Content warning: this chapter contains references to physical and emotional abuse that occurred earlier in Esmera's life. It is somewhat consistent with what was described earlier in this story. Please read with caution if you're sensitive to this kind of content. Thanks for your support 💜

The conservatory formed a box topped by a solid ceiling and walled in by glass panes that showed Esmera the night. The stars, brighter than the fairy lights overhead, were all there was in her world other than the plate of grilled cheese on her lap and Tauram, sitting beside her with his shoulder pressed against hers.

Lundas sauntered inside, peering around the bookshelf at Esmera and Tauram with a small rodent in his mouth. A thick worm dangling from his beak, Jammas sat on the wildcat's head the way he usually did on Esmera's. She tried not to feel a twinge of jealousy and instead focused on the heart-warming fact that the two familiars had grown close enough to go hunting together.

Seemingly thinking better of squeezing himself into Esmera and Tauram's cramped pillow fort, Lundas skulked away, taking Jammas with him.

Esmera looked after them until they vanished out of the conservatory and into the sitting room. "So, it looks like our familiars are friends now."

Tauram grinned. "It would seem so. I must say, I've never seen Lundas befriend a bird in the entire time I've known him. Your Jammas must be very charming."

"I wouldn't expect anything less from a lark who brings glittering gems and whispering flowers to his oblivious sorcerer." Esmera smiled.

That had been the event that kicked off her adventure in Milatanur. Jammas was charming, but he was more than that. He was loving, persistent, adorable and innovative, just to name a few of the qualities Esmera had picked up on since meeting him.

Tauram took a sip of litchi juice and set his glass back on the tray beside him with a clink. "Esmera, I wanted to ask you something."

"Yeah?" She glanced at him before turning away, taking another bite of her sandwich and doing her best not to think about the warmth of his arm where it pressed against hers or the finger that traced along the patterned edge of his plate just an inch away from her thigh.

"You know a lot about me."

Esmera sensed Tauram's gaze on her without needing to see it for herself.

"You know about how I was banished, and you even met my sister, but I don't know much about you before you came to Milatanur. Except for the bit about you being a barista." He tapped his nails on his plate, and they pitter-pattered like raindrops.

"Tauram." She faced him, managing a wry smile. "You know more about me than I do about myself. You met my family. You know first-hand every prophecy about me. I can barely say that I do."

"I want to know more, Esmera." The fairy lights were like stars in his dark, narrow eyes. "I want to know how you survived in Arkōsāra on your own for so many years. I couldn't have done it if I didn't have Belaren with me."

"I barely survived, Tauram," she whispered.

"Tell me about it." His eyes remained on her, soft but expectant. "Please."

Esmera took another bite of her grilled cheese. She could barely admire its delicious simplicity because her mind was elsewhere, flipping to the beginning of her story as she knew it.

Esmera inhaled deeply. "I was found on a doorstep one morning. I always thought I was deliberately abandoned there as a baby by parents who didn't want me or couldn't take care of me, but it seems that my mother left me there because she didn't have a choice. She had planned to come with me, but Ruagu killed her before she could." Tears pricked at her eyes.

Esmera hadn't seen Yandriya die, but she had heard her, and the auditory ability she had been blessed with turned into a curse, making that memory one she could never discard.

"Of course Lady Yandriya wanted to come with you." Tauram smiled softly. "I remember her. She adored each of her children. She would've never willingly separated from you, the daughter she had always wanted."

"I saw that. In the memories Lady Varali led me through." Esmera closed her eyes to contain her tears. She swallowed a sob. "The doorstep I was left on belonged to an elderly woman who lived alone. She took me in and cared for me for a little while, but she was old. She was never going to live forever, and definitely not long enough to see me grow up. When she passed away, there was nobody to take me in, so I was put into the foster care system."

Tauram said nothing, only watched Esmera, chewing softly.

"I was little, maybe three years old. Or so I was told. I was too young to remember much of it for myself." Esmera's voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. Part of her wished her story did too.

"What do you remember about her?" asked Tauram softly, his voice as gentle as the hands that had prised Esmera's from the piano before she could overexert her auditory ability to the point of no return.

"I remember sunlight. Warmth. She was gentle, and she had a lot of love to give." Esmera picked at the crisp edge of her sandwich as she thought back. She had to give Tauram something more solid than a vague sense of what her first caregiver had been like. "My earliest memory is of her."

Esmera frowned as she tried to call it into being, this image of a woman whose name she didn't know. "She bought a six-pack of yoghurts at the grocery store one day. I wanted one. Silly, clumsy child that I was, I dropped it, and it splattered all over the grass. I cried because, in my mind, this was the only carton of yoghurt I had and would ever get. She wiped my tears, picked me up, and gave me another one."

"That was kind of her." Tauram's eyes crinkled. They hadn't left Esmera since she started talking even though she couldn't bring herself to meet them.

It was better to talk to the dark, empty night or the stars. They wouldn't answer back. They wouldn't take the information she volunteered and use it against her. Most importantly, they wouldn't force her to share parts of her past she was afraid to face, confront feelings she'd rather leave unchallenged.

"She was kind." It was the first glimpse of goodwill Esmera had encountered in her memory and the last for many years.

"What happened next?" asked Tauram.

Esmera took another bite of her grilled cheese to give her strength before she waded into the parts of her past that would require it. "Lots and lots of foster families. Some wanted a maid or a live-in babysitter. Some wanted the money they'd get from caring for me even while they spent none of it on me."

It had been hand-me-downs or simply going without, but it was still better than living in the orphanage, where there was never enough of anything to go around, never anyone who cared to ask where the bump on Esmera's head had come from or why her meagre possessions were dwindling.

