Work Text:
"My lady."
Delo's downcast eyes and graceful curtsy were a shock, like a bucketful of freezing water splashed over her. Malta stood, frozen in the middle of closing her parasol - a gift from the Satrap, shimmering in the liquid colors of the sea - and stared dumbly at the shy stranger greeting her in the hallway of the Trell mansion. That Delo had rushed to meet her in the hallway like a child, instead of waiting augustly for a servant to bring her visitor to her in the garden or the drawing room, had stirred warmth in Malta's chest, a certainty that some things were still unchanged. But then her friend had taken one look at her, her eyes going round and her mouth forming a pretty little "oh!" that she was too well-mannered to say out loud, and then she had lowered her head and dropped into a deep curtsy with that murmured greeting.
"Delo," Malta greeted her, bemused but determined to behave as though nothing was off. She closed the parasol, and allowed the servant that had opened the door to take it and her hat from her. The Trells had recovered fairly well from the war over the last few months, she thought, though of course their mansion was far enough from Bingtown that it had escaped the worst of the damage to begin with. As had, it seemed, their fortunes.
She turned her eyes from inspecting the hallway back to Delo, and just caught her staring at her bared head and the scarlet crest on her forehead, before the girl shook herself and managed a stiff smile. Malta stopped, biting the inside of her lip. She had forgotten. How could she have forgotten? She had gotten so used to people admiring her Elderling features, had been so convinced of their beauty based on Reyn's words and those of the Jamaillian courtiers. But in her fantastical adventures she had forgotten that it was nearly a year since she had last seen Delo, and that that night she had been no more than a smooth-faced Bingtown girl in a recycled dress, just about to be presented to society as a woman.
And now she was a scaled stranger knocking unannounced at Delo's door.
Delo's dark eyes shone with some unspoken emotion, and the planes of her face were tense and strangely hard, now, her childish roundness burned away by the trials of the past year. She may not have known hardships like Malta had, but this was not the sheltered, petulant girl that had brought Malta a little purse full of trinkets and thought it a generous gift. Fear and worry if not hunger and suffering had gnawed away at her, and although she was perfectly made up and dressed, dainty lace gloves covering her hands, she carried herself differently. Malta thought she now looked like a person who had grown accustomed to hauling heavy buckets of water to keep the fires from spreading, rather than someone who had trained very hard to be able to swoon bonelessly into the waiting arms of a gentleman, or lounge languidly on a divan. Such skills they had once thought essential!
The silence had grown awkward, and Malta was considering asking the servant to return her parasol and hat and abruptly remembering some other engagement she had completely forgotten and had to take care of immediately, ever so sorry for disturbing you – when Delo apparently remembered that she was the hostess here.
She cleared her throat and stretched her lips in a perfectly schooled smile. “This way, my lady, if it pleases you,” she said, sidestepping around Malta and gesturing down the hall. “Would you care for some tea while you wait for my brother? The garden is quite pleasant at this time –“
Malta had remained rooted to the spot, gaping at her childhood friend calling her my lady – so she hadn’t heard wrong the first time! However, it was the latter part of her words that confounded her enough that she blurted out, “I’m not here to see Brashen.”
Delo froze. So did Malta. Slowly, Delo turned back to Malta, a frown marring her otherwise flawless Trader’s daughter façade. “… Brashen?” she asked, finally, a dubious note to her voice.
Malta blinked back at her, and suddenly flushed scarlet all the way, her scales probably standing out in a ridiculous way. Stupid, stupid! Delo had meant Cerwin – but she had not sacrificed a single thought to the boy for so long, and Brashen had been there at every negotiation she had attended, and – oh, she had virtually forgotten that Delo even had another brother!
“Well,” she barged on, tossing her head a bit and flashing a smile at Delo, “I just assumed there was something he wished to consult me about – about the dragons, that is. But no, I’m not here to see Cerwin either, but you, of course.”
Incomprehensibly, Delo’s eyes darkened at her words, and her answering smile was almost wooden as she gestured again for Malta to follow her. “Why, what a pleasant surprise!” she said, but didn’t sound like it was. “Shall we take tea in the garden, then?”
