t comment on. “Thankfully, Her Majesty isn’t all that focused on bloodlines or direct hereditary rule. The order of succession is determined mostly through merit, so it was easy enough to remove myself from the line.” She pushed Eleniah’s arm off her shoulder before she continued, “Anyway, I was wondering, why would it be a bad thing if I was a princess? Wouldn’t that be good for you? You’d get a lot of goodwill from the Isles.” She paused for a moment, then shrugged, “Not that my family doesn’t love me, but politically, saving one of my cousins from something like this would be quite a boon to you.”

Kay held up a hand and waved it back and forth. “Yes and no. Because of your lovely aunt here, your royal aunt isn’t all that pleased with me.”

“We don’t actually have any proof of that,” Eleniah interjected.

“Do you think she’s fine with what happened? Or is she probably pissed?”

“… She’s probably mad.”

“Right.” He turned back to Lydia, who looked between them with a confused expression. “I’m not going into all the details, but do you know about how she was sending Eleniah on various missions every once in a while?”

“Um, she talked about Aunt Eleniah doing a job for her once? I haven’t heard about anything else like that.” She frowned deeply. “Didn’t you leave because you got mad at her for using you like a pawn all the time? That’s what you told us before you left.”

“Right,” Eleniah nodded and shrugged, “She still managed to get under my skin and get me to do things for her, though.”

“And the last mission she sent her on, I ended up being involved in because of weird timing. Near the end, things got… a little complicated.”

Eleniah snorted a laugh, “It’s not that complicated. I finally got fed up with her, and when she told me to do something, I ended up not doing it, and we fucked off into the woods.”

“You did kind of do half of what she wanted, though…”

“They kidnapped you, so I went to get you back; the rest of what happened wasn’t really part of my plan.”

Kay conceded the point. “Back to your question, the two of us are probably not your aunt’s favorite people right now, which by extension means that she’s not that enthused about Avalon popping up with me at the helm and her standing on the prow. So I don’t really want her paying attention to us while we’re still small. When Avalon’s able to hold its own against bigger nations, then I won’t care that much, but during the early period, we’re still vulnerable.” He sighed, “Honestly, I don’t want anyone that powerful looking our way right now, but it’s a bit too late for that. Saving a member of the Queen of the Isles’ family is going to bring more attention, and if it was a member of the line of succession there…”

“Oh.” Lydia frowned contemplatively.

“Your ship metaphors need work,” Eleniah teased him, “That one was sad.”

“Aren’t you multiple hundreds of years old? Why do you act like a kid all the time?”

“I’m just dropping my mental age to match the people I’m around. Also, being serious all the time is boring. Did that for a few years, hated it.”

Kay saw Lydia still frowning. “Don’t worry about it too much. I’m happy that we saved you, with some extra happy because it means we saved one of Eleniah’s family members. The rest is just me bitching about things I can’t really do anything about. It helps me deal with the tension if I complain a little bit about it.”

“Alright then.” She didn’t look too convinced, but she changed the subject anyways, “What are the plans for letting those of us who want to leave head out? I overheard some of your people putting out recruitment offers, so I know not everyone’s going to leave, but I do still have to go home.”

“It’s going to be a while,” Kay admitted, “Not that we have any intention of forcing anyone to stay, but it’ll take a while to carve out a new channel for you all to sail out of.”

“What?”

“We filled in the channel that the pirates used to get into the bay in so they couldn’t sail off if we missed any of them or if there was a crew on any of the ships,” He told her, “Sent a group of mages and manipulators in to close it off.”

“Plus,” Eleniah jumped in, “That channel came out right next to a weird group of sandbars, shipwrecks, and reefs that made sailing in that area a bitch and a half. I’d bet good money that the only way the scum that based themselves here got in and out was to go back and forth over it for ages to memorize the patterns.” She looked out in that direction and huffed, “It makes a great escape when you’re on the run from pursuers, but it’s a shit way to get to an actual trade port.”

“You’re going to keep this place?” Lydia asked, intuiting their plans from Eleniah’s last words.

