Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was an ungodly hour of the morning, and Naomi Turner shuffled her feet in the deserted school courtyard, alone save for the olaball tucked under her arm. Alright, so she was a little early. A lot early. Two and a half hours early. Any other day she’d be appalled to be at school so soon, but olaball was worth it. At least, that’s what she told herself to justify the way she’d launched out of bed, rushed through all her morning routines and sprinted out the door, barely stopping to hug her baffled dad goodbye.

Tossing the ball in her hands, she considered her options. She could go back home, but while her arrival time was a bit extreme, she had agreed to meet some of her new friends before class to practice. Maybe this was an opportunity to warm up without anyone watching her, if just so she didn’t embarrass herself like she did when she broke that window the first time she played. With that decided, she dropped the ball and began to train, trying to bounce it up from her foot, to her knee, to her elbow, and back down.

It wasn’t that she was bad at Avalor’s local sport. She had excellent footwork from years of balancing on a moving ship, and she had the strength to make powerful shots, but her control needed some work. It was exhilarating, though, between the fast pace and the strong teamwork, and she had yet to play a round she hadn’t enjoyed, broken glass aside. The game had to be one of her favorite things she’d learned since moving there nearly six weeks ago. 

In fact, of all the places she’d lived for longer than a month, Avalor had to be among her favorites. It was the trade center of this side of the world, and the sheer number of cultures that passed through the harbor on a daily basis was enough to sate her appetite for the unusual that the nebulous, nomadic lifestyle of a seafarer had ingrained in her. The city itself provided balance and consistency, a place where her life felt stable for once. And of course, it didn’t hurt that her parents had actually warned her about the move this time, even if it wasn’t quite what she had expected for the start of ninth grade.

Her drill was going well—the ball was completely under her control. Pride swelling up in her chest, she decided it was time to mix it up, letting the ball drop to the ground and sending it flying with a kick toward—

Oh no.

Someone was there, perched on the courtyard’s surrounding wall with his nose buried in a book, directly in the path of the olaball’s wild flight.

Naomi’s stomach dropped. “Look out!” she shouted, far too late, and the hapless visitor snapped his head up at the sound, just in time for the olaball to collide with his face and send him flailing backwards into the bushes with a crash and a startled yelp. Naomi sprinted across the yard, and she leaned over the wall to check on her accidental victim, wincing at the sight that met her. The boy had snapped through several branches of the bush and sunken down far enough that he was having trouble freeing himself from the mess of foliage, and there was a reddish mark around his left eye. Guilt gnawed at Naomi’s insides at the sight. That was definitely going to be a nasty bruise by the next morning.

“I’m so sorry,” she finally said, vaulting herself over the wall. There wasn’t much room between the bushes, so she had to carefully maneuver between them to reach a place she could even help him from, tugging her skirt behind her to free it from a particularly clingy set of branches. “I didn’t realize you were there. Are you okay?”

“What? Oh, uh, sure,” he replied. “Don’t worry about it.” He was trying to get his palms against something solid below him, but he snapped through another branch as he placed too much weight on it. Grimacing, he sank down another few inches into the plant before looking back at Naomi with a strained smile. “Happens all the time, really.”

Naomi bit back a laugh. This really wasn’t funny—the poor guy was hopelessly stuck because of her—but she couldn’t resist taking a quick jab at him. “What, getting hit by an olaball or falling into the bushes?”

“Yeah,” he simply said. He made another attempt at pushing himself out, but only managed to send himself even further into the bush. With a frustrated groan, he switched tactics, trying to get purchase on something with one of his legs instead, but as trapped as he was, he just kicked uselessly in the air a few times before dropping his leg back into the leaves.

Naomi rolled her eyes. “Here, let me help you,” she said, finally reaching down to grab one of his arms. She barely waited for him to have a solid grip on her before hauling him up and out in a single pull, nearly tipping backward into one of the other bushes in the process. He stumbled for a moment, struggling to get his feet back under him, but a few seconds later, through both their efforts, he was upright, looking worse for the wear but immensely relieved.

“Sorry,” Naomi said again, trying for eye contact, but he turned away from her with a confused frown and bent back over the bush, mumbling to himself as he began pulling branches aside. She debated grabbing his shirt to keep him from falling in again, but stopped her hand a few inches from his back. This was already pretty awkward without her grabbing him by his clothes. She could already hear the reprimands from the teachers and the complaints from this guy’s parents and the distressed apologies from her dad. She could be a pretty rough and tumble kind of girl, and things like this came with the territory, but it was always a pain to deal with, especially since she really hadn’t meant any harm this time.

The boy suddenly popped back up with an ‘aha!’, holding his rescued book above his head, as if the plant was going to reach up and snatch it back. Naomi rolled her eyes again. What a nerd.

“So, are we good?” she asked. “Everything’s okay?”

He brushed some dirt off the book and began carefully thumbing through the pages. “I think so,” he said, lifting one of the pages between his thumb and forefinger and squinting at it. “There’s a little damage, but none of it looks that serious. It’s still readable, at least.”

Oh, this was too much. Naomi bit her lip to keep from smiling, but she could feel her eyes scrunching up with amusement. “I meant with you.”

“Oh.” He snapped the book shut in one hand and drew the other to the back of his neck. “Right. Of course. I’m fine.” He glanced at her, but dropped his gaze to his feet with a nervous laugh after seeing the look on her face.

And then he did a double-take, brow furrowed. “Wait, I know you,” he said.

Naomi was fairly certain she had never seen this guy before today.

Apparently convinced otherwise, the boy carried on. “You’re… uh… that new girl, right? Naomi?”

Well, he wasn’t wrong. “That’s me,” she replied. She did stand out quite a bit—her blonde hair and pale skin weren’t exactly common in the region. He must have just seen her around. “My dad’s the new harbormaster, so we just moved in by the docks. Good to meetcha!” She laughed, holding out a hand to shake. Might as well meet him properly.

He frowned. “We’re in the same class,” he said, voice flat.

Naomi prayed that the smile still on her face was enough to mask the panic she knew was in her eyes. They were classmates? She didn’t recognize his face, though! Okay, this was fine, a little embarrassing, but ultimately fine. She’d met a lot of people in the last six weeks, so it was totally forgivable for a few of them to have slipped her mind. Looking him over, Naomi scrambled to match him to one of her many, many new acquaintances.

He was just barely shorter than her, with gangly limbs suggesting that wouldn’t be the case for long, and his uniform looked loose, like his family was hoping he’d grow into it. A mop of recently-cut, dark curls sat on his head, made unruly by his adventure in the shrubs. His whole face was set in a look of disappointed judgment, with his hazel eyes narrowed at her, but with how baby-faced he was, it looked more like a comical pout than anything else.

Yeah, no. He didn’t look like anyone she knew.

She was tempted to ask him if he was sure, but her eyes were drawn back to his book, now clutched tightly under one arm, and instead of trying to imagine his face, she pictured the sight of him just before she’d clocked him with the olaball: obscured behind the pages of a book, with just the top of his head and hunched shoulders visible. Just like that, the image clicked into place.

“We are!” she blurted. She couldn’t place his face at first, sure, but she definitely knew—more or less—who he was. He sat near the back of the classroom and hardly spoke to anyone. Instead, he kept himself buried in a book at any moment he could and spent the rest of his time in class strategically avoiding eye contact with the teacher. He tended to rush into the classroom at the last second, looking distracted, like he’d rather be anywhere else, and was almost always the first person to take off at the end of the day.

Okay, so now she just needed a name. Fighting vainly through a month and a half’s worth of vague memories of the guy, she concluded that his name started with an ‘M’? She was pretty sure, at least. Was it... Marco? No, that didn’t sound right. Ma… Ma-something, though.

“Mateo?” she tried, wincing at her pleading tone.

He sighed. “It’s actually Mate—Oh! That’s what you said.” Mateo rubbed at his neck again, looking surprised and embarrassed and more delighted than Naomi had ever seen him before. “Sorry,” he continued. “People don’t normally get that on their first try.”

“Huh. I’m sorry.”

Silence stretched between them, and Naomi found herself feeling antsy, a restlessness brought on by the growing cloud of discomfort. She thought about trying for a handshake again, but presenting it now after such a long pause would probably just be weirder.

“Well!” she finally said, “not that standing in the bushes in total silence isn’t loads of fun, but I had other stuff I was doing, so…”

“Oh! Right.” Mateo swept an arm out toward the courtyard and gave a mock bow. “After you!”

Naomi snorted and shuffled her way back through the plantlife to vault over the wall again. Once back on solid, paved ground, her first order of business was tracking down the olaball, and after sparing a cursory glance at Mateo to confirm he hadn’t tumbled into a shrub as soon as her back was turned, she went to retrieve it. She was about to rush to the center of the courtyard to resume her practice where she’d left off, or maybe all the way to the other end to prevent another accident, when she heard her classmate speak up behind her.

“So, you’re here pretty early,” he remarked. He’d set his book down on the wall so he could use all his limbs for climbing, and while he wasn’t as graceful as Naomi had been—she had years of navigating between crates and equipment on a ship deck to thank for that—he handled the climb into the courtyard a lot better than she’d admittedly been expecting.

Naomi tucked the olaball under her arm and headed back toward him. “Yeah, I know,” she said, smiling. “José and his friends, uh, Beatríz and Dante? They invited me to join them for some quick olaball games before class today, and I thought I’d get some practice in before they got here. Guess I was a little over-excited, though.” She raised an inquisitive eyebrow. “What’s your excuse?”

“Ugh, my mom,” he replied. He’d settled in so he was leaning against the wall, but with his feet still planted firmly on the ground this time, one hand resting on his book like it might grow legs and run off if he didn’t hold it there. “She found out I got here late a few times last week and hustled me out of the house as quickly as she could this morning. And for her, that amounts to pretty early.”

“What, and you decided to actually come straight to school?”

Mateo shrugged. “Where else would I have gone?” he asked.

Well, Naomi probably would’ve dropped by a friend’s house to see if she could walk with them, but now that she was thinking about it, she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen Mateo hanging out with anyone in class. What other options were there? “I dunno. I’d have maybe taken the scenic route around the city,” she settled with. “I still feel like I’m finding new things to see here every day. Although,” she noted, “I guess if you grew up here you’ve probably seen most of it already.”

He was already nodding, even before he replied. “I live pretty far out of the city, actually, so I get the ‘scenic route’ every day.”

“Oh, so that’s why you’re always in such a rush to leave.” It made more sense than him being completely friendless, at least.

“Well, that’s more, uh,” he paused, looking away, “I’ve just got other stuff I’d rather be doing.”

“Don’t we all,” Naomi laughed, and Mateo actually joined her, visibly relaxing a bit. Naomi took that as a cue to lean on the wall next to him. When he didn’t elaborate on what ‘other stuff’ meant for him, Naomi continued, “I’m always worried a ship from someplace I’ve never been is going to be in and out of the harbor while I’m stuck at school, and I’ll miss a once in a lifetime chance to see something extraordinary.”

“Although, if you used to travel all the time before moving here, you must have already seen some pretty exciting stuff, right?” A grin split Mateo’s face and his eyes brightened, looking genuinely enthused for the first time that morning.

The smile was contagious, and Naomi found herself grinning back as she replied. “Sure have! There was this one time, we pulled into port right as the town was having a parade, and I could almost see the entire parade route from up in the crow’s nest. Oh! And out at sea, there was the time where the whole ocean around us started glowing one night.”

Mateo made a soft awed sound, and feeling bolstered, Naomi went on, rattling off stories she’d probably recounted a dozen times to a dozen different people each time her family had moved, but they almost never failed to get an intrigued reaction.

It was a bit weird, though.

Normally, when she’d do this, whoever she was talking to would inevitably cut in with stories of their own. Or they’d start telling her about things she could look forward to in whatever country it was, or talk about times they’d seen what she had, and okay, sure, Avalor didn’t seem to have festivals or anything, but she didn’t think it was unreasonable to expect a conversation. Mateo had the occasional question, which Naomi was happy to answer, but no amount of prompting or pausing on her part seemed to get him to share anecdotes of his own, and the conversation, if it could really be called that, was starting to feel more like an interrogation.

An itch was starting to creep up her spine, pleading with her to escape, and she turned the olaball over in her hands a few times to distract herself from the feeling. She could just leave, right? If he wasn’t doing any talking, then she could just end the conversation whenever, right?

Although, Mateo at least looked like he was having fun. He had started leaning in toward her, hanging on every word. “Have you ever seen any—” he started, but suddenly, like whatever spell he’d been under that kept him so engaged had been broken, he tore his eyes away from her and his smile dropped to something more subdued. “No, I can’t ask that,” he said, more to himself than to her.

Naomi perked up. That had been the first thing he’d said that felt out of the ordinary, and now she was curious. “Sure you can!” she chirped, lightly punching his arm. Besides, what was one more question, at this point?

“Ow,” Mateo protested, rubbing at the spot. “No, I really can’t.”

Undeterred, Naomi pressed again. “Well, why not?”

“I just—I mean—it’s not that important, honestly, I’m just, well…”

Any semblance of a normal, regular conversation between two normal, regular classmates died as Mateo stammered himself to a stop and the awkward, suffocating silence returned. Naomi stifled a sigh. That had, at the very least, been going okay. Kinda one-sided, sure, but it had seemed like he was finally starting to warm up to her. Not that she was really itching to become Mateo’s closest friend or anything like that, but if they were going to be in school together for a while, she wanted to at least put in a token effort. Besides, he didn’t strike her as an unpleasant person. Weird, for sure. He was definitely a little weird. But otherwise, he seemed nice, if a bit reserved.

Naomi gazed across the courtyard. Yeah, she was just gonna leave. Clearly, conversing was going to be an ordeal, and she didn’t have the fortitude to keep slamming her head against this brick wall of a discussion this early in the morning. If he didn’t want to talk, she couldn’t exactly make him. Standing back up, she readied the olaball to go charging back across the stone, when an idea struck her. She had wanted to practice with someone earlier, so she might as well give interacting with Mateo one last chance.

“You wanna play a few rounds with me?” she asked, turning on her heel to face him and brandishing the olaball. “Olaball is way more fun with a group of people than just practicing by myself.”

Mateo blinked at her a few times, looking confused. “You’re… asking me?” he replied, hesitant.

“Uh, yeah?” Naomi gestured to the empty courtyard around them. “Do you see anyone else here? Unless you’ve got an invisible friend there you didn’t bother telling me about.”

“No,” he said, but he did glance at the space beside him like he wasn’t quite sure. “Although, I have read about these magic spirits called chanuls that invisibly—”

He cut off suddenly, snapping his jaw shut so fast it was a wonder he didn’t break it and squeezing his eyes tightly shut, like he was in pain.

“What’s wrong? Are you okay?” Naomi asked, alarm bubbling up alongside the guilt from earlier. Had his tumble hurt him worse than she’d realized?

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said, and abruptly, he was gathering up his book and shoving it into a bookbag near his feet.

“What’re you—”

“I’m going to see if we can get inside the building yet,” he said, talking fast and avoiding her eyes, heading toward the front doors of the school.

“Just wait a second—!” Naomi tried again.

“Forget I said anything. Sorry.”

Alarm gave way to anger. Naomi knew that she really shouldn’t get upset about this, and on any other day she might have just let him go, but whether from the unusually early start she’d had, or her crawl through the bushes, or the unfairness of Mateo getting to just blow her off like that when she’d actually been trying, she was feeling especially irate. So, she did the only thing she could think of that was certain to get his attention: she pitched the olaball at the back of his head. It made contact with a sharp thwack , and Mateo yelped, lurching forward. He turned to her, holding a hand over the spot he’d been struck and glaring at her with a dark look that was uncanny to see on his previously mild-mannered face.

“What is your problem?!” Naomi shouted before he could get a word in.

Mateo scowled. “ My problem?” he shot back. “ You’re the one that just hit me!”

“Look, I’m trying, okay?!”

“You’re trying to hit me?!”

“No!” Naomi groaned. “Ugh, it’s no wonder no one ever talks to you!”

Across from her, Mateo recoiled like she’d struck him again, and Naomi felt something hollow out in her chest.

“Wait, no,” she immediately tried to correct, “I didn’t mean that.” Sighing, she put her face in her hands, trying to collect her thoughts.

She really hadn’t wanted to antagonize him, but being nice was proving difficult when he kept shutting down every one of her attempts. And now… She’d been told before that she could be blunt, and sometimes over-forward, and here she was, watching those traits come to a head and having to navigate around them to diffuse the situation. Hopefully, she never needed to be a diplomat. Looking back up, she saw that Mateo, though still looking upset, at least hadn’t tried to take off again. He was waiting there, his arms crossed and shoulders hunched, staring somewhere in the vicinity of his elbow.

“I was really trying to be nice,” she started slowly, trying to pick her words a bit more carefully. “I’m sorry I hit you, but you weren’t listening to me and I didn’t know what else to do!”

Mateo’s lip curled back into a scowl. “I’ve been listening to you all morning.”

Naomi had a scathing retort prepared, but it died in her throat as she opened her mouth. He had been listening to her all morning, and really attentively at that. He’d been asking questions about her and her interests and her lifestyle, and had never once responded with any sort of derision or boredom. But he had barely been responding with anything about himself, and Naomi had felt like she’d been put on-the-spot.

“I guess you were,” Naomi admitted. “But I’ve been trying to listen to you, too, and you keep getting all weird about it, like you don’t actually want to be talking to me. It makes you seem kinda…” she waved a hand around for a moment, searching for a word, “I dunno. Standoffish.”

Mateo’s face fell, and his whole frame deflated. “Oh,” he said softly. “You think I’m standoffish?”

Naomi shrugged. “I mean, not really, to be honest. You seem like an okay guy, but I’ll admit that surprised me. The way you’re always avoiding people in class, you can kinda give off that impression.”

“Do you… does everyone else think that, too?”

“Maybe,” she said, and Mateo flinched. “Look, I haven’t been here that long yet, but that was the first impression I got.”

Across from her, Mateo looked downcast. “I hadn’t realized,” he said. “I mean, it makes sense, but no one’s said that outright before.” He sighed, picking at a loose thread on his sleeve. “It’s not that I’m trying to be rude, really. I’m just kind of a private person.”

“I noticed,” Naomi replied, trying not to sound snarky and failing.

“I’m… sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. I really did like hearing about your travels.”

Somewhat reluctantly, Naomi smiled. He really was an okay guy. “And I’m sorry for hitting you with an olaball. Twice.”

He chuckled. “No harm done.” He reached up to gingerly poke at the bruise forming around his eye and winced, yanking his hand away again. “Ow, okay, maybe a little harm done. Be honest, how bad does it look?”

Not great. The redness hadn’t faded in the slightest, and in some spots had already darkened to purple, especially around where his cheek was starting to swell.

She must have grimaced, because Mateo laughed again. “That bad, huh?” he said. “Seriously though, don’t worry about it. These kinds of things just happen to me.”

“If you say so,” Naomi said. She definitely still felt guilty, especially now that they’d smoothed things over, but if Mateo was going to insist he was fine, then she supposed she could leave it be. “But hey, if you liked hearing my stories, you should come by the harbor sometime, see some of it for yourself, you know?”

He looked startled. “Really?”

“Sure. I can give you the grand tour or something.” It was the least she could do, really. “And you could tell me more about, what was it? Channels? Chanuls?”

A look of horror flashed across Mateo’s face, and suddenly, he was shushing her, arms outstretched like he was going to cover her mouth. He stopped before reaching her and instead pressed his knuckles to his mouth, jittering in place.

“Seriously?” Naomi asked, trying to force some of her frustration back down. “What’s your deal? Mateo, we just talked about this.”