Orphans had learned to scavenge, to take whatever they wanted before they lost out, even if that meant stealing it. Some of those children weren't even orphaned but removed from homes where their parents had hurt them, had taught them that it was okay to hit people to express themselves.

Esmera didn't blame them, but she couldn't quite sympathise with them either. She'd had her fair share of cruel treatment, and all it had taught her was that she would never do that to anyone else.

"But I'm sure you have some good memories of those times." Tauram brushed away a curl that had fallen over her eye, a curl she hadn't noticed because she had gotten so lost in her past.

Esmera nodded, smiling faintly. "There was the grilled cheese, pillow forts and movie nights that I told you about. There was a trip to the Museum of Indigenous and Diverse Art that I just remembered when I visited it the day we met."

Tauram sat straighter, narrowing his dark eyes. "Oh? When was that?"

Esmera took a bite of her grilled cheese and thought about it. "Maybe ten years ago."

Tauram tilted his head. He stared out at the stars before bringing his sparkling gaze back to Esmera. "The museum was already in my possession by then." He nudged her. "Do you think there's a chance we saw each other before we met, but we just never realised it?"

"Maybe." Esmera gave him a small smile.

The truth was, there was no chance that Esmera could've seen Tauram and not noticed that his stride was a work of art, that his energy was a masterpiece he had created unconsciously, that everything about him was as beautiful as one of his paintings, but she was too afraid to say that.

She was afraid of what would happen if he laughed it off and called her sentimentality ridiculous.

She was afraid of what would happen if he pulled her to him and said he felt the same way about her.

So, to keep things light, she said, "Though I think you probably would've been arrested for kissing me if you had done it back then."

"Unfortunately yes. Laws are laws." Tauram gave a dramatic sigh as he took a serviette from the pile beside him and wiped his hands before setting his empty plate down. "I guess it's better that we only met now, when you're no longer a minor according to Arkōsāra's rules."

"I think so." Esmera couldn't resist a smile at his theatrics.

Arkōsāra couldn't be more different from Milatanur, a place where a baby could be betrothed to a child with nobody batting an eyelid, but both had their cons and their charms. Both had been Esmera's homes whenever she had needed them.

She hadn't thought of it in this way before.

Everything that had gone wrong in her and Tauram's lives had brought them together. It had been painful and unfair at the time, but maybe there was value in them after all because of where they had led Esmera. Yes, Milatanur was dangerous and terrifying, but it was beautiful, and here, Esmera had people she could rely on for the first time in her life. It felt right being here with Tauram in this moment, with the fairy lights beaming down at them and the night surrounding them like an ocean full of diamonds.

"So, you've told me about your life in the foster system, but I'm curious about how you found yourself being a barista."

Esmera's mouth went dry. She had given Tauram the short story of her childhood, but there were some things he wasn't ready to hear about, like the foster mother who had kicked Esmera out when she had been unable to put her crying infant to sleep.

There were some things she wasn't ready to tell him, like how Stephan's hands had hurt her as much as they had caressed her, so all she said was, "I couldn't afford to go to college, so I took the only job I could get without a qualification." She kept her eyes off Tauram as she wiped her hands and set her plate down.

Gazing at the stars that stared back at her, Esmera reclined into the pillow behind her. It was soft and comfortable enough to summon sleep in someone who was as alert as could be. It might've done that to Esmera had Tauram not spoken.

"I'm sorry."

Esmera's eyes snapped to Tauram, confused. "About?"

"About everything you've endured." He cast his gaze downwards, and she could see from the grim line of his mouth how truly apologetic he was for the pain he carried no responsibility for.

"Tauram." His hand was so close, close enough for Esmera to grasp if she chose to, but she forced down her sudden, unwise urge to take it in hers. "None of what happened to me was your fault. You have nothing to apologise for."

"I do, Esmera." Tauram sighed. Now he was the one who found it easier to talk to the stars than to her.

She couldn't blame him even as she wished he would look at her so he'd know that she truly didn't blame him for the awful things she had experienced.

"I've been a terrible betrothed. I should've taken better care of you." After being lost in the stars, his eyes found hers again. "That is, after all, what a promise of marriage is. A promise to cherish another in every way until Death sees fit to separate you."

"Tauram..." Esmera cupped his cheek in her palm, shaking her head. "How could you have taken care of me? You thought I was dead. Everyone did."

That was the only reason why an honourable man like Tauram would even consider proposing to Ghallia, a woman he wasn't betrothed to, why the eyes of every mortal Esmera met widened when they found out who she was. She was a figure of legend, of prophecy, a wraith that was all that remained of her great family.

Tauram sighed. "I don't know what I could've done differently. I just wish I had done something. It's devastating knowing everything you've been through, all while you were so close to me."

"I wasn't that close," Esmera said. It was all she could think of to console Tauram, whose jaw was clenched so tight she feared he was about to dislocate it.

"Where did you live, Esmera?" His eyes glinted with fury or tears or maybe they were furious tears.

She might've been afraid to answer, even to be this close to him, if she hadn't known that his anger was for her, not at her. "Citadel."

It was a misleadingly impressive name for a neighbourhood that was one storm away from falling apart, but maybe it had been grand in its past. Just as Esmera had been before she had lost her entire family and been abandoned in Arkōsāra.

Tauram blanched. "That's a few minutes drive from my apartment. To think that you had to work as a barista of all things when I, your betrothed, was living so close to you."

"Hey, being a barista isn't that bad." Esmera elbowed Tauram in an attempt to lighten the mood but it did the exact opposite.

It only fuelled his rage.