Coordinating a day in which all involved parties are available is difficult enough when there are three people involved. When there are fifteen, it's a nightmare beyond words. All efforts to describe the accompanying aggravation will surely fall short, so instead let it be said that it wasn't accomplished until nearly a full month later, and leave it at that.

It is August, then, when all the citadel's former residents (save for Jasper, who continues to languish over his desk) make their long way back to the hill of their old home. Their large group is carried along in three horse-drawn carts, five seated in each.

It had been Tai who arranged this transportation for them. He had put up some resistance at first, saying, "All this for Jasper?" But after hearing of his reluctance, Skander had rolled his eyes, said "I'll ask him," and, lo and behold, the next day they wind up with three carts whose drivers have been paid enough not to ask too many questions.

A rain shower the evening before has left the skies clearer and the air cooler, which is something to be grateful for, at least. Better that than when the heat was so oppressive it felt like the air was shimmering in front of them.

The path they take toward Sunset Citadel cuts through the dense foliage of the western wood. Hilo keeps an eye out for any hints of red or amber, some sign that autumn and its accompanying shades will be here soon. But everywhere is green, green, green in all its emerald glory. Ah, well. Still beautiful.

There must be a stream nearby, he thinks when he spots the erratic movements of dragonflies among the leaves, violet-blue bodies taking them to and fro. Hilo reaches over to gently brush Edeline's shoulder. When she turns to him expectantly, he points the insects out to her.

"Remember An Ode to a Dragonfly?" he asks, and is unsurprised when her eyes spark with recognition. He's glad to see it; she's always been uneasy around animals and had been sitting stiffly in the horse-drawn cart until this point.

"How did it go again? 'Oh dragonfly, you noble steed, truly nature's finest deed-'"

"'A summer-jewel of pure delight, you dazzle me with bug-like flight,'" he continues, then loses his composure as soon as he's convincingly able to get the line out. Edeline laughs too. Together with the sunlight swimming down her hair, it's the best thing Hilo's ever seen.

"Are the two of you experiencing sunstroke?" Tai asks, giving them a sharp look from where he sits across the cart. By his side, Skander watches them with kinder eyes.

"Why shouldn't they find something to laugh about? It's hot, and we have a long way to go," he says. Then he faces Edeline and Hilo, asking, "Who wrote that poem?"

Dalmar, the fifth occupant of their cart, makes a guess. "Hilo, Edeline, Tai, and I went to the academy at the same time. Every month or so, students from the department of letters would host recitations of their work. Is it from one of those? It does sound like an overzealous young scholar wrote it."

Hilo makes a face. "Yes, and it was awful. It was the first place I took Edeline when we started courting. I thought it might be romantic to hear verses describing courtly love together and always liked poetry myself, but the first one we heard was a 112-line work rhapsodizing about the majesty of dragonflies. It was excruciating. I felt terrible for dragging her along."

Edeline nudges his shoulder with hers and gives him a reassuring smile. "I liked it. Somewhere around the seventieth line, it stopped feeling uncomfortable and became funny instead," she says.

Skander looks thoughtful. "You all went to the academy together? Were you friends with Taihei then?"

"We weren't friends, we just occasionally spent time in each other's presence," Tai says, arms crossed and looking disinterested.

Dalmar waves a dismissive hand at him. "We voluntarily spent hours together every day. We were friends then, and we're friends now." He turns to Skander. "Would you believe me if I told you that, when he was fifteen, Tai was actually very sweet?"

"No."

"Good, because he wasn't."

Skander laughs. A small smile plays at the corner of Tai's mouth when he watches it. Then he says, in his own defense, "I wasn't that bad."

"Yes you were. You never even helped me with my poetry," says Hilo.

"Because it wasn't much better than the dragonfly one you were deriding just now."

Hilo gets so offended by that that Edeline hides a smile behind her hand. She remembers meeting him— over a decade ago now— and wondering how he could be endlessly passionate about a thousand things: storytelling, his friends, calligraphy, learning the lute.

And, eventually, her.

-

When Hilo is fifteen, he suffers from the delusions of grandeur so characteristic of being that age. He has one more year left at Beledon's academy, then he'll study the law at its university. He knows this. His plan for it is set.

But first, before he steps onto that path and lets it pull him along forever, he's going to write a poem.

Hilo has always loved words: the building blocks of a story or an argument. The difference between knowing and not knowing. He makes them beautiful through calligraphy, pores over them in books. Picks them apart within songs, to see how one can be more evocative than another.

So before he loses himself in high ideals of fairness and the rote memorization of legal precedent, he wants to try his hand at penning something beautiful of his own.

If only he knew how.

Seated at a table along the edges of the academy's courtyard, he offers fragments of his prose to Dalmar for critique: "How about this: 'Caught up in another spoke along the endless wheel of grief.'"