“Sorry,” he finally said, voice low, “but you’ve got to believe me when I say we really, really can’t talk about that stuff.”

“Okay, fine,” Naomi huffed. “You don’t have to, but can you at least tell me why you can’t tell me?”

“It’s just—well, you know.”

“Uh, clearly not!”

He fidgeted again for a moment and, after taking a deep breath, looked pointedly over Naomi’s head toward something in the distance. Following his gaze, she saw that he was looking at the towers of Queen Shuriki’s palace, rising high above the rest of the city’s skyline.

“You know,” he whispered. “The magic ban?”

She turned back to him, confused. “Wait, you do magic?”

“Wh—no! Of course not!” Mateo answered, louder than he probably needed to, before she’d even finished asking the question. “I’ve just, uh, read a little bit about some creatures that can.”

“I don’t get it, then,” Naomi said. “You’re worried you’re gonna get in trouble just for reading some myths? That’s a pretty extreme restriction.”

“Shuriki arrests people for whistling,” Mateo flatly replied. “You really think anything is too small of a crime to her?”

“Well, when you put it that way…” Naomi let her gaze wander back toward the palace. It really did seem strange that a place as warm as Avalor would have a ruler as cold as Shuriki. Bans on magic, music, dancing, most festivals—it was a miracle the spirit of the people was as strong as it was. She hadn’t been anywhere else in the EverRealm with laws like that. One of the few definite downsides of living there, but at least she could always go out sailing with her dad whenever she needed a reprieve.

Mateo softly cleared his throat behind her. “So, uh. You aren’t going to, you know, tell anyone? Are you?”

Naomi rolled her eyes and looked at him, smirking. “What? That you’re a nerd that likes fairytales?”

He made a nondescript sound and looked away, wringing his hands. Sweat was beading on his forehead, and the way he was shifting his feet, he seemed ready to bolt at a moment’s notice. Naomi wasn’t the best at sympathy, but after walloping him with an olaball, knocking him into the bushes, hitting him with an olaball again, and setting off what was starting to look like a nervous breakdown, she knew she owed Mateo some sincerity. He deserved at least that.

“Relax,” she said, mentally cringing at her own tone of voice. Why did she always sound so sarcastic? Taking a deep breath, she tried again. “I really don’t think you need to be so worried about this. I mean, as long as you’re not actually practicing magic—”

“Which I’m not!” Mateo cut in.

“So you mentioned,” Naomi said. “Since you’re not doing that, I don’t think anyone is actually going to care about the stories you like to read. But if it makes you feel better, I promise, I’m not gonna rat you out to anybody.”

Mateo released the breath he’d been holding in a deep sigh, slumping in on himself like the stress was what had been keeping him upright.

“Thanks,” he finally said after composing himself.

Naomi shrugged. “Sure, no problem.”

The silence that followed was slightly more companionable than all the preceding awkward gaps in the conversation, although it still stretched on a bit too long for Naomi’s liking.

Just as she was about to break the silence, it was surprisingly Mateo that spoke up first. “Is the invitation still open?” he asked.

“What, to visit the harbor? I’m pretty sure you could go there even if I hadn’t invited you.”

Mateo shook his head. “No, I mean—well, yeah, that too. But I was talking about the olaball one.”

A grin split Naomi’s face. “I’m surprised you want anything else to do with that after how this morning’s been going,” she said, already looking around for where the ball had rolled this time. “But sure! I’m game.” 

“I just—I mean, I should try, too, right?” he said. “If I don’t want to come across as, you know—”

“Mateo,” Naomi cut in as he began to trip over his words again, “you’re fine. Relax.” And even though she couldn’t stop her snort of laughter, she still sounded less snarky than before, and he responded with a tiny smile.

By the time she’d found and retrieved the ball, Mateo had deposited his bookbag against the wall and had made his way to the center of the courtyard.

“You know how to play?” Naomi asked as he approached.

“More or less.”

“Good enough! You ready, nerd?”

And before Mateo had a chance to properly protest the nickname, Naomi had served the ball and started to play.

Amazingly, Mateo did not get himself clocked in the head again within the first 30 seconds of gameplay like Naomi had been expecting. He actually wasn’t half bad at all. Okay, even. His footwork was subpar and he wasn’t nearly as strong as Naomi, but his reflexes turned out to be pretty good when he was paying attention to his surroundings instead of his book, and his aim was a lot better than she’d been expecting. If she was being honest with herself, they’d probably balance each other out well if they were on the same team, which felt weird to think about considering they’d never spoken to each other prior to that morning.

But still, she noticed with satisfaction, she had been right: practicing olaball was a lot more fun when she was doing it with someone else. She let herself get lost in the game, delighted by the pace and the energy. Soon, all she could hear was her feet on the pavement, and the sound of the olaball being struck, and her and Mateo’s laughter, and she found herself feeling so, so glad that she had gotten to school so early.

She wasn’t quite sure how long they’d been playing when Mateo had to stop, doubled over and breathing hard.

“You done already?” Naomi teased, juggling the olaball between her knees to prove that she was still raring to go.

Mateo tried to laugh, but as winded as he was it came out more like a wheeze.

Just then, Naomi heard someone call out from the far end of the courtyard.

“Hey! Naomi! You got started without us!”

Looking toward the sound, Naomi saw the group of the three classmates that had invited her out in the first place jogging across the courtyard toward her. The place was still mostly empty, but now that she was watching the world outside the game again, she noticed that several more students had actually started showing up. They loitered in the corners of the courtyard, catching up with one another before class, or they filtered slowly into the school building.

Naomi chuckled as José, Beatríz, and Dante reached her. “Sorry, I just couldn’t wait any longer.”

“Hope you weren’t waiting too long,” José said, and then seemed to finally notice Mateo standing there, too. He turned to the other boy, brow furrowed in confusion. “Marco? I didn’t know you played olaball.”

“I… my name’s…” Mateo tried, but he was still catching his breath.

Dante didn’t let him finish. “Learn something new every day, huh?” he chimed in, slinging a bulky arm roughly across Mateo’s shoulders. “You wanna join us, too?”

“Aw, but if Marco plays too, we won’t have even teams!” Beatríz pointed out, pouting. “That was part of the point of getting Naomi in on this!”

“It’s... that’s not my...” No one seemed to hear Mateo over their own chatter.

Alright, that was enough of that. “Guys, guys! It’s fine. Mateo can be on whatever team I’m on,” Naomi cut in. “I’m still pretty new at this, so between the two of us, we’re basically a whole player.”

“That could work,” Dante agreed. Beatríz sighed and bobbed her head like she couldn’t decide whether to shake it or nod.

“Wait, Mateo? What did I call you?” José asked. “Marco?”

“Yeah,” Mateo replied, trying to squirm away from Dante’s arm.

“Oh, my bad. Sorry, man,” José said, only looking slightly apologetic.

Mateo grimaced, finally freeing himself. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, sounding tired. “Happens all the time.”

The others winced as he straightened up and they saw the bruising around his eye. “Whoa, what happened to you?” Dante asked.

Naomi bit her lip, knowing what was coming. Once Mateo explained what had started their little misadventure, she’d end up looking like a massive jerk, which, yeah, she kinda had been. But still, she wanted to make it up to him! She was pretty new here, and the last thing she wanted was to get stuck with a reputation for being a bully.

Given how evasive he’d been all morning though, she really shouldn’t have been surprised by how he responded, instead. “I tripped face-first into the bushes,” he lied. “Naomi helped me out."

Naomi wanted to make eye contact with him, to figure out if he really didn’t intend to mention the other aspect of her involvement in his accident, but he was looking away, trying to discreetly block his injury from view.

“Anyway,” he continued. “I think I’m done playing for the day, so you don’t have to worry about the number of people. I’m pretty wiped out. And you really don’t have to worry about Naomi as far as balancing the teams goes. She’s plenty good already.”

“What, so you’re just gonna go?” Naomi blurted before she could stop herself. All that about putting in an effort, and he was just going to bail as soon as someone else joined the picture?

Mateo blinked at her, perplexed for a moment, but then the corner of his mouth tugged upward in a crooked smile. “I mean, I guess I could referee,” he offered, turning back to José. “If you guys need one.”

The other three made varying noises of assent and started figuring out teams, and Mateo made his way over to the approximated sidelines.

The game played like any other game of olaball. Mateo, for his part, seemed to be content watching, and never asked to tag in for a round. And like her match against Mateo earlier, the game ended far too soon for Naomi’s liking. Unfortunately, they all still had to go to class.

Naomi grabbed Mateo by his elbow as he was trying to retrieve his things. “Hey, what you said earlier, about how you tripped,” she started, but Mateo shook his head.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I don’t want to get you in trouble. I know you didn’t mean it the first time, and I kinda deserved the second one.” He didn’t, Naomi wanted to protest, but Mateo kept going before she could. “Consider this returning the favor,” he said with a smile, and echoed her words from earlier. “I promise, I’m not gonna rat you out to anybody.”

Naomi smiled. “Thanks, Mateo,” she said.

“Of course. Well, I’ll see you later, Naomi.” He waved a little at José and the others, and then just like that, he was gone, rushing off toward the crowd of students entering the building.

“What were you guys talking about over here?” Dante asked, coming up behind Naomi with José and Beatríz in tow.

“Not much,” Naomi answered.

José gave a quick, barking laugh. “Well, that ‘not much’ is still probably more than I’ve ever heard him say in what? Three? Four years of knowing him?” He turned to Dante and Beatríz for confirmation.

“Four, I think,” Beatríz said.

“Only two for me,” Dante said.

That long, and none of them even knew his name. “He’s a nice guy,” Naomi insisted, feeling a rush of irritation on Mateo’s behalf.

José shrugged. “I’m sure he is,” he said. “He’s just also kinda… you know.”

“Quiet?” Dante supplied.

“Weird,” Beatríz said at the same time.

“Yeah,” José said, nodding. “Mateo is just a little bit weird.”

Before Naomi could argue further, one of the school staff came rushing through the courtyard, herding the straggling students inside, and the school day formally began after what must have been the longest morning of her life. She saw very little of Mateo throughout class, and heard even less of him. Were it not for his black eye, she might have even believed that the morning’s events were a bizarre, waking dream.

Naomi wanted to check on him again before they left, but as soon as class let out, he was gone, like he’d made himself disappear, without so much as a word to anyone on his way out.

Well, that was okay. It wasn’t like she was all that invested in his friendship, anyway.

Chapter Text

"Hey, you're friends with Mateo, right?"

Afternoon plans swept from Naomi's mind at the interruption, and she paused in packing up to see Beatríz looming over her desk, arms crossed and scowling.

"What?" Naomi asked.

Beatríz huffed and rolled her eyes. “You know, Mateo? The weird guy? Spends recreo alone? Sleeps in class all the time?” She looked back down at Naomi, an eyebrow arched. “Talks pretty much only to you? Any of this sound familiar?”

Naomi frowned. “I know who Mateo is.”

It had been weeks since their mishap with the olaball, and she and Mateo hadn't gotten past the point of small talk since then. Not for lack of trying—she’d ask about his weekend only to be met with quiet dismissal, as if he hadn’t done anything at all, and whenever she tried to ask about his books, the one thing she knew for a fact he liked, he’d dodge the question entirely. It was like he didn’t have any hobbies. His own approach to starting conversations, then, seemed to be hovering around the edges of other people’s, waiting for an opportunity to jump in that never came. He’d been doing that more often lately, apparently having taken Naomi’s ‘standoffish’ remark to heart, but without knowing how to bridge that gap, he came across more as a nuisance than a participant.

She could see how he’d gotten his reputation. It wasn't that she disliked him, but ‘friend’ was a bit of a stretch.

"Why does it matter?" she asked.

Grimacing, Beatríz toyed with the end of one of her twin braids where it draped over her shoulder. "I got stuck with him as my lab partner for the chemistry unit and I was hoping you'd have some advice on how to, I dunno," she paused and wrinkled her nose even further, "deal with him."

A tired sigh leaked out of Naomi’s nose. She’d wanted to go home, not play diplomat between her classmates. Her stomach growled impatiently to remind her that she’d forgotten a snack during that day’s recreo, and even after several months, Avaloran lunchtime still felt awfully late. Most of her other classmates were already out the door, chatting amongst themselves, and Naomi cast them a longing glance, already thinking about her dad’s chowder.

“What, is this a Norberg thing or something?” Beatríz suddenly asked.

Naomi blinked. “A Norberg thing?”

“Taking forever to answer a simple question.”

She may as well have slapped her. Naomi’s cheeks burned, a dozen defensive retorts leaping to the front of her mind. The image of her dad’s exhausted expression immediately chased them away—don’t make a scene with the locals, Naomi; you can’t keep getting into arguments, Naomi—and she swallowed the most acidic of her responses, sitting back and crossing her arms. She still ended up sounding stubbornly sarcastic when she asked, “What exactly is it you want me to answer?”

“He’s not exactly a great conversationalist. How exactly am I supposed to even talk to him?”

Naomi smirked. “Well, usually you open your mouth and then you make sound come out…”

Scowling, Beatríz flicked the braid back behind her. Before she could retort, though, a muffled snicker sounded from behind Naomi, and Beatríz turned her glare on the offending noise. “Don’t you know that it’s rude to listen in?”

“You’re talking about me,” the eavesdropper replied, and that was when Naomi finally turned around, meeting Mateo’s eyes across the desks between them. He waggled his eyebrows like they were sharing an inside joke, and she snapped her head forward again, face flushing with embarrassment. It felt wrong to be gossiping about him, but though it pained her to admit, it felt equally wrong to let him think they were friends.

It wasn’t that she disliked him, really. But everyone else in class seemed to be on the same page: Mateo was weird. Being his friend might well mean she would never be anyone else’s.

Beatríz gestured toward him with an incredulous shrug, as if to say ‘see what I mean?’

“You could’ve said he was right there,” Naomi muttered.

“Oh, I guess I didn’t notice him.”

“Okay, look,” Naomi said, lowering her voice so Mateo wouldn’t overhear, “the chemistry unit is only six weeks. Trust me, that goes by in a blink.”

“Oh, come on,” Beatríz whined, either not catching or not caring about Naomi’s intent for discretion. “You have so much more experience with this than me! You have to have met all kinds of weirdos on your travels, right? I bet you’re great at handling them! How do you usually do it?”

Naomi’s hunger was rapidly turning to nausea, a red flag flapping insistently in the back of her mind. It was technically a compliment, but didn’t feel like one. She’d met a lot of people that had struck her as unusual at first, sure, but it was almost always a product of cultural misunderstanding or basic ignorance. It was never a matter of ‘handling’ anyone. She felt compelled to correct Beatríz, to defend her foreign acquaintances on principle, but her classmate had clasped her hands in front of her and was staring Naomi down with a pleading expression, her eyes big and sad. Nerves crawling, Naomi beat back the alarm, smothering it under a layer of deliberate trust.

Beatríz was worried, that was all, and if Naomi didn’t want to alienate her, then maybe she just needed to be a bit placating for now. Fit in. Don’t make a scene. She could do that.

“Just… be nice? He’s pretty quiet and doesn’t like to talk about himself, so as long as you don’t, I dunno, yell at him or throw something at him or something like that, he shouldn’t do anything too out there. And if he does get too weird…” she shrugged, “like I said, you’re only gonna have to put up with him for a month and a half.”

There was a split second before Beatríz responded where she looked annoyed, half rolling her eyes, but then her mouth stretched into a wide and toothy smile as she leaned in to squeeze Naomi’s arm. “Thanks so much for the advice, Naomi. You’re the best,” she said, and she’d flounced out of the room before Naomi could place why it made her so uncomfortable.

The harsh scrape of chair legs against the floor rang out behind her, and Naomi turned her head just in time to see Mateo stalking past. He swung his backpack up to his shoulder as he passed her desk, roughly clipping her arm with it as he did. “See you,” he said, his voice as stiff as his gait, and he left the room with his head bowed and face taut.

So he’d overheard after all, but at least now he knew where they stood. That was a good thing. And if Naomi’s stomach felt like she’d swallowed a rock, well, that was just the hunger.

“Hey, hey, Naomi!”

Dante had an arm around her the second she set foot outside for recreo a week later, and he swiftly ushered her to the rest of their group, positioning her so she was eye level with José’s nose.

“In your professional opinion, would you say José’s new mustache looks more like a dead caterpillar or a mold growth?”

José wrinkled his nose, the scruffy tufts of hair beneath it shifting with the motion. “I think it makes me look distinguished.”

Beatríz scoffed from the courtyard wall, where she was re-braiding her hair. “It makes you look like my Tío Arturo after a bad breakup.”

The guys both laughed, clearly in on whatever the ‘Beatríz’s tío’ situation was, and not wanting to feel left out, Naomi forced a chuckle.

“I vote caterpillar?” she tried, and Dante crowed, slapping her back.

“I told you! Cut in half! Like the head’s on one end and the butt’s on the other.”

“It’ll look better when it grows in more,” José protested, retrieving an apple from his bag. “We’ll see who’s laughing when I’ve got a full mustache to twirl and you’re the one sporting face mold.”

“Just shave it, man. It’ll grow better in a year.”

“So, your Tío Arturo,” Naomi tried, turning to Beatríz as the guys continued to bicker, “what’s up with him?”

“Oh, it’s a whole thing ,” she replied, tossing her finished braid over her shoulder and reaching for the wrapped torta she’d set on the wall beside her. “There was this barrel of juice and a runaway mule… it’s a long story.”

Dante settled in against the wall, finally retrieving his own snack and waving it around as he talked. “See, her tío was trying to woo the daughter of the owner of the brewery down the street from the Emporium, and—”

“You wouldn’t get it,” José cut in. “It’s a ‘you had to be there’ situation. You remembered something to eat today, right?”

Naomi almost recoiled from the bluntness, her intrigue flattened under his words, but recovered fast, lifting her bag. “Yeah, I’ve got a sandwich in here.” She glanced at Dante, who simply shrugged.

“Eh, I tried,” he said, his mouth full. “Speaking of wooing, d’you guys think Celia would wanna go hiking with me next weekend?”

The topic now thoroughly changed, the conversation moved on with no signs that anyone was going to finish filling Naomi in. Settling in to eat, she chewed her sandwich absently as she tried to keep up with the subject. It ricocheted between other in-jokes and family drama that had little to no context, and offered her little opportunity to contribute. That was fine—it gave her time to appreciate her food.

It was when she was polishing off the last of her snack that the topic finally swung back around to something familiar.

“So Bea, how's working with El Silencioso going?” Dante asked, a mischievous grin on his face. “Has he shown you where he’s hiding the bodies, yet?”

"Mm! About that!" She hastily swallowed the last bite of her sandwich. "I've been wanting to talk about him. So it turns out that Mateo is actually, like," her face twisted in confusion, "really smart? He’s got like half the periodic table memorized, and he knows all sorts of weird stuff about which elements explode randomly. Or explode in water? I dunno, I wasn’t really listening."

"No kidding?" José remarked around a mouthful of bread, having swiped one of Dante’s conchas.

"Yeah! And I thought he was just being annoying when he got all particular about how we measured the ingredients—reagents? Whatever—during the lab, but apparently that’s actually super important for the experiment working.”

Dante blinked, staring at the bread in his hand. “Oh. I guess that’s why my lab turned out so weird. I thought it’d be like cooking or something, where if you add too many onions, then you just have more onions.”

“The last time you tried to make beef empanadas, they were almost entirely onion,” José said. “I like onion, and even I thought those were monstrosities.”

“Also, also!” Beatríz cut in, yanking the attention back to her, “Apparently he just kinda… knows Maruvian? Like, the whole language.”

Naomi perked up, finally finding a foothold. "That's the language of the kingdom that was here before Avalor, right?"