Malta felt lost and confused in a way she had not felt for many months, but she nodded and allowed her friend to lead her to the garden, a route she knew so well that she could have walked it with her eyes closed. A servant came almost as soon as they had seated themselves in the lovely gazebo next to the ornamental pond, and set them a table of sweetened tea and little ginger cakes. Malta sat in silence while the servant worked, her troubled thoughts on the icily correct young woman sitting opposite to her. This was all going wrong, she could not even take in the beauty of the garden, let alone admire Delo’s dress and feel joy in her own new gown.
The servant poured for them and bowed out of the gazebo. Malta watched him walk back into the house, the little silver tray balanced on his fingertips, feeling as though the man carried all the solutions to her situation on that tray, held so easily out of her reach and carted out of her sight. Delo picked up a teacup and sipped daintily, and Malta did the same, and then took a ginger cake just to have something to do with her hands.
The first bite brought tears to her eyes. It tasted of home. Crude and plain compared to the delicacies she had been fed in the Satrap’s palace, but absolutely perfect. It tasted of summer evenings spent in this very gazebo with Delo, combing the hair of their dolls and setting them to have a tea party with them; of picnics enjoyed on a large blanket by that decorative pond, the ginger cakes slightly mushed from being tossed around in the little basket hanging on Delo’s arm; of midnight snacks when Malta had been allowed to stay over for the night, snuck from the kitchens with much giggling and eaten in shelter of the pillow fortress they had erected between Delo’s bed and vanity table. They had been fine young ladies, sometimes young wives gossiping about their handsome, dashing husbands, sometimes kidnapped maidens waiting for a hero to come to their rescue, and yet other times, they had been Trader’s daughters tragically shipwrecked on an unknown island, waiting for a rakish pirate to happen by, and it had delighted them to wonder what such a man might ask in return for a safe journey home.
Malta had had her fill of pirates and kidnappings and shipwrecks, and she rather thought that men were a great deal less fascinating than she had been led to believe, with the possible exception of Reyn. She wanted to be just Malta again, and for Delo to be just Delo, and before she knew it, she had set the cake back on her saucer and was blinking tears.
“Oh Delo,” she said miserably, “have you not missed me at all?”
The teacup clinked in the breathless silence as Delo set it down abruptly and with a sharp inhale. Her lace-covered hands were shaking, and she tried to cover it by wringing them together as soon as the cup was down. “Oh, what are you saying, of course I have,” she chirped nervously, but her eyes never left the teacup. “I’m delighted to see you alive and well!”
“Then why,” Malta cut herself off, realizing that her voice was about to crack. She swallowed and tried again, “Then why won’t you call me by my name? Am I truly so hideous to you?”
Finally, Delo’s eyes shot up to meet hers. Malta held her breath and kept her tears at bay by sheer force of will, staring through them at her dearest friend. Delo stared back, her dark eyes suddenly liquid, her joined hands slapped across her mouth in either shock or some other great emotion.
“Malta, what are you saying?” she asked, and sounded genuinely dismayed. “You’re so beautiful. Who could think you hideous?”
Relief was almost a punch to her gut, and Malta felt deflated and winded as she let out the breath she had been holding, masking a sob in that exhalation. Delo thought she was still beautiful. “Then you… you don’t find my changes ugly?” she asked, and hated how childish she sounded.
Delo took a slow, shaky breath. The pause was much too long, and something cold had started to wrap itself around Malta’s heart when Delo suddenly stood up, almost upsetting the spindly little tea table, and surged past it to throw herself at Malta, her arms wrapping around her shoulders and her face hiding in the ruffled neckline of her dress. Startled, Malta found her arms coming up around the other girl.
“Oh, Malta!” she wailed. “I could never find you ugly! It’s just that you were dead and a traitor, and Papa forbid me from even saying your name, and,” she was weeping now, and hiccupping against Malta’s shoulder, “and I missed you so terribly, and then there was war and it was not exciting in the least and all I could think about was how disappointed you would be, and… Malta, I mourned for you, and I was so happy when word reached Bingtown that you were alive and well, and had had dealings with pirates and the Satrap and I couldn’t wait to hear all of it, and now you’re here and you’re a whole new creature and I can’t treat an Elderling queen the same way I would treat Malta Vestrit, can I, and –“
“Delo!” Malta cried, overwhelmed. “Calm down, please calm down – I’m sorry, I…” One of her hands had settled against the small of Delo’s back, the other had started rubbing her back comfortingly. She found herself at a loss for words, a most unusual feeling. If she had not seen Delo for a year, the opposite was true as well. She had spared no thought to what her absence might have meant for Delo, had only anticipated the joy of telling Delo of her adventures. But Delo had thought her dead, had mourned her, had perhaps gotten over her death, and here she was, not only a scaled stranger but a ghost as well.