“Why not?” Kay replied, “There’s already enough infrastructure here that’s useful, and the bay’s really nice. Might as well tear down what we don’t need and rebuild what’s left instead of building a whole new port somewhere else.”

They lightly chatted a bit more about his and Avalon’s plans for the port and other expansions. Kay did his best to steer the conversation away from topics that he didn’t want to spread yet. As much as Eleniah obviously loved Lydia, she was still loyal to another nation that cared about its own development. He didn’t think Eleniah’s cousin would suddenly show up with an army and demand their surrender, but he also didn’t put it past her to make moves in his territory in more subtle ways.

And now he was thinking of this portion of the continent as “his territory”. Internally Kay chuckled at the changes he was going through as time went on. Who needs hard work and therapy to change yourself from the person you were? Just get yeeted into another dimension!

Eventually, a runner came to get Kay, and he stood up to leave. “Lydia, we’ll talk more later. Eleniah, I’ll try not to need you for anything for a while.”

“Good luck with that! You need me three or four times a day!”

Kay rolled his eyes and was about to step away when he remembered something. “Oh, Lydia, you said something about a piece of jewelry that was taken from you, right? Eleniah got your necklace back.”

“Huh?” Lydia frowned as Eleniah pulled out the necklace marking her as being part of her family. “Oh! That isn’t what I was talking about. It’s nice to get back, but those are replaceable.”

“Well then, what are you looking for? I can tell some people to keep an eye out.”

Lydia blushed and pointedly looked away from her aunt. “… It’s an engagement band. It’s silver, with-”

The rest of the description was cut off as Eleniah grabbed her niece and spun her around, squealing with excitement.

Kay rolled his eyes again and walked off, following the runner. Eleniah could deal with finding it then.

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“Dammit!” The now former, once again, pirate captain cursed as she threw a rock into the dirt. “Where the fuck did the fucking Fist come from?” She whirled on her partner. “You told me she was on the other side of the bloody continent!”

“She was!” Her partner held his hands up and leaned away from her tirade from where he sat on top of his frog companion. “She was! No one said anything about her coming this direction.”

“Fuck!” She whirled and punted the rock into the ocean. “Now we have to start all over again!”

“It’s not like we haven’t done it before.”

She whirled around to glare at him and took a full step towards him before she managed to think anything through the red haze over her vision. She stopped and took a deep breath. “You’re right. We have. It’s just another setback. We can deal with this.”

Her partner nodded. “It’ll only take a few days to head up north on Muckspite, maybe less if you can really get him going. We can get ourselves set up there. I still have some contacts on a few of the ships in that area.”

“Right.” She scowled again. “Where the fuck did the Fist get an army like that anyways? Didn’t she leave her bitch cousin’s court?”

He shrugged, “I don’t know. I thought she had too. That one guy with the blood armor had a bunch of weaker blood guys with him, though, didn’t that new town to the west of us that caused problems with the slave shipments have a blood guy in charge? Maybe she teamed up with them.”

“I guess.” She looked around for another rock to abuse but didn’t find any. “Whatever, let’s get a few more hours away before we set up camp; I want a good night’s rest before I spend all my mana boosting Muckspite.”

“Actually,” A strange voice cut in, “I don’t think you’ll be going anywhere.”

They whirled around, both of them clutching at their weapons.

A dark-skinned man seemed to fade into existence a few feet from them. He was tall, and his limbs seemed to stretch in strange directions as he paced closer. His clothing was fancy, fancier than anyone should be wearing in the complete wilderness they were in and looked immaculate. His skin was sold black of the people to the far north of the northern continent, but it was sallow and somehow pale even through its dark tone.

The pirates stared into his multi-colored, swirling eyes and instinctively took a step back. “Vampyr.”

“You see,” The monstrosity in a mostly human shape continued, ignoring the pirates’ fear, “My target seems to have quite the number of powerful friends with them, and you seem to be quite familiar with one of them. I’ll need you to answer some questions for me. And then…” He grinned, showing off his sharpened teeth and two protruding fangs. “Well, I’m still quite thirsty.”

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