"Yeah, and it's a dead language," José said. "The Maruvians are gone. It's the kind of thing only professors or archeologists know.”

Their classroom history books had a lot to say about the Maruvians, and none of it was flattering. They were a society of wizards, the books said, and that was what wiped them out—swallowed by their own hubris in thinking they could wield such a corruptive power as magic. It was why Queen Shuriki had outlawed the practice when she took the throne—to spare Avalor the same fate. And since Maruvian wizards used drums to cast their spells, music became the natural next ban. And then since dancing and festivals were avenues for music, it was only good and necessary to ban them as well, as a preventative measure.

Of course, Queen Shuriki still had to bear the burden of carrying the power of magic herself, the histories said. Someone had to protect Avalor from dark forces. Someone had to keep that old, dark magic from making a resurgence, lest the country fall to ruin.

If Naomi was being honest, a lot of that sounded like bunk.

She’d lived in plenty of other countries where magic was a normal part of everyday life. People would hire a wizard to help them with even mundane tasks like repairs or pest control, and they never seemed more ignoble for it. Mages were an ordinary part of the royal court, and wanting to be a wizard was an ordinary aspiration. And banning music and dancing was just absurd, even taking the magical kind into account. There were entire academies across the sea in Enchancia dedicated specifically to teaching magical music, and they’d been around for ages without a magical apocalypse.

(She’d asked about them, actually, and Sra. Díaz had shaken her head and said, “Well, it’s only a matter of time, then.” She’d felt Mateo’s eyes on her during the entire next recreo. Which, yeah, that was a little unsettling.)

It all just seemed at odds with itself. Nothing she knew of magic pointed at it being civilization-destroying, but she also didn’t know enough about the Maruvians to challenge the idea that maybe their magic was. It was fascinating, the dichotomy between the irreverent, hedonistic villains the textbooks painted them as, performing sacrifices in their temples and laying curses for sport, and the mundanity and practicality of magic as she knew of it. She could better understand Mateo’s interest in mythology after a few weeks of these lessons; she wanted to start picking apart the history of it all herself.

José turned to Beatríz. “So where'd he even learn it?"

"I bet it’d be helpful for the final essay for the Maru unit," Dante added.

Beatríz nodded excitedly. "That's exactly how I found out! I was working on the report for last lab with him after school yesterday and I mentioned that I hadn’t finished the history essay yet, and all of a sudden he starts going on and on about how badly translated all the sources the school gave us are, what, like he’d seen the originals or something, and just—” Huffing, she pinched the bridge of her nose. "Ugh, I could barely get him to shut back up."

The idea of a chatty Mateo was somehow more unbelievable to Naomi than him being a linguistics whiz. Sure, he knew weird stuff; that made sense. He might as well know Maruvian. But she felt like she’d been lobbing him the softest olaballs of conversation topics since they’d met, and he’d inevitably missed every one.

"Oh, hang on," Beatríz said, and then suddenly sat up straight, waving an arm wildly. "Mateo! Over here!"

Naomi craned her neck, leaning around Dante to see that sure enough, Mateo was crossing the courtyard back toward the building. He'd frozen mid-stride, staring wide-eyed over at Beatríz, and after glancing around as if to make sure no other Mateos had burst into existence nearby, he raised a hand to point at himself.

"Yeah, you!" Beatríz confirmed. "Get over here!"

José stiffened, arching an eyebrow. "Uh, Bea? What're you doing?"

"Trust me," she whispered, and as Mateo arrived at the edges of the group, she turned a coy smile on him, fiddling with the end of her braid with one hand. "I was just telling these guys about how great a help you were last night.”

“Oh! Um…” He’d pulled his shoulders in and was clutching at his backpack straps like they were his only tether to his surroundings. Glancing between the four of them, his face wandered through a mix of confusion and suspicion as he took in their expressions: Beatríz, still smiling innocently and at direct odds with José, who was regarding Mateo with his own wary look of judgment; Dante, something amused stretching across his face as the scene unfolded; and Naomi, trying very hard to keep her face as neutral as possible. Whatever he found, or didn’t find, was enough for him to loosen his posture incrementally.

“Thanks?” he finally said. “Or, I mean, you’re welcome! It’s no problem. It was—you know, it was a school assignment, so—”

“You should sit down!” Beatríz said, cutting him off. “Naomi, make some room.”

Naomi jolted, shooting her a startled look.

“Go on,” Beatríz huffed, waving her fingers like she was shooing her.

A complaint lodged in Naomi’s throat like a stuck piece of food, but she scooted closer to José anyway. Don’t make a scene . Mateo sat down cross-legged in the gap with a nervous smile, setting his backpack beside him. Beatríz leaned toward him, her chin cupped daintily in one hand.

“So Mateo, how’d you get so super-smart anyway?” she asked. “Is it all that stuff you’re always reading?”

He ducked his head, flattered, and made a soft sound of protest. “Well, I don’t know about that…”

“What are you always reading, anyway?” Dante asked, and before Mateo could stop him, he’d flipped Mateo’s backpack open and tugged out one of his notebooks, cracking it open haphazardly.

Dread sliced across Mateo’s face. “Please give that back!”

He grabbed for it, but Dante leaned out of his reach, paging through it. “What’s all these squiggles? Hey, Bea, check this out.”

“Don’t! They’re just—they’re just drawings, they’re nothing important.”

“If they’re nothing special, then why do you want it back so badly?” José asked as Mateo swiped at Dante’s hands again.

“Don’t make such a big deal out of it,” Beatríz said. “We just wanna see.”

If Naomi was being honest, she was curious, too. She craned her neck as Beatríz and Dante flipped through the book, catching glimpses of rows of sketched symbols lining the pages. They looked intricate, though she couldn’t make out the details from the angle and distance, and Mateo’s body was blocking her before she could determine any kind of pattern.

He wrested the book from Dante’s grip. “It’s private,” he said, clutching it against his chest.

Dante threw his hands up. “Alright, alright. Jeez, man, we were just messing around.”

“They weren’t very interesting anyway,” Beatríz added. She tucked a loose hair behind her ear and gave him a smile stretched in false reassurance. “Don’t worry—we won’t take it anymore.”

“Oh. Um,” Mateo squirmed, his agitation deflating into confusion. “Thank you?” Settling back into his spot, he put his notebook away and tugged his entire backpack into his lap, clinging to it protectively.

“Hey, Beatríz says you know Maruvian,” José cut in, changing the subject. “Is that true?”

Beatríz’s smile grew broader. “Ooh, yeah! You should say something in Maruvian!”

Mateo faltered. “Uh, like what?”

Her teeth gleamed. “Whatever you want!”

There was a long pause as Mateo rubbed his chin, his lips pursed in thought. “Well, there’s a lot that I could say…”

“Just pick something!” José groaned, and Mateo flinched, his shoulders jumping.

“Right! Sorry! Um, how about…” Straightening up, he cleared his throat. “Ninoyolnonotza, campa nicuiz yectli auiacaxochitl…”

Naomi listened as he went on, stunned. His voice formed the syllables with practiced ease. He didn’t just know Maruvian; he was good at it, or at the very least confident enough to fool her. The lack of his usual anxious stammering told her he was reciting something he’d read, not just coming up with something on the spot, but he still sounded like he knew what he was doing.

“Cool,” she breathed.

“Wow,” Beatríz said, strained, “that sure is a lot you’re saying.”

Mateo paused. “Is that a bad thing?”

“No,” she said, drawing the word out, “but I was expecting maybe a sentence or two, not the whole dictionary.”

“That wasn’t the dictionary,” Mateo said, annoyed. “It was the first part of—um.” Just like that, his attitude evaporated, and he clamped his mouth shut with a nervous squeak. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter, right?”

And just like that, Naomi’s impression of him rebounded right back to ‘weird.’ Yet another thing he wouldn’t talk about. She didn’t know why she expected anything different.

Dante rolled his eyes, something roguish creeping onto his face. “Hey, my bisabuelo knows Maruvian, too.”

Mateo whipped his head around. “Wait, really?”

“Sure!” He snickered, unsubtle, like he was setting up for a joke, and as Naomi glanced around, she could see José and Beatríz hiding amused smiles behind their hands. “Listen to what he taught me,” Dante went on, and with a deep breath, he rattled off a string of words. It sounded like Maruvian at first, all hard c’s and t’s like Mateo’s recitation, but the way the excitement dropped off Mateo’s face as he spoke was a pretty clear tip that something wasn’t right.

“Um. None of that is Maruvian,” Mateo said. “That was just nonsense.”

Dante gasped. “What, are you saying my bisabuelo lied to me?”

Panic flashed across Mateo’s face at the accusation. “No, of course not! I just think that maybe there was a mix-up?”

“What kind of mix-up? You think I’m misremembering?” He leaned in, his grin looking more like he was just baring his teeth. “That’s exactly what my bisabuelo told me. It’s Maruvian, honest!”

“It’s not, though!”

“Maybe it’s just a dialect you don’t know.”

“I—well—” Mateo looked around at the others, fidgeting with his backpack straps. There was sweat sliding across his temple as he took in Beatríz and José’s giggling, and he sank in on himself in defeat. “Maybe I could talk to your bisabuelo sometime about it.”

That was the point where José finally gave up, letting out a groan of a laugh. “Mateo, Dante doesn’t have any bisabuelos. That’s the joke. He makes up family members to be good at random things so that he can make himself sound more impressive than he is. Everyone knows that.”

“Hey, low blow,” Dante remarked, though he didn’t sound particularly hurt.

“I didn’t know that,” Naomi muttered. Just the previous week, Dante had told her his bisabuelo was an expert in cartography, and now she felt like a sucker for believing him. “You guys could’ve said something when he pulled that with me earlier.”

“It’s a rite of passage,” José said, “and you’re new. You at least have an excuse for not knowing.”

Ashamed, Mateo curled tighter around his backpack, staring at the ground.

Beatríz examined Mateo’s pout as the group returned to conversation, keeping sharp-eyed watch even as she struck up talk with José about an upcoming test. After a minute or two, a flash of inspiration crossed her face, and she suddenly made a show of digging through her backpack, looking for something. “Ugh, I can’t find my notebook. I must have left it in the classroom.”

“Do you need it right now?” José asked.

“Um, yes? Obviously. Ugh, am I gonna have to go back in for it? Recreo is almost over!”

“I could go look for it, if you wanted?”

All heads swiveled toward Mateo. He’d been silent ever since Dante’s prank, and he recoiled at the sudden attention, but composed himself as best he could to reaffirm it. “I don’t mind, really.”

Pressing a hand to her heart, Beatríz simpered. “You’d do that? That’s so sweet.”

Naomi’s snack soured in her stomach at her tone. Something felt off about it, and far too familiar for comfort.

If Mateo had picked up on it as well, he didn’t show it, instead trying to bite back a delighted smile at the praise. “Sure! It’s no problem!” He scrambled to his feet. “I’ll be right back!”

Beatríz fawned again. “Thanks so much, Mateo! You’re the best!”

Beaming, he took off toward the building.

José watched him go, disbelieving. “There’s no way. There’s now way that just happened.” He turned to Dante, whose own incredulous expression was shifting into a broad grin.

Beatríz spread her arms, palms up, as a smirk spread across her face. “And that’s how it’s done,” she said. “I figured that one out last night when he basically volunteered to finish the lab report by himself. Turns out, all you have to do is be a little nice to him and he does whatever you want. It’s just like you said, Naomi!”

Naomi swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. “Okay, that wasn’t exactly what I meant.”

She just shrugged. “Well, whatever works.” Her eyebrows shot up in surprise as she saw something in her bag, and she pulled out her notebook, exactly where she’d been looking for it.

“Whoops,” she said. “I guess he probably won’t find it, then. Oh, well. It’s the thought that counts.”

Weeks turned into a month, and Beatríz kept her claws sunken deep into Mateo the entire time. It started small, with the lab reports he was supposed to be doing anyway and tiny favors that would make anyone look selfish to turn down. Could she borrow a pencil (and then never return it)? Could he drop off her assignment on the teacher’s desk when he brought his own up? Nothing outlandish.

And then it was asking for so much help on assignments that he was all but doing them for her and running errands that put him well out of his way. Could he get her something from the bakery? Could he help sweep up her dad’s store after school? And through it all, she heaped on praise and adoration, waxing lyrical about how smart and helpful he was. Mateo leapt at each scrap of attention like a starving man, and even if he noticed that she undercut every compliment with cruelty, the backhanded remarks and invasions of his privacy weren’t enough to scare him away.

And through it all, Naomi said nothing.

It wasn’t that she was getting any enjoyment out of watching her friends use him. Her stomach churned each time one of them twisted his words around so much that he ended up apologizing for jokes made at his expense. It was just that every time they made a remark that even she didn’t get, it stripped back a layer of the false confidence she’d painted over her own ignorance. She was hardly a paragon of social grace, even next to Mateo’s impossible awkwardness, and her lack of familiarity with the local culture just made it worse.

Watching Mateo flounder was a joke she knew she could be in on, for once. So even though her neck prickled and her chest hurt, when her friends laughed, she laughed with them.

It was when it escalated to even José and Dante exploiting his help that Naomi finally found the stomach to confront them.

“Don’t you think it’s kinda mean?” she asked José over a roll one recreo . Mateo was hovering by Beatríz as she spoke to a group of other girls from the class. She patted his arm as she said something, and even from a distance, Naomi could make out the discomfort on his face as the girls all tittered in response.

“What’s mean about it? If you ask me, we’re doing him a favor.”

Her brow wrinkled. “By mocking him behind his back all the time?”

José shook his head, waving the question off like an annoying bug. “That stuff’s not the point. He’s got friends now, thanks to us. And friends help each other out, right?”

“Yeah, sure.” Naomi ripped off another piece of bread. “The helping is real mutual.”

The look he gave her was almost pitying, and when he spoke, it was with the cadence of someone talking to a young child. “Look, you’re still new here. There’s a lot of things that you just don’t understand. Like the tilde thing.”

Her ears burned and a spike of humiliation crawled up her spine at the memory. How was she supposed to know what the tilde over an ‘N’ meant? Let alone how it was pronounced? All it had taken was her reading ‘año’ as ‘ano’ one time to turn her into a punchline, where Beatríz kept insisting that Naomi should use the latter as Dante almost collapsed in laughter. José had finally rolled his eyes and chastised not them, but Naomi, as if it should’ve been obvious from the start how wildly inappropriate she sounded.

Thankfully, he didn’t dwell on the reminder, instead gesturing across the courtyard, where Dante had approached the group of girls and tossed an arm across Mateo’s shoulders. Mateo had gone rigid, leaning his head away, but he didn’t pull away entirely, instead plastering on a smile and bearing with it.

“Mateo is… kind of a mess,” José went on, “and he’s been that way as long as Bea and I have known him. Trust me. This is the best thing to have happened to him all year. He does us a few favors, and he gets to hang around. It’s not a big deal.”

Face still far too warm, Naomi watched the group at the other end of the pavement. Mateo hadn’t relaxed, but he’d adjusted, enduring Dante’s manhandling with far less unease, and one of his laughs at whatever Beatríz was saying almost looked genuine.

“Okay,” she finally said. “If you say so.” And the knot in her stomach pulled ever tighter.

Naomi joined her friends in their usual recreo spot on a warm Friday morning, settling down and letting her brain catch up with the ongoing conversation.

“Maybe Celia just doesn’t like birds,” José was saying. He patted Dante’s arm and then flicked a crumb off his own, returning to his snack.

“She has birds,” he replied, sounding miserable. “Her family has chickens. She’s named them all.”

“Maybe Celia just doesn’t like you,” Beatríz offered with a shrug.

Naomi leaned toward Mateo, who was watching with rapt attention. “What did I miss?”

“Bird date went badly,” he whispered back.

“It wasn’t a bird date,” Dante insisted, “it was a ‘walk to a peaceful jungle clearing’ date. That happened to have birds in it.” He tipped his head back, sending a pleading look to the sky. “I just don’t know what I did wrong!”

“Well, better luck next time,” Naomi said.

Beside her, Mateo snickered. “Or, I guess that would be better luck nest time?”

And oh, that was bad. Naomi pulled a face and glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. He looked immensely pleased with himself, eagerly watching the others for their reactions.

But their reactions never came. Beatríz’s face pinched briefly and José rolled his eyes, but the conversation continued as if Mateo hadn’t said anything.

“Try the beach or something next time,” José said. “Way fewer birds there.”

Beatríz shook her head. “Again, I’m not sure the birds were the issue.”

Mateo’s smile faltered. “Nest time?” he tried again.

“Bea, If she didn’t like me at all, then why would she even agree to go on the date in the first place?” Dante asked, raising an eyebrow in challenge. “Also,” he turned to José, incredulous, “I’m pretty sure there are more birds on the beach.”

“Because—because birds make nests…?”

José sighed, pinching his nose. “Yeah, we heard you the first time, Mateo. It just wasn’t very funny.”

He drew a sharp breath. “Oh,” his voice wavered, “okay.”

“You don’t need to get that upset about it,” Beatríz said. “You’re awfully touchy about one dumb joke.”

The accusation immediately put him on the defensive. “I’m not upset about it, Bea, I’m just—”

“Beatríz.”

Mateo jumped at the sharpness of her tone. “W-what?”

“It’s Beatríz.” She heaved out a weary, exaggerated sigh. “Come on, Mateo, you always get so upset whenever someone else gets your name wrong. Can’t you at least do this right?”

He sputtered, eyes flickering across her face before jumping between the others and back. “But I—but you—but before, you said—” He gave his head a tiny shake, like he could jostle coherent words into place, and finally seemed to find an argument that stuck. “Dante and the others call you that!”

Beatríz slouched, her annoyed expression morphing into false pity. “And do you just do everything that everyone else does? I thought you were smarter than that.”

Wincing, he pulled his limbs in, staring down at where his hands lay in his lap.

“Aww, Mateo,” Beatríz started. She peeked over at Dante, who spurred her on with a stifled laugh and a thumbs-up. “It’s okay. I’m not mad at you. Everyone messes up sometimes!”

Furrowing his brow, he took a shuddering breath and lifted his head, looking her in the eye for the first time all day.

“Do you think I’m stupid?”

Beatríz blinked, taken aback. “What?”

“Do you really think I can’t tell when I’m being made fun of? I’ve been putting up with it because I thought, well, all of you make fun of each other sometimes, and I thought maybe that meant this was normal, and it would stop hurting after long enough.” He swallowed, gripping the straps of his backpack. “But it’s not normal. The way you guys talk to me is different from how you talk to each other.”

“How are we making fun of you?” Beatríz asked, recovering fast. “I said I thought you were smart!”

“No you didn’t! Well,” he closed his eyes, gave his head another tiny shake, “yes, you did, but you didn’t mean it like—that wasn’t how you—” A frustrated sound escaped his throat. “You’re doing it right now! You’re taking everything I say and making it mean something else!”

A wheeze of laughter rushed out of Dante’s mouth, and he quickly went to cover it, watching the scene with his eyes crinkled from mirth.

“Are you—” Mateo’s face scrunched up further. “Are you seriously laughing at me?”

Dante snorted again, a strangled sound that had him hunching over to muffle it, his shoulders starting to shake. Beside him, José pressed his fist to his mouth and covered a laugh with a fake cough. His ragged mustache twitched over his lip as he tried not to smile.

Mateo’s grip tightened on his bag. “It’s not funny!”

“Of course not,” Beatríz said, her voice laden with the sickly sweet kindness that she’d been faking for weeks. Across the circle, her foot bumped against Naomi’s, and she met her eyes with a split-second wink. “There’s absolutely nothing funny about you.”

José was by Naomi’s ear, humor in his tone as he whispered, “Especially not his jokes.”

Naomi felt sick.