Finally, she gathered herself, focused on the dignity and calm she had found in the last year. "Oh, do calm down, dear," she said, her voice calmer and deeper than she thought it had any right to be. "I'm still Malta Vestrit, I'll always be your Malta, and I'm here now. And of course you can still treat me the same! I wish you did.”
Delo sniffled and looked up with wet eyes. Her arms were still around Malta, and she was practically in her lap, her tear-stained face very close to her. She smelled of violets and lemon-scented tea, and red-nosed and teary-eyed was not an attractive look for her – it had made her powder run, too – but suddenly Malta didn’t care at all. Delo had missed her; Delo thought she was still beautiful. Delo’s dark hair was soft in her fingers as she cupped the back of her head and pressed her scaled brow against Delo’s smooth forehead. It felt warm against her cool scales. Delo’s eyes fluttered closed, and she sighed, her arms tightening around Malta’s shoulders.
“I’m so happy you’re home,” she whispered.
Home. It felt almost absurd to be home after all her adventures, but here she was. “Me too,” she whispered back.
They held each other for a moment longer, and then Delo moved to sit next to her rather than in her lap. Delo cleared her throat and dabbed her eyes with a lacy handkerchief, and Malta rearranged her skirts and hair fastidiously. They glanced at each other surreptitiously from the corner of their eyes, and, catching the other looking as well, shared a secret little smile.
Malta picked up her tea, now only lukewarm but just fine for the warm summer afternoon. “Excellent tea, as always,” she said solemnly. “And do give my compliments to your kitchen, the ginger cakes are delicious!”
“Why, thank you, I shall!” Delo trilled, stifling a giggle. “But really, you must find them rather plain after all your adventures.”
Malta smiled at her. “They are perfect,” she said, much more warmly than she had intended, and Delo grinned shyly back at her.
They enjoyed their cakes and tea, and Delo proved exactly the audience to Malta’s stories that she had hoped for, gasping and laughing and tearing up at just the right moments. She had stories of her own, too, which Malta hadn’t expected; she told them hesitantly, as though expecting Malta to laugh at how it had torn her heart to turn some of her clothes over for those who had lost their homes and possessions, at how she had wept as she had cut up her beautiful handwoven blankets into bandages for those wounded in the battles, at how she had burned and scarred her hands putting out fires and trying to help the women of her household cook and provide food for the less fortunate Bingtowners. At Malta’s urging, she took off her gloves to show her hands. Malta took them in hers, her scarlet scales against the white of Delo’s scars, and told her, “There, you are marked too. No one can look at us and think us mere spoiled girls, now.” Delo looked startled, as though she had never thought to be proud of her scars.
After tea and stories, they strolled the garden arm in arm, chatting lightly and admiring the work of the Trells’ gardener. At the little pond Delo laughed suddenly. Malta quirked a questioning eyebrow at her.
“Oh, it’s just…” Delo shook her head, dark curls bouncing from shoulder to shoulder. “We used to sit here and dream of being these fine ladies being courted by dashing adventurers, the heroines to their heroes, and now you’re such an adventurer yourself. Pirates and dragons and Satraps!” She laughed again, her mirth making her dark eyes twinkle. “Your life has become a storybook.”
Malta chuckled, but allowed Delo’s admiration wash over her like sunlight, soothing and lovely, and admitted to herself that she was preening a little. “Well, it may sound like it, but hardly felt like it! The stories certainly never warned us of how uncomfortable adventuring could be.” She patted the scarred hand, now gloveless, resting on her wrist, pulling Delo affectionately closer by the arm linked with hers. “And you are a fine lady and a selfless heroine, and I’ve had enough of pirates and dragons and Satraps.”
Delo smiled at her.