Dalmar frowns as he thinks hard on this. "What are you grieving, Hilo?"

Hilo blinks. Dalmar's right. His life is charmed; he has had nothing to grieve yet.

"Then this one, maybe: 'I miss you like the night sky misses the sun, chasing lesser lights until you come back.'"

Dalmar's confused by this as well. "Missing who, exactly?"

Hilo makes a frustrated sound, letting his head fall into his hands. "I have no idea," he says.

He feels wretched. What can be done? Every other poet has been faster and wiser than him: they've said it first, and they've said it better. No masterpieces will be made by his hand.

The summer sun shines unforgivingly upon the dark hair of their heads. Hilo feels as if the back of his neck is burning with it. He doesn't know how Tai continues to sit there with the entirety of his academy uniform in place. Every boy is meant to wear the same white tunic, black trousers, and dark over-shirt, but in heat like this they become lax with it. Dalmar's over-shirt hangs unbuttoned, and Hilo has taken his off completely.

Meanwhile, Tai sits straight-backed with the silver buttons of his clothes meticulously done up. At fifteen, he is already as condescending and sharp-eyed as he will grow up to be. He still has some of a child's softness in the lines of his face and hasn't been able to convincingly grow any stubble yet, but those are the only true indicators of his youth.

Instead of paying any attention to Hilo's persisting woes, he makes an irascible face at the pocket-watch in his hands. It had been a gift from his father, but now refuses to tick.

"It's stuck again," he complains.

Dalmar gives him a long-suffering look. He is sure that studying medicine and apprenticing himself to a physician is his calling. Hilo often thinks that because of this, he tolerates Tai's ill-tempered presence purely as an exercise in patience, in the hopes that it will come in handy when dealing with difficult future patients.

"I've told you three times already, just take it to the clockmaker's," Dalmar says.

"What possible benefit could I have from a clockmaker?"

Dalmar's exasperation climbs to new heights. "He fixes problems like this a dozen times a week. Trying to mend it yourself clearly isn't working, so ask for help," he says, but Tai remains stubborn.

Hilo sighs as they bicker back and forth. He shuts the pages of his book, where the words are written elegantly (he takes great pride in his penmanship) but are ultimately lackluster in meaning and rhythm. Standing, he says, "I'm going to take a walk around the courtyard. Maybe I'll find inspiration for something better."

Tucking his book under his arm, he steps onto the path that winds through the carefully manicured inner courtyard of Beledon's academy. Somewhere out of sight, the clear notes of a goldfinch ring out.

He passes shrubs of rosemary, beds of flowers, and fountains carved from white stone. His fellow students lounge here and there on their afternoon breaks, some huddled under arched doorways to take advantage of the scant shade offered, while others sit on the benches along the yard's perimeter.

All while he walks, Hilo picks through phrases in his mind: assembling verses, taking them apart. Who knew that it could be so harrowing to pursue an artistic endeavor? Then again, he does intend for it to be his magnum opus before entering the sobriety of the adult world, so maybe that's where the debilitating pressure comes in.

Words run in rivers through his mind, beating drums and pushing each other around in a clamor for attention. Honestly, it's very annoying. The sun shines at its best above him, but he barely registers its light, caught up as he is in the workings of his own head. 

Then suddenly, he passes a girl sitting by herself under a tree, and his mind is filled with nothing at all.

When Edeline asks him much later about why he decided to come sit with her, he won't be able to pinpoint one exact reason. He just liked all of it: her, the tree, the book in her lap. He remembers that the tree was yew, all reddish-brown bark and flattened green leaves. He remembers that her light blonde hair had hung long and loose, and that wherever the sun made its way through the foliage to crown her head, it lit up golden like a field of summer wheat.

When he sees her there, Hilo has a sense of recognition, but can't quite recall her name. Their academic year is only a few weeks old, and she had joined at its beginning: a newcomer while the majority of students had already known each other for years. But he does know that she has come to the city completely on her own (she must be brave) and is from a town in the north, and that she knows the answer to nearly any question about numbers or the stars (she's definitely smart).

Because Hilo loves stories and poems, epics and tragedies, he's familiar with the dramatic rise and fall of emotion that humans are capable of. Therefore, when he approaches the girl under the tree, he already has a sneaking suspicion that they will end up in love. He sees how her expression becomes softly considering when he approaches, and can sense that his own eyes have begun to shine and sharpen with interest. It's the beginning of a swift current of mutual feeling that Hilo is instantly able to identify.

Then again, maybe it isn't as remarkable as all that. Maybe it's just a standard case of a young adult finding someone pretty and deciding to wax poetic about it, as if it's the first and not the millionth such case.

Whatever the reasoning, he ducks under one of the yew's branches. He asks if he can join her, is thrilled when she says yes. Introductions are made, conversation is had. And slowly, over the course of many months, they fall in love for the first (and, interestingly enough, the last) time in their lives.