“Oh, don’t try to start that again!” Mateo snapped. His voice was climbing in pitch and worse, in volume, drawing the attention of other students scattered around the courtyard.

“Start what?” Beatríz asked, the picture of innocence.

“The—the same thing! You’re just insulting me and pretending it’s a compliment!”

“Hey, she’s just trying to be nice,” José said. “Don’t yell at her for no reason.”

Dante could no longer hide his laughter. His whole body trembled, and he had to flick a tear away as he gasped for air.

“It’s not nice! She’s being awful!” Mateo jabbed a finger at José. “You’re being awful!”

“You just don’t know how to take a joke,” he replied, swatting his hand away.

Beatríz scoffed. “We’re just having some fun, right, Naomi?”

No. No, no, no, she’d been trying to stay out of it, but suddenly, all eyes were on her. Beatríz, José, and Dante weren’t even bothering to hide their grins.

“I, uh,” her own uncomfortable laugh slipped out, and she chanced looking at Mateo’s face. He looked stricken, his eyes wide and desperate like he was pleading with her. Like he needed her.

Naomi turned away.

“It was just a joke, Mateo. It’s not that big a deal.”

From the corner of her eye, she saw Mateo’s body tense so tightly he shook, but he took a ragged breath and stood, clumsily pulling his legs back under himself. “Fine,” he spat, his voice breaking. “That’s fine. If you guys don’t want me here, then—then I’ll just go.” He swung his backpack onto his shoulder and had stomped just a few feet away before he suddenly wheeled back, pointing at them all again. “And—and you all should be ashamed of yourselves!” And with that, he marched away, not toward the school, but away from it, disappearing onto the streets of the city.

The moment he was around the corner, the others burst into raucous laughter.

“Oh, my God?” Beatríz said. “What even was that? Is he just—he literally just left!”

“He sounded like my mother!” José cackled, before putting on a falsetto and wagging a finger at his friends. “You should be ashamed of yourselves! Seriously, what is his problem?”

Dante wiped his eyes, finally managing to breathlessly speak again. “Oh, man, did you see the look on his face?”

It was burned into Naomi’s mind, the way his face had crumbled when she looked away, devastated, like she’d screamed at him instead. Like she’d kicked him. She may as well have.

“Yeah,” she said quietly. “I did.”

Mateo didn’t return to class after his outburst. Sra. Díaz tutted at his empty chair and scribbled something onto the attendance record, and class went on, the whispers about his absence and the scene he’d made fluttering around the room. A few of Naomi’s classmates tried to grab her for comment when the school day ended, but she shrugged them off, feigning ignorance, and went home for the weekend with that wretched sense of shame still slithering through her insides.

When she got to class on Monday, Mateo was already at his desk in the back of the room, trying to finish an incomplete assignment. His eyes flicked up briefly as she pulled her chair out, and darted away just as fast, his jaw tightening. Naomi tried not to feel too hurt. Deciding it was for the best that she let him be, she pulled out her notes from the previous week and began to review them, thankful Mateo sat behind her and she didn’t have to see the object of her discomfort while she worked.

The tenuous peace wasn’t meant to last, though. Beatríz sauntered into the room with José and Dante on her heels, all chatting loudly amongst themselves, and her face brightened as her gaze fell on Naomi. She waved cheerily as the guys took their seats, and then noticed Mateo further back, and her expression snapped to something malicious. The look passed as quickly as it appeared, rearranged back into sweet and innocent, and Naomi watched as she breezed past her desk and hopped up onto Mateo’s, jostling the surface beneath her. Mateo yanked himself back from it like the shaking table had burned him, and barely had time to muster an affronted glare before Beatríz spoke.

“Mateo, hi! Did you have a good weekend?”

He leaned even further back, like she was contaminating the space around him. “Beatríz. Go away.”

She scoffed. “Rude. I’m trying to be nice .” She had a hand on the desk—Mateo was staring at her nails instead of anywhere near her face. “What happened last week? You left so suddenly. You know we were all just having a little fun.”

“I wasn’t having fun,” he shot back, and his jaw clenched further as he realized he’d been goaded into talking to her. “Leave me alone.”

It wasn’t Naomi’s business. She could just go on with her review and have plausible deniability when it inevitably went south again. But something nagged her into staring anyway, leaving her peering over her shoulder and far from inconspicuous.

“Anyway, you way overreacted,” Beatríz continued. She lifted her hand to examine her nails, delicately running her thumb under the tips. “It wasn’t our fault—you’re just too sensitive.” Suddenly jabbing a finger at him, she added, “And if you get mad at me for saying that, you’re just proving my point.”

Mateo had opened his mouth to retort, finally glaring up at her face, but snapped it shut with a forceful click at her accusation, grinding his teeth. His whole body had tightened; his shoulders were up by his ears and his hands gripped the edges of his desk so hard it looked painful. One leg bounced under the desk fast enough to wobble the surface—his abandoned pencil shuddered back and forth in time.

Naomi peeled her eyes away from the scene to check what the others were doing. José watched from the corner of his eye, his chin propped on his fist and a slight smile curving his lips. Quiet, discreet—he had his textbook open in front of him as an out if he got accused of listening in. Dante was being much less subtle but no more helpful, twisted in his seat and watching Mateo with the hungry stare of someone looking for drama. They all wanted him to blow up again, set like a ticking time bomb, and at the rate Beatríz was going, they were going to succeed.

Naomi swallowed, and her blood pounded in her ears.

Beatríz flashed another winning smile. “So anyway, it would be super sweet of you if you could help me sweep up again after school today.”

Mateo glowered at her again. “I’m—I’m not going to do anything else for you. Leave. Me. Alone.”

“Oh, don’t give me that look.” Beatríz crossed her arms. “You’re acting like I made you do anything for me. You’re the one that always volunteered.”

He’d freed a hand from his desk to press his knuckles hard against his mouth, like he was about to bite his hand, or about to be sick, and his breathing had gone uneven, like he needed to cry, or scream, or both. “Please, stop,” he begged, his eyes squeezed shut, his bouncing leg even more frenetic, but Beatríz still wasn’t letting up, instead leaning closer, letting a braid dangle between them.

“Mateo, this is just what friends do.”

“Hey!”

Beatríz whipped her head around, confused and annoyed, and Naomi felt her cheeks burn under the sudden scrutiny. She hadn’t meant to be so loud. Her blood roared, now, drowning out everything but the frantic thrumming of her heart—don’t make a scene, don’t make a scene, don’t make a scene—and it felt like the whole room had to be staring by now—

She swallowed, her tongue heavy. “He said to buzz off.”

Beatríz said nothing at first. She tilted her head, looking at Naomi with a bored expression that seemed to drill into her skull, like she was daring her to back down. With a deep breath, Naomi set her jaw and held the stare.

After an agonizingly long moment, Beatríz huffed, rolling her eyes. “Well, whatever.” She slid off Mateo’s desk and finally made her way to her own, but not without leaving him a venomous parting shot. “Have fun by yourself, weirdo.”

Her pulse slowly returning to normal, Naomi chanced a look around the room to see who had been watching. It was scant few, thankfully—though a handful of students had turned their heads, the ordeal hadn’t been the commotion she’d imagined it. But Mateo definitely was staring at her, his hazel eyes blown wide and full of hope, and somehow, that made her feel worse than anything else.

She returned to her lesson review and tried very hard to pretend he wasn’t there.

One thing Naomi had learned pretty fast after her first few moves was that the only reliable way to become part of a friend group was to already be a part of the friend group. When Naomi went to sit with Beatríz and the others during that day’s recreo, Beatríz had simply flicked her braid aside and looked Naomi up and down, like an appraisal.

“Wow, Naomi, I would’ve never expected you to be so bold,” she’d said. The guys had snickered and snorted.

Naomi had taken the hint.

So she sat alone on the opposite end of the courtyard, her back to the wall, eating a sandwich that tasted like ash. Watching the other students milling about and having fun felt like salt in the wound. Maybe she could find her way with another group of friends, but she’d always felt like an intruder in the past when she’d tried to insert herself somewhere she wasn’t welcome. Like an outsider. She tore off another piece of the sandwich, chewing mechanically. Nothing she wasn’t used to. It didn’t even matter. Her family would probably be moving soon, anyway.

The scuffing of a shoe on stone pulled her attention away from her self-pity, and she raised her head enough to see a pair of thin legs shuffling against the pavement.

“Um…” Mateo started. He sounded anxious, and had to take a breath to steady himself before saying anything more substantial. “About earlier, in the classroom. I really—that meant a lot. Thank you.”

“Sure. No problem.” As if her conscience would’ve allowed anything else. She took another bite. “D’you actually need something?”

Another shaky breath. “Well, I was just hoping—or, thinking—I was wondering if—” He cut off with a frustrated sound, and finally blurted, “Can I sit with you?”

There it was. Naomi’s stomach sank. After everything that had happened, it would feel weird to extend an invitation, like they were actually close in any way. It wasn’t that she disliked him. It really wasn’t.

But…

She looked him in the eye. “Pity’s not a good enough reason to be someone’s friend, Mateo.”

He shook his head so hard it sent his curls flopping around his eyes. “I don’t pity you!”

Naomi took a measured breath. “That’s not what I meant.”

It took a beat for it to click, and Mateo shrank back like he was wounded, his face flushing deeply enough to be obvious even against his brown skin. “Oh,” he said, his voice small. “You meant—okay.”

“Sorry,” Naomi said, not quite sure if it was for the remark or a more general expression of sympathy.

Still embarrassed, Mateo’s posture hunched inward, but he didn’t leave. “So… I guess you just want to sit by yourself, then?”

Naomi flinched. He didn’t need to call attention to it, unless passive aggression was his goal. Worst of all was that whether he meant it as a dig or not, he had a point—she wasn’t in much better social straits than him at the moment. The two of them made a pretty pathetic pair.

“Just do whatever you want,” she finally said, pointedly turning back to her food. Her appetite had evaporated, though, and she picked listlessly at the sandwich fillings.

Beside her, Mateo shifted his feet again, and then walked a few yards along the wall before sitting down. He set his backpack next to him and retrieved a book, and without another word to her, began to read.

Naomi stayed right where she was. This was fine.

Chapter Text

Naomi’s feet skidded along the pier as she raced toward her house, the wind tangling her skirt between her legs and whipping her sodden ponytail into her face. She was no stranger to bad weather, but the coastal storms of Avalor were something to behold. What started as a mild drizzle hours ago had transformed into a deluge, churning the ocean up into a gray froth and blurring the distant horizon into a seamless wash of dark clouds and darker seas.

Her heel slid out from under her on the rain-slick stone of the main pier as she finally reached her home, and she crashed shoulder-first into the door. Nearly blinded by rainwater, she fumbled for the handle, and with a distant flash of lightning spurring her on, she managed to swing the door open and toss herself inside. Regaining her footing, she threw her entire body weight against the door to push it closed against the force of the howling wind. The sound of the storm cut off with a click. It wasn’t silent—wood creaked around her, and the rain battered the roof in a staccato rhythm and dripped down through leaks in the ceiling—but the distant rumble of thunder sounded less threatening through the thick walls. Naomi sighed and sank to the ground, her back to the door. She was out of immediate peril.

So long as the house holds, she thought as a wave sprayed against the opposite window. A kernel of worry made its way into her stomach as the house groaned again and another bout of water spattered down from the ceiling. The building had been there for years already before her family had moved in, and had probably seen worse storms than this. It would totally be fine through this one, right? Her dad would definitely make it back to the house as well, as soon as he was done securing the harbor’s ships and warehouses, and her mom was somewhere out at sea, far beyond the edges of the tempest. No problem.

Shoving her concerns to the back of her mind, Naomi dragged herself to her feet and stepped further into the living room, shaking water off of her arms and taking stock of the house. The main room was a mess, with mounds of unwashed clothes and loose charts scattered between barrels and crates of who-knew-what, and dirty dishes from that morning were still stacked on the dining room table. Naomi sighed, cringing as she drew a lungful of the smell of damp wood. Every whirlwind move always left the house in disarray, but she thought they would’ve gotten better at keeping things clean in between them. Instead, they always seemed too busy—there was schoolwork, or dock work, or anything else that kept the Turners away from home and oblivious to how bad the chaos had gotten until they returned in the evening, too exhausted to do anything about it.

But the storm had sent her home early, leaving the rest of the afternoon blank. Blank, and full of waiting. Thunder rolled again, and she glanced back at the door, vainly hoping to see her dad swinging it open behind her. She could probably clean up a little while she was waiting for him—anything to keep her mind from idling on his absence. He would be back before she knew it.

From there, it was a matter of keeping busy. Dry off first—check, even though her long hair fought her at every turn. She really needed to get it cut. She changed into her new lobster pajamas—might as well be comfortable if she was going to be trapped at home—and cobbled together some chairs and twine into a makeshift clothesline by the newly lit fireplace. After getting a kettle on the stove and a pair of mugs and a package of tea bags on the crate they’d been using as an end table in the living room, she rounded up every spare bucket and bowl she could find to set out under the leaks. She’d just barely gotten the charts from one floor pile rolled up and set aside when the kettle began to whistle, and she eagerly abandoned the tedious task to prepare herself a cup of tea, bringing the kettle with her and setting it by the fire.

Satisfied, Naomi tossed herself into the nearest armchair and took a long drink from her mug. There. Everything shipshape for when her dad got back. Mostly. A flash of lightning arced across the sky, visible through the large window in the dining room, and the clap of thunder that followed reminded her of exactly why her dad wasn’t back yet. The seed of worry she’d set aside earlier bloomed again, and she took another drink to try and smother the feeling, turning her attention back to the fire. He was fine. Everything was fine.

A sudden knock at the door jarred her out of her thoughts, and Naomi turned in her chair, watching the entryway with bated breath. Why would her dad bother knocking? Maybe she’d misheard. But no, the sound came again, and Naomi shook her head, grinning and setting her mug down. Maybe he just had his hands full. She ran to the door and tugged it open.

“Hey—” And then she blinked up at the empty space where she’d expected to see her dad’s head. Dropping her gaze closer to eye-level, she found herself staring instead at a pair of hazel eyes, half hidden behind a mop of sodden, brown curls.

“Hi,” Mateo greeted, half waving with one arm, tucked close to his body.

Naomi just gaped at her classmate, bewildered.

Mateo squirmed under her stare. “Uh, I can leave if—”

He cut off with a startled yelp as she grabbed him by the front of his shirt and hauled him across the threshold, and for the second time that day, she threw her body against the door to slam it closed against the storm. The two were left in the relative quiet of the house, the muffled sounds of the raging storm outside punctuated by the constant dripping from the ceiling, Naomi’s drying clothes, and now, from Mateo, who stood shivering just beside the door.

“What are you doing here?” Naomi asked, looking him over. He was completely drenched—his clothes were soaked through, plastering his collar and sleeves to his skin, and his mud-caked boots squelched as he shifted his feet. He was holding his equally soaked backpack tightly against his chest, and didn’t seem to have any kind of umbrella, not that that would have done much good against the fierce winds of the storm.

“I got stranded,” he explained, and glanced across the room, eyes flickering between the piles of junk Naomi had tried to reorganize. “I live up by the Moon Cliff, and the road up to my house is basically impassable right now.”

Naomi sucked in a breath. She knew Mateo lived outside the city, but the Moon Cliff was a hike to get to, even on a clear day.

“And believe me, I tried,” Mateo went on, waggling a dripping foot in her direction, “but I kept slipping in the mud, and the storm was just getting worse, and, well,” he paused to push a soaked curl higher on his forehead and offered Naomi a sheepish smile, “I didn’t really know where else to go, and I remembered you saying you lived here so I figured maybe, uh…”

Great. Just great. Her weird, awkward classmate had apparently decided they were close enough that he could invite himself into her house in the middle of a storm, and she was just standing here in the middle of a mess, wearing her dorkiest pajamas.

“Sorry,” Mateo said when Naomi didn’t reply, and repeated, “I really, really didn’t know where else to go. Any neighbors that I’d go to live up that way, too, and I don’t really have other, um,” his wayward curl slipped back down into his eyes and he shifted his bag in his arms, tightening his grip around one of the straps. “Classmates,” he concluded, “that I know that well.”

Naomi pinched the bridge of her nose. “Okay, okay, I get it. You didn’t have options, so you’re here now.” She sighed and looked down at the water pooling around his feet. “And if you’re going to be here, then I don’t need you leaving puddles all over the place. Stay put,” she ordered, jabbing a finger toward him, “and I’ll go get you some towels or something.”

Mateo straightened up and nodded stiffly, and Naomi felt his eyes on her as she turned and raced up the stairs, taking them two at a time as if the awkwardness was some physical menace she could escape.

Reaching the linen closet, she yanked it open, staring down the towel shelf for the second time that afternoon. Snatching the largest one she could see, she went back toward the stairs and leaned over the railing of the landing, only to see Mateo adjusting the nicknacks on one of the disorganized bookshelves.

“Hey, nosey!” Naomi snapped, and Mateo leapt to attention again, stammering out a protest.

“I wasn’t—I bumped it on accident—I was just—” He cut off with a flinch as Naomi flung the towel down at him. It caught him across the face, and then fell down to drape over his backpack, where he watched it like he expected it to leap up at his head again.

“You dry off,” Naomi said, “I’ll be right back.”

She heard Mateo call a faint ‘okay’ up at her as she ducked back into the second floor hall. Okay, she had to pull it together. It wasn’t fair to Mateo for her to be taking her embarrassment out on him—he was the one that had to muster up the courage to go to her for help. This was probably infinitely weirder from his perspective, especially if he could tell she was annoyed, and she was the one in a position to make things less weird.

So… what could she do to make things less weird?

Well, what had she done when she’d gotten back? Dried off—check, she’d supplied a towel. Changed clothes—ugh, that could get weird, too, but it was probably a necessary step. The towel and the fire might not be enough to dry his clothes out completely, and he’d both make the downstairs mess worse and risk getting sick if he sat around in damp clothes all evening. Cleaned up and made tea—okay, she wasn’t about to turn this into a cleaning party, but she could offer some of the tea. It wasn’t like she was going to drink a whole kettle’s worth herself, and at this rate, it would be dinnertime when her dad finally got home, anyway.

Oh, right, her dad. What was he going to think of their surprise houseguest?

Whatever, it didn’t matter. Mateo was there, and she wasn’t about to be the jerk that sent him back out into the storm, so he was stuck there until the weather cleared. Her dad would just have to deal with it, just like she did. Though, if she was being perfectly honest, her dad would probably be completely okay with this, and wouldn’t have to stand in the hallway for a minute to figure out what to do.

But okay, she had a plan, or at least half of one. Get Mateo some dry clothes, offer him a warm drink. Easy enough. She finally entered her parents’ room, spirit sinking at how the downstairs mess had crept in there, as well. They really needed to work out a system for keeping things tidy while her mom was away. Shaking her head, she sifted through the dresser drawers for things her dad didn’t wear much anymore, or things that were too small on him. She tossed a couple articles onto the bed, and as an afterthought, added a belt to the pile before heading back out to address her guest.

Mateo had returned to his spot by the door and had finally set his backpack by his feet, where he stared down at it as he rubbed the towel across his head. The towel was already looking pretty damp, even though Naomi had only been gone for a few minutes, but Mateo wasn’t looking much drier. Yeah, it was probably a good thing she’d decided to get him a change of clothes.

“Okay, I got some of my dad’s stuff out for you to wear for now,” she said, heading back down the stairs and pointing toward the bedrooms. “In the hall, there, in the door on the left.”

“Oh,” Mateo replied, following her finger. “Are you sure that’s okay?”

Naomi bit back an annoyed huff. “Sure it is. I’m saying it is. Now,” she pointed more emphatically, “go get changed before you catch cold. And don’t touch anything else in there!”

With hunched shoulders and a stilted gait, like he’d been caught doing something wrong, Mateo grabbed his backpack again and went up the stairs, disappearing into the hallway.

So that was taken care of. Naomi allowed herself to let out the frustrated sound she’d suppressed earlier and looked over at the clotheslines she’d set up around the fire, where her own day clothes were still looking pretty soggy. She’d have to set up more chairs. She busied herself with that while she waited and hung up the abandoned towel, trying not to stew in her irritation and discomfort.

A door creaking open upstairs caught Naomi’s attention, and she looked over from her handiwork as Mateo reemerged on the landing in the new clothes, with his wet clothes bundled under one arm and his boots and backpack dangling from the other hand. She’d figured her dad’s clothes would be a bit big, but as Mateo started down the steps, watching his feet carefully, she realized she’d drastically underestimated how much. They were almost comically oversized, the shirt billowing around him like a loose sail as he moved and the belt tightened all the way to the last hole. Both his sleeves and pant legs had been rolled up multiple times—though Mateo was no longer shorter than Naomi (which was completely unfair), he still wasn’t exactly tall, especially in comparison to her dad. He looked as out of place in those clothes as he did in her living room.

“Where should I…?” he asked, holding up the dripping wad of fabric.

“Just hang it up here,” Naomi said, stepping out of the way of the clothes-chairs. “Hopefully it’ll all be dry by the time the storm lets up.”

As if on cue, lightning flashed again in the distance, crackling over the sea and bringing a low rumble of thunder behind it. The wind shifted, and Naomi watched the rain fall sideways, vaguely aware of Mateo sorting out his clothes in her periphery.

He stepped up next to her when he was done, staring out the window with a quiet awed noise. “It’s pretty bad, huh?” he remarked.

“Mm.” She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. “So what were you doing out in it, anyway?”

Mateo grimaced and rubbed at the back of his neck. “It’s kinda hard to explain.”

Snorting, Naomi shook her head and whacked the back of her hand against his arm as she finally turned away from the window and retrieved her now frigid mug of tea. “It’s not like we don’t have time,” she said, grabbing the kettle and pouring a splash of hot water into her cup to heat it back up. “Grab some tea and settle in, because I feel like, as your host, I have a right to know what caused—” she waved the mug toward him and then took a sip, considering her next words.

“All this,” she finally settled with. “Unless,” she went on, smirking, “this is another one of those ‘secretly reading fairytales’ things we can’t talk about.”

“No,” Mateo hastily answered, frowning. “I was just running some errands.”

“In a storm.”

“In a—well, it wasn’t a storm when I left my house!” Mateo crossed his arms, pouting. “It was only raining a little bit, and I thought I could get back before the weather got worse.”

“Sure, sure,” Naomi said. “Are you gonna stand there or are you gonna have some tea? There’s a mug right there and I’d like to stop holding this kettle.”

“Oh, uh,” Mateo looked over at the empty mug. “It was sitting out already, so I didn’t realize that was for me.”

Well, it hadn’t been, but Mateo probably didn’t need to be reminded of how abrupt his intrusion had been. “I’m psychic, I knew I’d need it,” Naomi said instead, only to immediately regret it as teasing conversations of recreos past flashed through her mind. “I’m joking,” she quickly added. “Sorry, I forgot you don’t do jokes.”

He bristled. “I do jokes.”

“You do puns.”

“Those are jokes!” He turned away with a petulant sniff, an irritated crease in his brow. “Just because you don’t appreciate them,” he muttered.

“Please,” Naomi forced through a clenched smile and brandished the kettle once again, “just take some tea.”

He just stared at her for a moment, arms crossed, but the irritation on his face faded back into discomfort and he quietly accepted the kettle. He dropped a tea bag and poured some water into the empty mug and then placed the kettle back by the fire, and then he just stood there, holding the steaming mug and watching Naomi like he was expecting her to give him more directions.

“You waiting for an invitation to sit or something?” she asked, flopping down onto the sofa.

“No,” he replied, and finally took a seat in the adjacent armchair, where he stared into his mug with a pensive expression. “Thanks,” he added, eyes flickering over the rim to look at her. “For letting me stay.”

Naomi nodded, and then they both fell silent, with Mateo squinting into his cup like it wouldn’t steep if he took his eyes off it and Naomi trying to find entertainment in the way the shadows from the fire curled and stretched on the wall.

Mateo shifted in the seat. “So,” he started after a moment, “what type of tea is this?”

“Mulberry,” Naomi answered. “It’s a big deal in Norberg, especially the part of the country my parents are from.” She took a long sip, savoring the taste. “The juice is better, but the fresh stuff doesn’t last as long, so we try to keep some of the tea around.”

“Huh. Cool.” Nodding, Mateo took a sip himself, and then lowered the mug, setting it carefully back on the end table.

Naomi tried not to vocalize her discomfort, the skin of her face feeling too tight from her strained expression. Absolutely riveting conversation.

Rain continued to drum steadily on the roof, and a bucket Naomi had set out in the dining room pinged as water dripped into it. Somewhere in the house, a clock chimed, and one of the logs in the fire popped loudly, sending a burst of sparks against the back of the fireplace. Thunder rolled softly beneath it all, like a distant tremor, but even with all the constant sound, the silence between them felt like it was flooding the room.

Naomi tapped her fingers against the side of her mug and looked over at Mateo. His shoulders were hunched, and one of his legs was bouncing, causing the floorboard beneath it to squeak in time. He was staring at the fire like it was a homework problem he was trying to solve, and only lifted his head after she’d been watching him for what she knew was way too long.

“Yes?” he asked, his leg bouncing faster.

“What kind of errands?” Naomi asked.

Mateo startled, sitting up straighter and blinking at her. “What?”

“What kind of errands?” she repeated. “You said it was hard to explain, and now I’m kinda curious.”

“Oh.” He chuckled nervously and reached for his mug again. “I was just getting some, uh, supplies I needed. Nothing that important.” He forced another laugh and raised the mug, hiding his face behind a large gulp of tea.

Naomi glanced over at the makeshift clotheslines, covered in soaked clothes. “You sure about that? They must have been pretty important supplies if they couldn’t just wait for the weather.”

His next laugh was a lot less forced, bordering on genuine. “That was actually just poor planning on my part,” he admitted. “I was working on, um,” he bit his lip, “a project? A personal one. And I didn’t realize until the last minute that I was all out of something I needed for it, and I thought, ‘well, if I go out now, I won’t be stuck at home later with nothing to do if the weather gets worse.’ Except, well…” He grinned at her, shrugging. “I ended up stuck here, instead.”

“Let that be a lesson to you, I guess,” Naomi said, returning the grin. “Don’t assume you can outrun a thunderstorm.”

“Heh, yeah. Sorry about this, again.” He stared back down into his mug with a softer expression. “And really, thank you for letting me stay here.”

“No problem,” she replied, and now that she was thinking about it, it really wasn’t. She’d been caught off guard by his appearance, sure, but it wasn’t like a spare set of clothes that no one wore anymore or a hot drink was really all that inconvenient. “I’m not about to kick someone out into that mess. And honestly,” she went on, more softly, “I kinda appreciate the company. Helps keep my mind off, you know,” she nodded toward the window, “that mess.”

Mateo hummed in agreement, and the two of them fell into another lull. Naomi shifted her mug in her hands, letting the warmth of the tea seep into them.

This silence was broken by Mateo awkwardly clearing his throat. “I, uh, like your pajamas?”

Naomi cringed. Count on Mateo to make things weird again. She’d almost allowed herself to get comfortable, forgetting the full context of the situation and letting herself pretend she was just hanging out with a friend, and she almost wanted to snark at him for reminding her otherwise. Her attitude deflated, though, at the sight of his face; he didn’t exactly look like he was trying to make her uncomfortable, and the unsure, almost hopeful edge to his voice made it seem far more like he was just blindly throwing darts to see if he hit something in the vicinity of appropriate small talk.

“Thanks,” she finally said, looking down at the cartoon lobsters smiling brightly back at her, and an idea bubbled up into her head of how to redirect the conversation without shutting him down completely. “You know, my dad makes a mean lobster bake,” she said. She curled her legs up under her and leaned further into the sofa, smiling. “Another Norberg thing, I think. I know I’ve seen some lobster dishes here but the sort of stuff my dad makes requires sturdier ones than what you can catch locally.”

Mateo was still just watching her, like he was expecting her to continue, and Naomi took a sip of tea to fill the gap. She’d really expected him to jump in with some commentary by now. Dinner shouldn’t have been a taboo subject. “Anyway, the cold water ones are a bit of a pricey import, but if you have a chance to try it, I’d definitely recommend it. It’s really good.”

“I’ll take your word on that,” Mateo said. “I can’t stand shellfish.”

“Oh.” Naomi felt her ears heat up, and rapidly buried the embarrassment under indignation. “You could’ve said earlier that you don’t like them, then.”

Confusion flickered across Mateo’s face. “No, I mean, physically, I can’t. They make me actually ill,” he clarified. “I break out in hives and throw up a bunch and it’s,” he made an uncomfortable sound, “unpleasant for everyone involved. Especially for me.”

The rest of Naomi’s face heated up, as well. “Oh.” He still could’ve mentioned it sooner.

Mateo’s leg was bouncing again, and his voice cracked as he hesitantly tried to continue. “That’s cool, though, that your dad knows how to cook with them. My, uh, my mom used to make a really good paella de marisco up until we figured out,” he gestured vaguely to himself, “you know.”

“I’ve had that,” Naomi remarked, nodding. “Probably one of my favorite things I’ve had here.”

“Have you had a lot of Avaloran food?” Mateo looked confused again. “You haven’t really been here that long.”

“I—Mateo, I’ve been living here for almost a year, now,” she said, barely containing an incredulous laugh.

He quickly ducked his head, looking abashed. “Right, I knew that.”

“But,” Naomi went on, “if you have any recommendations, I’ll take them.”

“Oh, uh,” he peeked back up at her, and then tilted his head thoughtfully. “Well… I really like sopa de fideo.”

“That’s noodle soup, right?” Naomi asked, her brain flipping through a year’s worth of sporadic, language knowledge.

“Uh-huh.” He pulled his legs up into the armchair, crossing them under him, and settled back, looking genuinely relaxed for the first time since he’d arrived. “It’s one of those recipes most people have their own variation on, so it’s easy to find a good version. Of course,” he said, his mouth twitching into a smug smile, “my mom’s is the best.”

Naomi snorted. “I don’t doubt it,” she said, taking another drink. She was nearing the bottom of her mug. When she lowered it, Mateo’s face had taken on a more somber look, and he was leaning on one of the arms of the chair, his chin in his palm, looking at nothing in particular.

“She’s probably worried sick,” he said, and his eyes flickered back over to her. A gust of wind howled past, bringing another rush of rain against the windows and sending an ominous creak through the woodwork.

“I know,” Naomi said, and really, she did. Her dad was taking an awfully long time getting back home. “But, there’s nothing you can do about it right now. You’re stuck here until the storm clears.”

Mateo wasn’t looking especially reassured, and Naomi felt her own morale flagging as well. It seemed like the weather had only gotten worse since she’d gotten home, and it was getting harder to stay optimistic.

That didn’t mean she couldn’t try, though. “Well, maybe she figures you found someplace to stay for the time being.” She fished out another tea bag and stood, wiggling her toes to get some feeling back in them, and went to retrieve the kettle. “Did you guys talk about what to do if the weather got worse while you were away?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Naomi paused, holding the kettle and her mostly empty mug. What part had he not understood? “Before you left for your errands, did you talk to her about a backup plan?”

He immediately averted his eyes, sinking back further like he was hoping he’d disappear into the chair. “I, uh, might not have told her I was leaving?” he admitted around a sheepish chuckle.

Naomi almost poured hot water over her hand instead of into her cup. “You snuck out?” she blurted, louder than she’d meant to, and Mateo flinched.

“No!” he protested, then, “Well, I guess a little?”

“You snuck out,” Naomi repeated with a surprised laugh. “I can hardly believe it. I thought you were, I dunno, well-behaved or something!”

“I—I am!”

“I mean, you asked if it was okay to use a mug, for crying out loud!” She shook her head and finally refilled her drink properly.

“I thought I could get back in time,” Mateo said, audibly strained. He looked mortified, his eyebrows drawn and lips pressed together in visible discomfort. “She would’ve never let me leave in the rain if I’d told her I was heading out, especially since I didn’t have a reason I could—I mean—a reason she’d think was very compelling.” He frowned. “And the weather really wasn’t that bad at the time, and it shouldn’t have taken very long, but Doña Paloma was trying to upsell me—you know, again—and I—”

“Okay, okay, you don’t have to get defensive,” Naomi said. “Honestly, I’m just kinda surprised.” She grinned broadly, swatting at his arm as she returned to her spot. “Who knew you were such a rebel?”

“I’m not!” he insisted, his voice climbing in pitch.

“Secretly reading illegal fairytales, sneaking out of your house to go on mystery errands,” she went on as she lowered herself back into her seat. “What’s next,” she smirked over the rim of her mug, “you gonna overthrow the queen or something?”

“Shhh, no! Stop it!” Mateo’s voice cracked with a desperate urgency, and he was suddenly standing, looking somewhere between frantic and furious.

Naomi faltered, regretting she’d pressed the issue. “Mateo, I’m just jok—”

“You can’t even joke about that kind of stuff!” he snapped, his hands curling into tight fists. “Do you have any idea the kind of trouble I could get in if someone heard you?”

An uncomfortable silence yawned in the wake of his outburst, filled by thunder and wind and creaking wood, and Mateo deflated, turning to rub at his arm and looking embarrassed, like he’d realized all at once how loud he’d gotten.

“I… I guess not,” Naomi admitted quietly, something settling heavily in her stomach. “I’m sorry.”

Mateo looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “Yeah, me too,” he said. “I’m sorry for yelling. I mean,” he forced a nervous laugh, almost straightening back up, “it’s not like anyone actually could hear us right now,” he paused, voice teetering on an anxious edge again, “right?”

“Right,” she confirmed around her own awkward chuckle. “It’s just us in here, and even if someone wanted to listen in, they’d have a hard time hearing us over the storm. Honestly, if there was ever a time to talk about this kind of stuff, it’d be now. But, I get it,” she said, holding up her hands at the way Mateo froze, “rebellion jokes are off-limits.”

He was standing stock-still, watching her carefully. “Right,” he echoed after a moment. He looked away again, a thoughtful expression on his face, and he pulled a hand up to tap against his chin, mumbling under his breath, “now would be the time to…”

Naomi felt a strained smile returning to her face. “Ooookay,” she said, “on that note, do you wanna just play a card game or something? Might fill the void better than sitting around arguing about, I dunno,” she shrugged, “lobsters and crimes. Lobster crimes.”

Mateo snorted, quickly covering his mouth to stifle a giggle, his air of seriousness gone in an instant and his voice taking on a familiar, humorous tone. “I bet they rob people because—ah…” He averted his gaze, and his smile wavered.

And oh, well, didn’t she feel like a jerk? Naomi sighed. “Go ahead.”

Something sparked behind his eyes. “They rob people because they’re shellfish,” he whispered, looking at Naomi expectantly. “Get it? Like selfish?”

She let out a sound somewhere between a groan and a dry laugh. “Yeah, okay, you’re hilarious,” she said, suppressing the urge to roll her eyes at how his face brightened further at the comment. “C’mon, you move the tea stuff over to the table and I’ll…” she paused, overlooking the vaguely sorted piles scattered across the floor, “I’ll figure out where the cards got to.”

It took nearly ten minutes of searching to find the cards, and another four to free a baffled Mateo from the tangle of fishing wire he’d gotten stuck in after Naomi had admitted needing an extra set of hands. They settled in at the table, and by the time they’d picked a game and had gotten through Mateo’s rambling explanation of how to play conquian, the clock had chimed again. Even as she tried to focus on the game, Naomi felt distracted by the unease roiling in her stomach.

Her dad was fine. Everything was fine.

“Are you okay?” Mateo asked.

Sighing, Naomi set her cards down, tilting back in her chair. “Yeah, I’m just—I’m getting really worried.”

Mateo frowned. “Maybe he’s just doing what I did,” he said. “He could’ve decided the weather was too bad to risk the trip back and gone somewhere closer.”

“I hope it’s something like that,” she replied.

“Maybe—no, that wouldn’t work,” he said to himself, and only continued when he caught Naomi staring at him, an eyebrow quirked upward. “I was going to say we could look for him if there’s a moment of calm, but—”

“But that’s basically how you ended up here,” Naomi finished, smirking, earning a nervous laugh from Mateo. “Believe me, I’d like to do something about this, but our best bet is to stay here where it’s safe. Ish.”

As if the universe wanted to prove her wrong, something suddenly slammed against the window behind Mateo with a resounding crack. He leaped up with a yell, knocking over his chair, and Naomi flailed in her seat to keep from toppling over herself. They both stared at the window: Mateo, frozen in place with wide eyes; Naomi, one hand grasping the table to keep her tilted chair up and the other clutching her shirt over her chest to soothe her racing heart.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Naomi groaned, and she let her chair legs slam back down against the ground, scooting it back with a scrape. Spreading across the window was a spiderweb of cracks, centered around a chipped dent in the glass where it had been struck. Thankfully, the cracks aside, the window was still intact, though who knew if it would stay that way through the rest of the storm.

“What just happened?” Mateo asked, hesitantly stepping toward the glass.

“Some driftwood or something must have been thrown into it by the waves,” she explained as she circled around to it. “Just another thing to deal with, I guess.”

“Can you fix it?”

Naomi turned to Mateo, incredulous, and took in his look of genuine concern. “You’re serious,” she remarked, and continued before he could interject. “I don’t think this is really fixable without replacing the whole pane.” She sighed, rubbing at her temples. “Best case scenario, it holds long enough that we can patch it when the rain lets up, while we’re waiting on repairs.”

Mateo worried at his lip. “And the worst case?”

“It breaks tonight and we have a storm blowing in through the dining room,” Naomi said with a shrug.

Another wave crashed against the wall, sending a spray of water through the cracks, and Mateo leaped backward with a squeak.

“It’s just water,” Naomi laughed, flicking another few droplets in his direction. “You should see how it gets on a ship during a storm. Honestly, the worst part of this is getting broken glass everywhere.”

She stood Mateo’s chair back up and made her way into the main room, pulling some stray fabric out of one of the piles and examining it.

“Come on, help me look for a tarp or something we can put over it for now, so we at least don’t have the wind blowing in here,” she said as she pushed a stray ship’s wheel out of the way. What was that even doing there? It clattered against the ground as it toppled over, and Naomi hoisted up a coil of rope that had been under it. With a huff, she looked back toward the dining room and frowned as she saw Mateo still standing by the window, watching the rain outside.

“Hey!” she called, “You in there? I could use some help!”

“What is she even doing,” he said, to no one in particular, and Naomi made an exhausted noise.

But fine, she’d bite, if it meant she could get him to focus. “She?” Naomi prompted, letting a bundle of fishing lures dangle from her hands.

“Shuriki.” He scowled and crossed his arms. “She’s supposed to be this powerful sorceress, right? You’d think changing the weather would be easy for her. And you’d think,” he went on, turning on his heel to stalk back and forth in front of the window, “that if she cared at all about her responsibilities as a ruler, she’d, I don’t know, want to put a stop to something that could cause her citizens so much harm?”

“She’s not a very good ruler, I feel like that’s common knowledge,” Naomi cut in.

“She’s the worst!”

Naomi jumped at the venom in his voice. “Mateo—”

But he was on a roll, careening ahead before she could stop him. “The whole reason she’s exempt from the magic ban is because she has to ‘protect us,’ right? But she’s never done a thing for Avalor’s benefit! She’s just a liar! She took away everyone else’s magic but she’s only using hers to help herself!”

“Mateo! I get that you’re upset, but there’s nothing we can do about that. Help me figure out what to do about the window, because that’s something we can fix.”

“I know but,” his face scrunched up and his voice climbed in volume, “what’s the point of even having magic if you’re not doing anything with it?”

Rain hissed in the ensuing silence. “Okay,” Naomi said after a beat. “You good, now?”

Mateo took a deep breath through his nose and turned to her, resolute. “I have to get home.”

She pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. “You can’t go anywhere right now, sorry. Come help me find a tarp.”

“You don’t understand—” Mateo tried, but Naomi cut him off.

“Yes, I do,” she snapped. “I get that you’re worried about your mom. I am trying not to freak out about my dad. But the weather’s only getting worse, and wandering around in the storm isn’t going to make that any easier!”

“But there might be something I can do to—”

“Like what? Catch pneumonia? Drown?” The stress of the evening was starting to take its toll, and the afternoon’s annoyance, the worry for her dad, and the aggravation about the window all fused together in her stomach, white-hot and acidic, and she stomped her foot, gesturing broadly around her. “What could you possibly do about all this?” she shouted, and brought her hands to rest on her hips, staring Mateo down and mentally daring him to reply.

How he chose to respond caught her, not for the first time that night, completely off guard.

“Can you keep a secret?”

She drew in a breath to chastise him again, but stopped at how deathly serious he looked. Lightning crackled somewhere nearby, the flash casting an eerie shadow across his face, and a chill raced down Naomi’s spine as she was suddenly hit with the thought that she was about to get involved in something very, very dangerous.

But that was ridiculous. Mateo wasn’t dangerous. A little unusual, but not a threat.

…Right?

“Yeah,” she breathed, bracing herself for whatever was coming next.

Nodding, Mateo swallowed hard and drew in a shaky breath, squeezing his eyes shut. “I’m actually—”

A deafening bang of thunder suddenly tore through the house, tremendous enough that it shook the walls and rattled everything on the shelves, and the two of them screamed, reeling toward each other like the sound had physically manifested around them.

As the sound faded out, Naomi forced a laugh through the ringing in her ears. Just thunder. Nothing to be so spooked about. Mateo had doubled over, visibly shaking, with one hand bunched up in his shirt. He looked up to meet her eyes with a flustered smile, returning her laugh, and soon, they were both giggling at the absurdity of it.

“Thunder,” Naomi laughed. “What are we, toddlers?” She tugged on his arm to pull him upright and gave him a playful punch for good measure, still snickering.

“Hopefully there aren’t any more surprises like that tonight,” Mateo replied, sounding breathless.

No sooner had the words left his mouth, though, than the front door flew open with a crash, slamming against the inside wall and shaking the house again. A gust of icy wind howled in around the hulking, shadowy figure filling the doorframe, and they both screamed again, grabbing for each other in panic.

“Naomi?” the shadow called in a familiar voice, and Naomi felt her terror disappear in an instant.

“Dad!” she cried, and she sprinted for the door, half shoving Mateo away from her in the process. She tossed herself up around her dad’s shoulders, unbothered by his soaked shirt, and she choked back a relieved sob as his arms circled her back to give her a proper squeeze.

“Sorry I took so long,” he said, carefully setting her back on the ground. He turned and grabbed the door, pushing it closed and cutting off the shrieking wind and hissing rain outside. “Another ship came into port for refuge right as we were all about to head home.” Reaching up to wring out his ponytail, he skimmed his eyes in a quick survey of the house, pausing at the sight of something over Naomi’s head.

“Who’s this?” he asked, and all at once, Naomi remembered the presence of the Turners’ surprise visitor. Turning around, she saw Mateo, standing at attention and scratching the back of his leg with his other foot, a forced smile on his face.

“Hi,” he said, with an awkward wave that mirrored his arrival, though he looked considerably less like he’d just taken a swim.

“Right,” Naomi started. “Uh, this is Mateo. He’s one of my—” one of her what? Friends? Did he count at this point? “—classmates,” she settled with, moving on as quickly as possible. “He got stranded by the storm, and I said he could wait it out here.”

Her dad, though still looking bemused, nodded. “Of course, Naomi’s told me about you,” he said, and Naomi wondered if he noticed the horror that flashed across Mateo’s face. Whether he did or not, he crossed the room and held out a hand, saying, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mateo.”

“Uh, you too, Señor Turner,” Mateo replied, hesitantly accepting the handshake.

“Captain Turner,” he corrected gently. His hand nearly swallowed Mateo’s whole.

“Right, sorry! Captain. Captain Turner. I knew that,” Mateo stammered out, and Naomi’s dad responded with a hearty chuckle.

“Nothing to apologize for,” he said, releasing Mateo’s hand and turning back to his daughter. “I best head up and dry off. I’ll be right back down.”

As he headed up the stairs, Mateo shuffled closer to Naomi, clearing his throat. “So, when he says you’ve told him about me…”

Naomi glanced over at him, confused, and watched as he mimed opening and closing a book. “Oh! The—” she lowered her voice, “the fairytale thing?”

Mateo nodded, wringing his hands.

“Nah,” Naomi said with a quick shake of her head. “Relax, I haven’t mentioned that. Just—” her mortification at how she’d hit him in the face the day they met, how awful she’d felt for not sticking up for him when he’d needed it, how uncomfortable their months of tenuous not-friendship had been ever since, “—other stuff. Nothing bad.”

That seemed good enough for Mateo, even with the omission. A moment later, Naomi’s dad returned downstairs, in dry clothes with a towel draped across his shoulders.

“Seems like we should start thinking about dinner,” he announced. “I think there’s some clams from yesterday in the icebox yet that need to be used soon. Would that be alright with you two?”

Mateo fidgeted. “Oh, um. I wouldn’t want you to go out of your way…”

Naomi rolled her eyes with a frustrated noise. “Dad, Mateo can’t eat shellfish,” she explained, since apparently Mateo wasn’t going to, and she could barely make out her classmate’s betrayed expression in her periphery.

Her dad’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh! Why didn’t you say so?” he asked, turning back to Mateo with a warm smile. “We can have something else, then.”

“But I—”

“Ooh! We could do something with the rest of the chicken!” Naomi suggested. “That always makes a lot.”

“Great idea,” her dad said with a hearty chuckle. “Mateo, is there anything else you can’t eat?”

“No, but—ow!” he cut off as Naomi jabbed her elbow into his side and shot him a look.

“You might be stuck here for a while yet,” she said, lowering her voice so her dad wouldn’t hear over the clatter of kitchenware, “and I don’t want to deal with you getting cranky because you haven’t eaten.”

The flat expression on Mateo’s face would have been funny if he wasn’t being so aggravating. “You sound like my mom,” he muttered, and then sighed, rubbing at his shoulder. “But okay. And, uh, thanks,” he gave her a small smile, “again.”

Naomi shrugged. “Yeah, sure.”

“Is there anything I should do to help?” he offered, right as her dad finally seemed to take notice of the cracked glass.

“Naomi, what happened to the window?” he asked, and she heaved a sigh.

“I’ll tell you over dinner,” she said, “and you,” she added, tapping Mateo’s arm, “can help me find a tarp.”

Chapter Text

Despite Mateo’s initial reservations, dinner went smoothly. Naomi found that everything felt a lot less uncertain once she had something warm in her stomach, and suspected Mateo felt the same, judging by how he gradually warmed up to conversation over the course of the meal. Her dad, for his part, put an effort into making chit chat with their guest (though Mateo meticulously, but politely, deflected any questions about his hobbies), and even seemed to enjoy Mateo’s brand of humor, or at the very least, did a convincing job of feigning amusement. When the meal was done, Mateo insisted on helping with the dishes, either just a naturally tidy person or desperate to be as little of an intrusion as possible. Either way, he left a trail of cleanliness in his wake just by existing in the Turners’ space.

The storm was still raging by the time the three of them settled in for a few rounds of the game Mateo and Naomi hadn’t gotten to finish earlier, though with company and after a hot meal, it felt more distant. The sound of the rain had become part of the background, and the only reminders were the soft patter of water against the sailcloth that had been tacked up over the broken window and the way Mateo’s shoulders would jump whenever there was a particularly loud clap of thunder.

A low rumble was accompanied by the sound of the clock chiming, and Naomi’s dad set his cards down with a frown, scooted his chair back, and headed to the window, peering out with one hand cupped around his eyes to block the light from the house.

“Still looks pretty bad out there,” he remarked, and turned back to the table. “Looks like you might be spending the night, Mateo.”

Mateo startled, looking at Naomi like he expected her to confirm it. “It’s not that late, though, is it?”

“It’s after ten o’clock,” her dad replied.

Naomi felt a jolt of surprise run through her, and she leaned forward to see outside around him. Pitch black. She hadn’t realized the hour herself, but now that her dad had mentioned it, she felt a weariness sinking into her bones and tugging at her eyelids. It had been a long day.

Across from her, Mateo had his face scrunched up in intense concentration, eyes locked on the abandoned card deck in the center of the table like it could offer him a way out.

“I don’t want to intrude,” he said, his voice faltering.

Naomi huffed out a laugh. “A little late for that,” she muttered, earning a chiding glance from her dad. Mateo didn’t notice, as wrapped up as he was in whatever frantic, internal dialogue he was having this time.

“My mom is going to freak out,” he went on, standing up, his chair squeaking against the ground. “I should really try and get back—”

He stopped as Naomi’s dad came to rest his hands on his shoulders, looking him in the eye.

“I know you’re worried about your family,” he said, “and I’m sure they’re worried about you, but as the only parent in the room, I can assure you that as worried as she is now, your mother will feel much better afterward knowing you spent the night safe, at a friend’s house, instead of wandering around in a thunderstorm, in the dark.”

Mateo’s voice failed him and he looked away, hanging his head.

Nodding, Naomi’s dad continued, “I’m afraid we don’t have a spare guest room—at least, not one that’s usable—”

Naomi stifled an embarrassed chuckle. Yeah, their spare room was a mess at the moment, too, being the room where everything got stuffed that they still hadn’t unpacked, even after most of a year.

“—but we can get you set up on the sofa. Are you alright with that?”

It didn’t sound like Mateo had said anything, but he must have done something to indicate his assent, because her dad nodded again and took a step back.

“Right then,” he said, “I’ll go get you some blankets.”

It didn’t take long to get a makeshift bed ready, and though Mateo had stopped apologizing, he still wore a troubled expression.

“I’m so grounded,” he said, staring down at the quilt draped across the couch.

“I think you passed that threshold a while ago,” Naomi pointed out. Mateo only looked more stressed.

Her dad offered a sympathetic smile. “Even so, that will have to wait until tomorrow to sort out.” He suddenly yawned, stretching his shoulders with a satisfying-sounding pop. “I may turn in, myself,” he said. “Will you two be alright?”

“Sure,” Naomi replied, “assuming there are no more broken windows and that someone,” she raised an eyebrow, looking pointedly at Mateo, “doesn’t die from fright.”

Mateo narrowed his eyes at her. “Hey!”

“Well, alright then,” her dad continued before Mateo could protest further. “Mateo, if you need anything, my room’s just at the top of the stairs.”

With that, he bid them both goodnight and headed upstairs, entering his room down the hall and closing the door with a click.

“...You screamed too,” Mateo said after a pause, something bitter laced through his tone.

Naomi stifled a laugh, not wanting to disturb her dad. “You screamed louder,” she shot back, and Mateo looked away, shaking his head in irritation. “Anyway, you gonna be up for a while? I can hang out if you still wanna talk.”

The annoyance faded from Mateo’s face as he considered her. “I guess? I probably won’t be able to fall asleep for a while anyway.”

Wincing, Naomi glanced over at the blanket-laden couch. “Yeah, I guess that’s not the most comfortable bed, is it?”

“What?” He followed her gaze, looking back and forth for a moment before realization dawned on him. “Oh, no, I’m sure it’s fine. I just,” he crossed his arms like he was hugging himself, “have a lot to think about.”

“Well, maybe a card game will help keep your mind off things,” Naomi offered, heading into the kitchen to grab the abandoned deck. “Just ‘Go Fish’ or something this time—I could barely follow your explanation of conquian when I wasn’t half asleep.”

Time passed, and they’d gotten settled in the living room. Naomi had taken up residence in an armchair, curling her legs up into the seat and wrapping a blanket around herself. Mateo was sprawled out on his stomach on the sofa, his elbows propped up on the armrest so he could lean over the end table crate between them. A candle burned merrily beside the deck as an extra light source to the slowly dying hearth, but it didn’t actually help much with seeing the cards.

Naomi almost had a better idea of what was in Mateo’s hand than her own. As it turned out, he was impressively bad at Go Fish, something she hadn’t thought possible. He sorted his hand as he drew cards, and he couldn’t keep a straight face to save his life, which gave her an advantage at guessing what he might have. She wasn’t sure he even realized he was doing it. He’d lost all but one of the rounds so far, and he was starting to get frustrated, his nose wrinkling every time Naomi took one of his cards, but at least it was keeping him distracted.

Mateo let out an annoyed huff as he handed her his fours. He glowered at his cards for a moment, but then visibly relaxed his face, like he was trying to remind himself that it was just a game. “Do you have any fives?”

“Go fish.”

He gave a melodramatic sigh, but drew a new card anyway, slotting it in on the right end of his hand. A high number, then. Naomi checked her own cards, planning her next move, but Mateo spoke up again before she could make it.

“So you’ve been here almost a year now.” He didn’t say it like a question, but he waited for her to nod and confirm it anyway. “What do you think?”

“It’s nice,” she answered. “I can’t really make comparisons since I don’t normally stay in one country for this long. I’ve been enjoying it, though. The food is great, the city is really interesting, the people are nice,” a sneering image of José, Beatríz, and Dante flashed through her mind, and she added, “you know, for the most part.” She frowned. “The whole ‘no music’ thing is weird, though. Any queens?”

Mateo stared at her, blinking slowly, his face scrunched up in confusion. Then, “Oh, you mean in my hand.”

Naomi almost choked trying to muffle her laugh as he shook his head, pinching between his eyes. “How tired are you right now?”

“Very, apparently. Also, go fish.” Not that high a card, then. Naomi hadn’t even properly added the new one to her hand when he asked, “Now do you have any fives?”

She glanced at the card—the five of clubs—and handed it over, two-fingered. Lucky guess.

“Finally,” he muttered, laying out the matched set on the table. “Anyway, I can promise you that pretty much everyone thinks the music ban is awful. Before Shuriki, it used to be you could barely make it down the street without hearing someone whistling or playing an instrument, and there were mariachis that hung out around the main plaza of the Villa Mercado, and Día de los Muertos wasn’t so quiet and sullen…”

“You say that like you were there,” Naomi remarked, looking over her cards again.

“No. But my mom was. And I grew up with her telling me stories about what Avalor used to be like when she was little, back when King Raúl was still on the throne.”

Naomi tried to picture it: the streets filled with sound instead of wary silence, people talking freely instead of watching over their shoulders, energy and enthusiasm palpable in the air. “I wish I could’ve seen it,” she said. “Too bad I wasn’t born a couple decades earlier.”

“Although then we never would have—” Mateo cleared his throat, half ducking his face behind his cards. “Anyway, if you wanted, I could maybe show you some old Avaloran stuff sometime. My mom taught me a few songs, and,” he lowered his voice suddenly, checking the door like he just remembered he was talking about something illegal, “she taught me the sambarosa. I’m not very good at it, but I could try to teach you.”

Mateo teaching her a dance would mean they would have to hang out again, but somehow, Naomi didn’t find herself dreading that idea as much as she would have that afternoon. “Hey, my only experience dancing is standing on my dad’s feet while he twirls around, so I can’t imagine your ‘not very good’ is much worse than that. It sounds… fun, though.”

“It can’t leave this room, though,” he quickly added, his warm, delighted smile suddenly vanishing behind that familiar-looking paranoia.

Naomi waved her free hand. “Oh, sure, of course.”

They fell into a brief lull. Naomi tilted her head into the armchair with a yawn, and Mateo adjusted the blanket draped across his back, pulling it toward his shoulders. She wondered what time it was—it hardly felt like they’d been playing for very long at all. The rain had softened to a soothing hiss, and the thunder sounded distant. Her eyes had grown heavy, and she could feel them drooping as she watched the flickering candle flame. When Mateo spoke again, she had to drag them back open, not quite sure when they’d actually closed.

“Hey, um,” he was chewing his lip, and he peeked at her over the top of his cards. “Can I ask you something that might be kind of personal?”

What was the harm, at this point? “Sure, go for it.”

He nodded almost imperceptibly, and then, “Is it just you and your dad?” When she didn’t answer right away, just staring at him, surprised, he went on, “It’s just that I saw some of the pictures around the house of a woman with red hair. Is she… not around, or…?”

Naomi swallowed against the sudden lump in her throat. She knew she didn’t have to answer if she didn’t want to, and Mateo would probably apologize and drop the subject if she implied it was upsetting. The late hour had rendered her sentimental, though, and she found herself willing to share. “Yeah,” she finally said. “Most of the time. My mom escorts merchant convoys to help ward off pirates, and some of those journeys can get pretty long, so she’s away from home a lot.”

Mateo nodded again, understanding flickering across his face in the candlelight. “I’m sorry. That must be hard.”

“Mm. Part of the reason we moved to Avalor in the first place was because it was so central to this side of the EverRealm. We thought that would mean her trips would be shorter and she could spend more time at home.” She huffed out a weak laugh. “It didn’t really work out that way, though. I’d still much rather have her get a job here somewhere. Of the last ten months, she’s been away for almost seven total.”

“Seven? That’s. Wow.”

“She should be coming home soon, though,” she explained, trying to stave off the inevitable pity. She wasn’t sure why she was saying all this, but she was too tired to come up with a good reason to not keep going. “And it’s not all bad. She always brings back stories and souvenirs, and Dad and I always have a lot to tell her, too, so we never run out of things to talk about when she is home. We write each other letters, and whenever we’re traveling, the three of us are together constantly. But, you know,” she sank further into the seat, staring at her cards but not really seeing them. “It would be nice if she was around more.”

“I hope she’s able to stay for a while this time.” He glanced up at her again with a tentative smile.

“Thanks.” Something occurred to her then, nudging through the fog that was sleepily consuming her reasoning. “Hey, um. Is it okay if I ask—I’ve never heard you mention anyone other than your mom. Is it just the two of you?”

His smile grew more subdued. “Yeah. All the time.”

Naomi lowered her cards, letting them dangle loosely in her fingers as she gave him her full attention. Dimly, she realized the game might have been over, anyway. Neither of them had actually made a guess in a while, and she couldn’t remember whose turn it was supposed to be. “Can I ask what happened?”

He shrugged, the motion stiff from how he was lying there. “Your guess is as good as mine. It’s just been my mom and I for as long as I can remember, and she doesn’t like to talk about it. For what it’s worth, we only put her side of the family on our ofrenda every year.” He broke off with a yawn and folded one of his arms to cushion his chin as he settled down against the armrest. “I eventually stopped asking. I figure whoever it was was probably a real jerk.”

Naomi stifled a laugh at his casual tone, not expecting such an open jab, and a wave of mortification briefly dragged her back to alertness. “Sorry,” she tried, not sure if she was apologizing for his situation or for laughing.

Mateo waved it off, fluttering the fingers on his pinned arm. “It’s okay. It’s one of those things you get used to. I didn’t even realize there was anything unusual about it until I started going to school.” He yawned again, and Naomi couldn’t help but return it this time, the tiredness returning full-force after her spike of embarrassment. “It’s hard not to wonder sometimes, though,” he went on, more softly. “How things would be different if they were around, you know? Mom was always more than enough for me, but for my classmates or teachers…”

“Other people always make a big deal about it,” Naomi finished. “I get it. There’s the people that get way too pitying about it, and the people that judge your parents for it—”

“And the people that act like it makes you an issue.” He let out a dry laugh. “I mean, yeah. You get it.” He closed his eyes for a moment, breathing deeply, but spoke up again right as Naomi was starting to wonder if he’d fallen asleep. “What’s it like when she is around, then?”

She thought about it, toying with her cards. “It feels like coming home. Avalor already feels more like home than anywhere else I’ve lived, but it’s not really complete until she’s back. And then we’re in a rush, like we have to get as much family time as possible before she leaves again, and we can never just take our time with it.” She slid the cards together, looking back at him. “What about you? What do you imagine when you think of your mystery parent?” Mateo snorted, like he didn’t really take the question seriously, and Naomi tried to straighten up. “No, no, really. A stranger shows up claiming to be your long-lost father: what do you do?”

“I ask why he left my mom,” he answered without missing a beat. “Honestly that’s the bigger issue for me. I’ve been fine with just her, and it’s hard to imagine how my life would’ve been with someone else, but…” His face fell, and he seemed to sink more heavily into the upholstery. “It had to be hard for her. I’m the only family she has, and I know she worries a lot. I think it would’ve helped her to have someone else to turn to, and help look after me.”

“Would’ve been a lot harder for you to sneak out, I bet,” Naomi said before she could stop herself. Rather than take offense, though, Mateo let out an embarrassed squeak, burying his face in his arm.

The topic stirred something in the back of Naomi’s mind, turning into a quiet nagging that pestered her into a semblance of consciousness. “Hey, Mateo?” He peeked back up at her. “What was it you were gonna say earlier?”

“Hm…? What do you mean?”

“Before my dad got home. You were gonna tell me something. You said it was a secret.”

He stilled, barely even breathing. “It’s not actually that important,” he finally said, forced humor in his voice. “I don’t know why I even brought it up.”

“It’s okay. You can tell me,” Naomi mumbled. She blinked slowly, the effort of keeping her eyes open feeling onerous. “I wanna know.” She closed them again.

And she opened them to darkness. Confused and blinking, she rubbed a hand across them, looking around to take stock. She was still in her living room, propped up in the armchair with a blanket pulled around her, but the fire in the hearth had burned down to dimly glowing embers. The drying clothes hung like ghosts in her periphery, fluttering in the draft from the covered window. Outside, the rain had died down to a soft drizzle, the sound filling the room like a comforting haze, and the occasional drips from the ceiling were few and far between, the sound standing out much more sharply in the quiet than when the storm was still raging. She worked her mouth to get the taste of sleep out. She must have dozed off.

On the sofa, Mateo was out cold, breathing slowly and still lying on his stomach. One arm and his head were still propped up on the armrest, his cheek squished against his sleeve and his neck craned at an uncomfortable angle. The other arm dangled off the side of the sofa, his forgotten cards pooling on the floor beneath his fingertips. Naomi’s own cards were scattered on the end table. She didn’t remember putting them down. She didn’t really remember what they’d been talking about, either, but exhaustion must have taken its toll mid-conversation.

Carefully untangling herself from the blanket, she uncurled from the chair and stretched her legs out. No sense in not going upstairs. Slowly, so as to not disturb Mateo, she retrieved the candle from the crate, burnt halfway down by now, and stood, pulling the blanket around her shoulders like a cape. The wooden floor felt like a sheet of ice beneath her feet, and she shivered as she tiptoed around the sofa. Mateo didn’t so much as stir as she went past. Despite how uncomfortable his position looked, he seemed more relaxed than he’d been all evening, his shoulders loose and his brow smooth. Naomi could barely see movement beneath his eyelids.

Dreaming, then. She wondered what about.

Suddenly, something snagged on her foot as she stepped forward, hooking across her ankle. She gasped and pitched, flailing an arm to keep balanced. The blanket dropped to the floor in a heap, and she rocked on one foot to keep from following it, watching the wobbling candle with her heart in her throat. There was a dull thump and a clink of glass at her feet as whatever she’d tripped on fell over, but the sound registered distantly through the roaring in her ears.

Well, that woke her up.

Alert and precariously balanced, Naomi finally looked down. Her foot was caught on the strap of Mateo’s backpack. Letting out a held breath, she carefully stepped back, freeing her foot and settling her weight back down evenly. She checked on Mateo. Still sound asleep, somehow. She let out another relieved breath. All good, then. She hadn’t fallen, she hadn’t dropped the candle, and she hadn’t woken anyone up.

Stooping down, she set the candle aside and righted the bag, leaning it back against the sofa. And then she stopped, her hands hovering just over the flap and her heart hammering in her chest. All at once, Mateo’s off behavior came rushing back to the forefront of her mind, the conversation they’d been having flaring urgently in her memory. He was hiding something, something big, and whatever it was had to do with the contents of his backpack. Her fingers clenched and unclenched, and she bit her lip as she glanced at him again. He didn’t seem especially threatening while he was passed out and snoring gently, and he’d seemed fine after dinner. But she’d felt uneasy to be alone with him that afternoon, the way he was ranting and pacing, and then there was the matter of his aborted confession…

Palms sweating, she let out a slow breath. She could totally justify going through his things in the name of personal safety. Besides, it sounded like he had something fragile in there. The decent thing to do would be to make sure nothing had broken. But just to double check—

“Hey, Mateo,” she breathed. “Are you awake?”

No response, save for the slight curl of his fingers.

She reached out and undid the buckle.

The first thing she noticed when she lifted the flap was the glint of glass in the dim light. Peering inside, she could make out an assortment of small vials and bottles, intermixed with thin cloth pouches and bundles of herbs. The bottles were all full of different liquids and powders, though she couldn’t gauge any of their colors in the dark. Cooking ingredients, maybe? But why would he need to be so secretive about that? Her breath caught at the thought that it might be medicine; it would explain the urgency of his errand, as well as his unwillingness to discuss it, and she suddenly felt like a cad for snooping. Shame burning in her ears wasn’t enough to dissuade her from delicately lifting out one of the bottles, though, and she held it close to the candle to read the label.

Spidervine sap.

She blinked. Huh?

To her knowledge, spidervine sap was basically just a fancy, expensive glue. Her parents had used it as a sealant ingredient on the ship a few times when they couldn’t get ahold of the regular stuff. It wasn’t medicine, and it definitely wasn’t food, and she couldn’t think of any reason Mateo would need to buy it. She could only even guess why Doña Paloma would carry it, other than staying true to her store’s slogan of ‘all you need and more.’

Either way, it wasn’t anything alarming. Confused and more than a little guilty, she tucked the vial of sap back in the bag and closed it up, letting it rest against the sofa. Retrieving her blanket and her candle, she pulled herself to her feet and headed for the stairs. She paused at the base, looking at Mateo's sleeping form, perplexed.

“What is your deal, anyway?” she whispered, and with a shake of her head, she went upstairs.

The next morning, she awoke to birdsong and sunshine, the storm already a distant memory as far as nature was concerned. She spilled gracelessly from her hammock as she tried to stretch and landed hard in a tangle of limbs. Grumbling and still not fully awake, despite the rough landing, she began to slowly maneuver her body into a more reasonable position, sitting up and blinking sleepily into her bedroom, breathing in the refreshing scent of rain and sea salt. She wasn’t normally so uncoordinated in the mornings, but she’d had trouble falling back asleep after her investigation the night before, her mind spinning emptily as she tried to come up with an explanation for Mateo’s behavior. Her dreams, then, had been plagued with bizarre and upsetting images of dripping sap, broken glass, and Mateo himself, looming in the distance like another storm on the horizon.

A part of her dreaded that he had somehow discovered her snooping in the night, and she dragged her feet as she washed up and got dressed. She was not looking forward to another confrontation with her surprise guest. Before heading downstairs, she hesitated, checking her dad’s door. She couldn’t hear his distinctive footfalls downstairs yet, which meant he was still asleep, and if the work the day before had worn him down as much as it seemed, he’d be out for a while. She could wake him up, to make sure she didn’t have to be alone with Mateo again.

But then, Mateo had seemed fine as the night wore on.

Her dad probably needed the rest. With a steadying breath, she went downstairs. Mateo was awake already, it seemed; the blankets from the sofa had all been neatly folded and stacked at the end of it, with the spare clothes she’d lent him sitting on top. He’d stacked all the cards together on the end table, and wiped up the few stray globs of candle wax that had dripped off as well.

Rustling in the dining room alerted Naomi to the presence of Mateo himself, right as she was starting to wonder if he’d already gone home. He was standing with his back to her, puttering around with something by the broken window. His backpack was propped up and open by his feet with the tea kettle sitting next to it, and he was pulling the edge of the tarp away from the window. Whatever he was actually doing was obscured by his body, and he seemed pretty energetic despite how rumpled he looked in his unironed clothes. He bounced slightly as he worked and was half-humming a tune to himself, just softly enough that he could convincingly argue that he wasn’t really singing if he got caught.

Naomi stared, uncomprehending. “Mateo?”

He shrieked, his entire body spasming as he leaped from the window like it had burned him. Wheeling around, he slammed his back against the wall beside it, almost kicking over the kettle as he did, and fixed Naomi with a rictus grimace that was probably supposed to be a smile. “Nothing!” he blurted. “I’m doing! Nothing!”

Naomi blinked slowly. She rubbed her ears, stinging from the volume. Apparently, he was back to being weird and suspicious. Good to know.

The corner of the tarp started to peel down again and Mateo slapped a hand against it so hard it sounded painful, pinning it to the wall. “The, uh, the tarp—” he tried. “I saw the tarp falling, so I thought I’d, uh—” His mouth was stretched uncomfortably tight, and he was sweating. “I was just fixing—I mean, the tarp. Just the tarp. I was fixing the tarp.”

It was way too early for this. “Good morning to you, too,” Naomi said. “Try to keep it down, okay? My dad’s still asleep.” Assuming Mateo’s scream hadn’t woken him up, anyway.

The rigid line of his shoulders loosened incrementally as she walked into the kitchen, and he let out a shaky breath as he realized she wasn’t actually going to question him. “Right. Sorry.” Out of the corner of her eye, Naomi could see him pin the tarp up more carefully and flip his backpack closed. If he’d noticed she’d messed with it the night before, he didn't say anything, just fastening the buckle with still-shaking hands.

“Can you bring the kettle in here?” she asked, rifling through the cabinets. “I’ll fill it up again for breakfast.”

“Oh, uh, sure. I’ll get it cleaned out first.”

She didn’t look at him as he made his way to the sink. No sense setting him off again. Instead, she pulled a pan out and set it on the stove, casting about for where her dad had left the matches. “It just had water in it. You can just leave it on the counter.”

“No, no, I really think I should wash it first.”

Thankfully, her dramatic eye roll as he opened the tap was hidden by a cabinet door. Just let him feel useful. If he needed to clean something to feel like he wasn’t in the way, then so be it. The two worked in silence for a moment: Naomi digging around for cooking utensils and Mateo scrubbing at the kettle with the same vigor one would use to scour a dirty tub.

By the time Mateo had moved on to drying the kettle, Naomi had gotten the stove lit and had butter melting in the bottom of the pan. “You good with eggs?” she asked, flipping the carton open.

Mateo’s shoulders jumped again at the interruption, and he snapped his attention to her from where he’d been staring blankly into space. “Oh, um, thank you, but I was going to head out once I was done with this.” He briefly raised the dish towel, and his brow furrowed. “I don’t want to keep my mom waiting any longer than she already has.”

Naomi hummed. “Fair. You want something for the road, then?” If he didn’t want to stay for breakfast, she couldn’t make him, but basic hospitality demanded that she at least offer. Weird or not, he didn’t deserve to be thrown out hungry.

He set the kettle on the counter and pointed toward the basket of fruit she’d moved to the table. “Could I… grab an apple, maybe?” He sounded unsure, like he was half expecting her to scold him for the request.

She shrugged, cracking an egg into the pan. “Sure. Help yourself.”

She busied herself with the pan, cracking a few more eggs into it as Mateo loitered by the fruit basket. The gentle sizzling and the smell of food was invigorating, and she could already feel her mood picking up after her rough night. Wood creaked upstairs—her dad was finally awake, then. She wouldn’t have to worry about the food getting too cold.

Shuffling by the window caught her attention as she pulled the eggs off the heat. Mateo was picking up his bag, and he slung it over one shoulder, an apple held loosely in his grip. “I guess I’ll get going then,” he said. “Thank you for letting me stay.”

“Sure, no problem.” She wiped her hands off and walked him to the door. Trying not to look too aloof, she held it open, ready for this exceptionally strange event to be over.

But Mateo hesitated. For all the rush to get home, he sure was taking his sweet time. Maybe the smell of fried eggs had gotten him after all. Instead of a request for food, though, Mateo went for a far more awkward remark. “This was actually kind of fun? Not the getting trapped here part, but just getting to hang out.”

Naomi chuckled. “Yeah, sure. Next time we’ll do it without the downpour.” The words were out of her mouth before she could think about what she was actually saying.

Mateo straightened up, his eyes wide. “...Next time?” he asked, and Naomi didn’t miss the quiet hope in his voice.

She wished she’d shoveled down one of the eggs before seeing him off—her hunger suddenly felt surprisingly like guilt. She hadn’t meant to extend another invitation, implied or otherwise, but it seemed cruel to slam the door in his face both literally and metaphorically by saying so.

Although, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to spend more time with him.

“You know. Maybe,” she quickly answered, pressing ahead before anything more concrete could be planned. That was a problem for Future Naomi. “See you in school.”

A nervous chuckle slipped out of his mouth, turning his hope to apprehension. “Yeah, assuming my mom lets me out of her sight any time within the next century.”

Naomi snorted. “Good luck with that.”

“Thanks. Well… see you.” He gave her a little wave and then headed down the pier, watching his feet and fastidiously avoiding the puddles as he went.

Naomi closed the door and pressed her back against it, sliding toward the floor with a groan. She dragged a palm down her face and stared into the open space of her home. What a weird night.

Her dad finally came down the stairs, yawning. “Naomi, good morning. Did Mateo already leave?”

“You just missed him.”

“Hm, alright. He seems like a nice boy.”

Frowning, Naomi followed him back toward the kitchen. He hadn’t seen Mateo at his least predictable. Unease churned through her, mingling with hunger like nausea. She wanted to talk to her dad about what had happened, but as oddly as Mateo had been behaving, he still hadn’t done anything that was explicitly wrong. All she really had was the mystery secret he never told her and a gut feeling, and that felt like a poor excuse to potentially get someone in trouble.

But he was definitely hiding something, and she didn’t want to think of how much worse she might feel if that ‘something’ turned out to be bad. If anyone would be safe to talk to, it would be her dad.

He’d taken over breakfast prep, getting started on some coffee and toast and taking a long whiff off the eggs. “Smells good! Thanks for getting this started,” he said with an encouraging smile, but Naomi wasn’t in the mood for smalltalk.

“Sure. Hey, Dad?” His eyebrows went up in curiosity. “Did Mateo seem kinda… strange to you?”

“A bit nervous, maybe.” He got some plates, chipped and battered from years of rough sea travel, and started setting them out on the table. “He was very polite. I got the impression that I intimidated him a bit, but I hope I didn’t scare him too much. It’s your mother that’s the swashbuckler, not me!” He chuckled at his own joke, casting a fond look at the family photo on the nearby shelf.

Naomi leaned back against the counter, looking at the recently-cleaned kettle. Suspicious. “He’s always like that. But before you got home last night, he was saying some stuff that was,” she sighed, “I dunno. Weird. Even by his standards.” She crossed her arms, feeling childish and small. “It kinda freaked me out a little.”

The joviality suddenly vanished from her dad’s face, and he set down the silverware he’d been arranging, giving her his full attention. “Did he threaten you?” he asked carefully.

“Nothing like that! He was just—” She made a frustrated sound in the back of her throat, trying to figure out what she could say without outright condemning him. “He was just acting like he was hiding something. He was really agitated all night, especially after the window broke, and he had a bunch of weird stuff in his backpack that he didn’t want to talk about—” and her dad didn’t have to know how, exactly, she’d seen said weird stuff, “—and the reason he was even here in the first place is because he snuck out of his own house!”

That surprised him, and he hesitated before he spoke again, with the gravity of someone choosing their words. “Naomi, did he say anything about his home life? Does he talk about his parents at all?”

Well, yes, but not in the way her dad’s tone suggested. “Nothing bad,” she finally said. “Just that his mom is a little overprotective, I guess? But I don’t think that’s why he was being so…” She waved a hand around. She was running out of synonyms for “weird.”

“Okay.” Her dad looked less tense, but he still wore a serious expression. “Was there something specific he did that upset you?”

Can you keep a secret?

The guilt curdled further, and the smell of cooling eggs was suddenly far from appetizing. Technically, he’d never told her what that secret was, so she wasn’t saying anything that he hadn’t explicitly asked her not to. Carrying on about this seemed against the spirit of secret-keeping, but it wasn’t like they were friends or anything. She wasn’t really betraying his trust. Despite that rationalization, she found herself unable to speak further, just working her jaw silently and frowning at the edge of the table.

A flutter of movement behind her dad pulled her out of her thoughts. The tarp was peeling down again from where Mateo had haphazardly pinned it up, exposing the broken window behind it.

Except the window wasn’t broken anymore.

Pristine, unmarred glass gleamed in the daylight. Water drops speckled the outside, glittering in the morning sun. There was no sign of the damage from the night before, as if it had simply never happened, with the tarp itself as the only indicator that anything should have been amiss.

“What?” Naomi croaked.

Her dad furrowed his brow and turned around, following her gaze. He stiffened at the sight of the window. “Naomi, that was the cracked window last night, right?”

So he saw it too. She wasn’t losing her mind. “Of course it was! You saw it, we all saw it!” Breakfast preparations completely forgotten, she rounded the table and approached the glass, tentatively reaching out like it might burn her. She pressed a finger to it, leaving a print, and then carefully dragged her fingertip across where it had been splintered just a few hours prior. It felt cool and smooth to the touch, like a window was supposed to be, without a single hard edge to suggest damage, without a single blemish or wrinkle along the surface to suggest a patch job. She let her hand rest on the sill, then, only to jerk it up as she touched something wet. Expecting water, she looked at her hand to instead see drops of a thin, greenish goop on her palm that tingled as she curled her fingers against it. Ew.

Her dad came up behind her, scratching at his head. “I guess it must have been fixed somehow.”

She snapped her head up from her hand. “Fixed—by what?”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure I want to question it.”

Naomi stared up at him, incredulous. “What, so we’re not gonna wonder about who replaced part of our house without us knowing? Or do we think that it just repaired itself, like—like—”

Like magic.

Can you keep a secret, Mateo had asked, and he’d been so upset about Queen Shuriki’s negligence with her power, and he had special errands he had to run for weird materials that he couldn’t even tell his mother about, and he devoured books about mythology that he wasn’t even supposed to have, and he constantly acted like he had to look over his shoulder, like he was a hair's breadth away from arrest for his mere existence.

I’m actually, he’d tried, and Naomi suddenly had a pretty good idea of how that sentence was supposed to end.

Mateo was a wizard.

She clamped her mouth shut and curled her hand, crossing her arms to hide whatever potion or spell residue the goop no doubt was. Mateo being a wizard explained everything, from his persistent anxiety to his apparent lack of hobbies. It was also beyond illegal. Naomi could usually catch people singing quietly or twirling around when the guards weren’t looking, and Avalorans had found ways to preserve some of their festivals, despite the arrests and fines and confiscations, but whatever laws Queen Shuriki had cracking down on magic were so stringent she barely even heard mention of the subject, let alone saw its performance. No wonder Mateo was so worried about getting caught.

So where did that leave her? Wizards were dangerous, according to her school textbooks, and she didn’t doubt that dark wizards existed, but she’d lived in enough places to know that there were plenty of them that chose to be good and kind, instead. She knew Avalor’s history with magic was more fraught than average, but a kid her age that fixed windows for free and seemed scared to take up space was hardly the picture of evil.

It could be an act, a cruel part of her mind suggested. But he’d looked at her like she’d offered the world when she’d so much as suggested they could hang out again sometime. That sort of desperate loneliness just wasn’t something people faked.

“We can worry about it later,” her dad finally said. “What was it you were saying about Mateo?”

Naomi swallowed, and then pulled her eyes away from the glass, forcing a smile onto her face. “You know what?” she said, a slight shake in her voice, “It’s not actually that important.”

Chapter Text

Barely a month had passed since Shuriki had been overthrown, but Naomi could already tell that Princess Elena was going to be a far better ruler than the old queen ever was. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed parties. Every day after Shuriki’s defeat had brought a new one, each grander than the last: more color, more music, more food, and Elena’s ascension was pulling out all the stops.

Brightly colored banners hung from the ceiling, with paper chains and streamers strung up between them, and each lit lamp glittered on the tile. The band jumped straight from one lively tune to another, and the gowns of the partygoers spun in extravagant patterns as they danced to each one. Several sprawling buffet tables lined the furthest wall, covered in every manner of Avaloran delicacy and filling the room with mouth-watering, savory scents. Most importantly, an entire table was dedicated to desserts, with tiered platters overflowing with chocolates as the centerpieces. She had to stop by that later.

For now though, Princess Elena herself had her hooked by her arm, talking a mile a minute with the same boundless enthusiasm Naomi had seen from her all day. “So, we’ll have our first Grand Council meeting tomorrow morning to start discussing the future of Avalor,” she was saying. “How does nine sound? Does that give you enough time to get in from the harbor?”

“Sure does!” Naomi responded. With how excited she was for the position, she would’ve dragged herself into the palace at five if that’s when the Grand Council decided to meet.

Elena beamed. “Perfect! I have to go attend to the other guests now, but I just want to say that I’m really looking forward to getting to know you better.” She squeezed Naomi’s shoulders, and then practically twirled her way back toward the center of the reception.

Naomi could get used to this. If this was what just naming Elena the Crown Princess was like, then she couldn’t wait to see her coronation. And she would get to be there, if her new title meant anything. Grand Councilor Naomi. It didn’t even feel real yet. None of the day had, between the princess showing up at the harbor, the jaquin ride across the city, the fight with the noblins, Mateo being a wizard…

Well, no, she already knew that last bit.

Curious where he’d wandered off to after the ceremony, Naomi scanned the crowd and spotted him at the edge of the ballroom, drum-wand tucked under one arm and a plate of food in his other hand, engaged in a spirited conversation with the princess. She was speaking animatedly, and Mateo was nodding along with just as much enthusiasm. Their discussion lasted only a moment longer, and then she gave Mateo’s arm a quick squeeze and took off back toward another group of party-goers, waving to him as she went. Mateo lifted his arm to wave back, but dropped his wand out from under it in the process, and it fell to the ground with a clatter before he could catch it. Wincing, he stooped to pick it back up, glancing around to check if anyone had seen, and when he made eye contact with Naomi, his face promptly shifted to an expression of embarrassment. He sheepishly waved at her with the wand.

Naomi took that as her cue to join him. “Relax,” she said as she approached, laughing. “I don’t think anyone else saw, and I’ve seen you do way more embarrassing stuff.”

“Thanks,” he said, a wry smile on his face.

She stepped up beside him, back to the same column. In the center of the ballroom, Princess Elena was dancing with her little sister, spinning the girl back and forth between her and her grandfather. “The princess seems pretty nice,” she remarked, and Mateo’s smile turned warm.

“Yeah, Elena’s great,” he said. “She’s stopped by my house a couple times to ask about magic stuff, and she’s really easy to talk to.”

No title. Interesting.

Granted, he had never used one for Shuriki either, but that had seemed more like a deliberate act of disrespect, where he spoke Elena’s name with a sort of fond familiarity. Sure, some of Elena’s first words to Naomi after her appointment were that she didn’t need to call her “Princess” or “Your Highness” or anything like that, so it made sense that she would’ve said something similar to Mateo. But while Naomi wasn’t one for formality, Mateo tended to err on the side of politeness, and yet he seemed to be well past the mental reminders stage that Naomi found herself in.

“How do you two know each other, anyway?” She’d been so wrapped up with the noblin situation earlier that she hadn’t thought to ask that afternoon. In hindsight, it seemed funny that Mateo and Naomi already knowing each other struck Elena as more unusual than the fact that she knew them both.

“Huh? Oh, well, you know. I helped out a little bit during the revolution, and she ended up at my house before the march on the palace.”

That seemed like far too big a deal to be announced so casually. Elena was much more personable than Shuriki (though that bar was admittedly low), enough so that Naomi could force advice on her earlier that day consequence-free. But still, there was a difference between encountering the princess on the job and helping get the princess on the throne. It must have been something big, for them to be so casual with one another already, like they were old friends.

Naomi hadn’t even been in town that day.

She’d been out sailing with her dad, and had come back to different flags flying and people dancing in the streets. She hadn’t even been sure at first that they’d come back to the right country. One confused interrogation of their neighbors later had only raised more questions than answers.

Princess Elena had returned, after forty one years. She was barely older than Naomi. She’d blasted Shuriki with her own magic. No, no, she’d thrown the witch off a bridge. She’d ridden a jaquin into battle. That was ridiculous, people didn’t ride jaquins! And on and on it went, a hundred different thoughts and stories, none of them lining up in a way that made any sense. The only consistent throughlines, the only points she could use as an anchor, were the facts: when she’d left that morning, they had Queen Shuriki, and when she’d returned that evening, they had Princess Elena.

She may as well have moved again. The entire world had shifted around her, and she’d missed it.

“What was it like?” she asked, her voice more urgent than she expected. “Did you see them fight? What did you do?”

“I… didn’t really do that much, honestly. It was mostly Elena. But…” his expression turned awed at the memory, “I did have a front row seat to her breaking Shuriki’s wand.”

Something tasted bitter in Naomi’s mouth. So he really had gotten to be there, to be a part of it. The feeling didn’t linger too strongly though, fading as Mateo scratched at his neck and immediately fumbled his wand again. He swatted at it, sending it spinning in the air like a juggling act several times over before finally catching it with a too-loud, victorious whoop. He was still Mateo, after all.

“Aha! Okay, I have got to get a better way to carry this.” He tucked it briefly under his plate arm before removing it, and made like he was going to slide the handle up his sleeve before thinking better of it, just letting it dangle in his hand.

“I’ll hold something for you,” Naomi offered, “if you… let me eat one of your desserts.” She pointed at his chocolate-laden plate. “No one needs that many sweets anyway.”

Mateo gave a surprised laugh, like he’d forgotten what food he’d grabbed in the first place. It was possible—he hadn’t even touched it since Naomi had arrived. “Honestly, you can take the whole thing,” he said, holding it out. “My mom doesn’t really keep sweets at home, so I guess I got a little carried away.”

“Ooh, don’t mind if I do!”

Mateo snagged one last chocolate from the plate as he handed it over, and Naomi didn’t waste any time popping one of the candies into her mouth, letting it melt on her tongue. Definitely the best chocolate of anywhere she’d lived. The two stood in silence for a moment, enjoying their treats and watching other party guests twirling themselves around, before Mateo spoke up again.

“So… Grand Council, huh? That’s big.”

Naomi beamed. “I know, I can hardly believe it! Me! On the Grand Council!” She leaned back against the column, looking up at the ceiling with a sigh. “I’m not even sure I know what that means for me yet.”

“Doesn’t it mean you’ll be voting on any laws Elena wants to make?”

“Well, yeah, I knew that part. I mean more,” she waved a hand around, “what kinds of laws will we be voting on? What kinds of people am I gonna get to meet? What kinds of things am I gonna get to see? That kind of thing.”

Her Council position granted her a new foothold in the community, a chance to participate in a way she’d never gotten to before. The country may have turned itself around without her input, but she wouldn’t have to miss a day like that again. And if anyone thought she didn’t belong, well, they’d have the Crown Princess to answer to.

“Oh, well…” Mateo leaned in like he was about to tell her a secret. “Elena told me that the first thing she was going to bring up was formally removing all of Shuriki’s old bans. Technically, all of this is still illegal,” he said, gesturing toward the party. “So, uh,” he pressed his palms together, his wand sandwiched between them, “please don’t vote against lifting the magic ban.”

Naomi gave him a reassuring smile. “Relax. I wasn’t planning on it.”

He let out a soft ‘whew’, and Naomi tried not to snicker, her eyes trailing over the drum-wand.

“So, wizard, huh?” she asked. “That’s… something. You’ve got a real wand and everything.”

Something brightened behind Mateo’s eyes, and he immediately perked up. “It’s called a tamborita! It’s a traditional type of wand used by the Maruvians back before they disappeared, and modern Avalorans—well, not modern modern, because of Shuriki—adapted it for their own use. Well, they didn’t really adapt it either; the design is pretty much the same as a traditional one…”

And he just kept going.

Naomi stared, dumbfounded, with a forgotten chocolate loose in her fingers as he plowed ahead, rattling off a lengthy explanation so littered with magical jargon she wasn’t sure she could’ve followed it even if he was actually pausing for breath. She’d never heard him say so much at once before, let alone with so much enthusiasm, but there he was, enthusiastic. His eyes were alight with happiness and crinkled by a genuine smile, and his words tumbled out and jumped around, like his mouth physically couldn’t keep up with what he was thinking. A tremor ran through his whole body, like he was holding back the urge to jump for joy, like there was too much energy in his skinny frame with nowhere else to go but out. His elbows stuck out at his sides as he turned the wand—the tamborita—over in his hands, describing the different parts of it. How was this the same anxious, anti-social recluse from her class?

“—and you technically don’t have to hit exactly in the middle of the drum,” he was saying, “but it helps for spell power. Although I’ve read that there’s ways to manipulate the effects of a spell by hitting in specific spots—I mean, that’s still way above my level, but it’s an option if you—if you…” Trailing off, he looked back at Naomi for the first time since he started rambling. His eyes searched her stunned face, the light fading from them and the corners of his mouth slowly dropping. He let out an uncomfortable laugh. “You… don’t actually care, do you?”

“Wh—” The question hit like an arrow, heartbreaking, and Naomi shook her head, blinking rapidly and trying to catch her brain up with everything she’d just heard. “No, no, by all means, explain away.” She gave a bewildered chuckle, still not sure what to think. “You just kinda surprised me, that’s all.”

Mateo’s shoulders sagged with relief and a shaky exhale. “Oh, good. Yeah, I guess the whole ‘wizard’ thing was a bit out of nowhere today, huh?”

“Hm? Oh, no, I’ve known that for months.”

He jerked back. “Months?”

“You fixed my window,” she reminded him. “What was I supposed to think other than ‘magic’?”

“You’ve known for months,” he repeated, staring wide-eyed at nothing. “You knew, my mom knew… What's next? Is Doña Paloma going to reveal she knew all along, too?”

“You’re not very subtle.”

He shook his head, like he still couldn’t believe it. “I guess I can get carried away sometimes…”

That was an understatement. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this excited before.”

Mateo huffed out a laugh, his smile looking faraway. “I’m not sure I’ve ever been this excited before. At least not since I found my abuelo’s things in the first place.” He turned the wand over in his hands again, something fond and warm in his eyes. She could almost imagine it: Mateo, smaller but still all limbs and loose curls, bounding around his basement with that same giddy, unrestrained joy so strong it made him shake. She thought of all the times he’d stopped himself mid-sentence, or avoided questions about his interests, his passions either guillotined or jailed to keep from subjecting himself to the same.

Naomi hadn’t given much thought to Shuriki and her laws before. The woman was a mediocre ruler, at best, and seemed to have her fingers in a lot of business that wasn’t hers to meddle in. Seeing the nonstop celebration in the wake of her defeat, though, and the way Mateo had come alive for the first time since she’d met him, opened her eyes to just how soul-crushing her rule had really been. Any remaining jealousy of Mateo slid into righteous anger on his behalf, and she felt glad not just that Shuriki was ousted, but that she was dead. Good riddance.

“So, um…” Mateo was looking at her again, not quite meeting her eyes, twirling his wand in his fingers. “You knew? And you never…”

“What, told anyone?”

“Told me.”

She’d considered it. When they’d first gone back to school after the fateful night of the storm, she’d paid closer attention to the ins and outs of his behavior, trying to catch him in some kind of act, searching for any kind of duplicity that would justify her continued wariness. But his oddities remained benignly awkward, all easily explainable as signs of fear and stress from keeping his secret alone. There was nothing to suggest he was an evil sort of wizard. There was barely anything to suggest he was any sort of wizard at all—if Naomi hadn’t had her dad to confirm the state of the window, she might have thought she’d dreamed the whole incident up.

He’d wanted her to know, she’d told herself. He’d been about to tell her. If she told him she was in on it, it wouldn’t have been his secret; it would’ve been their secret, something to move them past the polite distance they’d maintained since that night. Courteous, but never close.

But if she was wrong on any account… He’d walked back his confession attempt, and he hadn’t broached the subject again. Maybe he didn’t want her to know, and bringing it up would just send them back to not talking at all. Maybe he really was nothing but a malefactor, and bringing it up would put her in danger. Maybe he wasn’t even a wizard, and bringing it up would just be embarrassing.

By the time she felt ready to make a decision, the school year had ended, and Mateo disappeared from her life until the moment she and Elena had turned up on his doorstep that morning. In hindsight, she’d only sabotaged herself with her dithering.

“I didn’t want to freak you out,” she finally settled with. “I wasn’t sure if it was really my business, and I didn’t want to get you in trouble. But… I actually kinda wish I’d said something, or that I could’ve known sooner,” she admitted. “It’s nice seeing you happy for once. All this magic stuff sounds pretty cool.”

His apprehension disappeared behind the brilliant, delighted smile stretching across his face. “You really think so?”

“Sure. I think it would’ve been interesting to hear about.” She looked down at her plate, idly spinning one of the chocolates, regret settling into her chest. “We probably could’ve been friends.”

Beside her, Mateo rocked forward on his feet. “Well… there’s no reason we can’t be now, right?”

He was biting his lip, watching her with a hopeful expression, and Naomi felt something shift again. It wasn’t just the Grand Council giving her a place in Avalor. She might not have been there when it counted, for the country or for Mateo, but she could make sure she was going forward.

“There really isn’t.” She stuck her hand out. “Good to meetcha,” she said. “For real this time.”

Mateo looked at her extended hand like she’d promised him everything, and with a deep breath, he clapped his hand firmly into hers. “Yeah. For real.”

Chapter Text

Naomi learned pretty quickly that the Grand Council was not going to be nearly as exciting as her first few weeks had led her to believe. As it turned out, it wasn’t all meeting kings and rock not-monsters; most of it was dull, logistical discussions of economic policy and legal minutiae. It was all far out of her depth, and she spent most of the meetings feeling lost and exhausted, and unsure of what her own job responsibilities actually were.

The last week’s inglorious topic of choice had been the palace staff. Expelling Shuriki’s more staunch supporters from their ranks was an ongoing task, with new ones popping up like weeds each time they thought they were done. Even if they hadn’t needed to flush half the guard, the former queen had kept much of her personnel understaffed and overworked. But after a week’s worth of reviewing headcounts and salaries, it seemed like the end was finally in sight.

Her elbow was propped up on the table, her chin resting in her palm. She was trying desperately hard to not look bored, but she’d felt her brain check out some twenty minutes ago as Esteban started going down the list of still-empty staff positions for the upteenth time. Her leg bounced under the table and her eyes were locked on a portrait on the far wall like it was especially interesting, like she hadn’t seen it every day since her appointment.

“We are back up to full in the kitchens and gardens, though I recommend we hire a few more maids to help with straightening out the rooms left unused during Shuriki’s rule.” He was pacing at the side of the room, clutching his agenda in one hand and stroking his goatee with the other. “Of course, with how long it has taken us to get to this point, I suspect any more hires may delay finalizing our annual budget until next month.”

Naomi wanted to scream. It had been his fault the staff reorganization had taken so long. In fact, it was his fault that the Grand Council meetings tended to drag on in general. He was contrarian for the sake of it; he argued against every point Elena raised regardless of the value of the final decision, and regardless of if he could change anyone’s minds. Sometimes he would make a valid critique—Elena seemed to routinely forget that there was only one of her and that she couldn’t personally handle every city project, and Esteban was more than happy to remind her—but most often his cases were inane time wasters, like criticizing choices in tablecloth colors and flower arrangements. If Naomi didn’t know any better, she’d think he was just trying to wear everyone down enough to let him do things his way without question.

Elena looked equally ready for the meeting to be over. She wore a polite smile and kept her hands folded neatly on the table, but the rigid line of her shoulders and the way she tapped her thumbs together exuded a nervous energy that spoke of someone with something to say. If she still had Isabel’s swivel chair, she’d be spinning in it for sure.

Esteban was finally nearing the end of his monologue. Something about a handyman slid past Naomi’s ears before she latched onto the phrase she’d been waiting for forever. “...Otherwise, all of our remaining staff positions have been filled.”

Heaving a sigh of exhausted relief, Naomi turned to Elena, ready for her to adjourn the meeting.

Except then she didn’t. “Actually, Esteban, there’s one more staff position we haven’t discussed yet.”

Naomi bit back a groan. She had to be kidding.

“I am quite sure my list was thorough,” Esteban said as he returned to his chair, and for once, Naomi found herself silently agreeing with him. “What are you proposing I missed?”

Elena smiled. “The Royal Wizard, of course!”

Ah, so that was it. Esteban bobbed his head in a reluctant concession, and Luisa and Francisco sat up more alertly, having gone a bit glassy-eyed themselves during their grandson’s speech.

“It wasn’t the highest priority to get this sorted out right away, but now that all the essential positions are taken care of, I think it’s fair to discuss.” She looked proud, her chin jutting out and her shoulders squared. “And since it’s an appointed position, I would like to formally recommend Mateo de Alva for the job.”

…Mateo?

From Naomi’s understanding, Avalor was a bit lacking in magical options, but Mateo seemed awfully inexperienced for such a high-profile position. She’d never personally met the court mage of any other kingdoms she’d lived in, but she’d gotten enough hearsay to piece together a unified picture of what one would look like: old, wizened, self-assured and uniquely powerful. Mateo wasn’t exactly any of the above. She’d thus far seen him one: fix a window, and two: knock over some noblins, and he could barely even keep a grip on his wand most of the time.

It wasn’t that she had a particular objection to him, it just seemed odd that Elena had put his name forward so wholeheartedly. Maybe there really just weren’t any other candidates. She leaned back in her seat, settling in for the long-haul. It should have been a quick vote, but Esteban would surely have things to say about it.

True to form, he twirled his mustache, staring down the bridge of his nose with an impassive, thoughtful frown. “Hm, yes, he would be the most suitable for the job. I could not agree more.”

Naomi blinked. Wait, what?

“What a wonderful idea, mija,” Luisa said. “I’m sure he will do a great job.”

Francisco nodded along as well. “If he’s anything like his abuelo, he certainly will.”

Naomi snapped her head between the other councilors, willing her brain to catch up. It felt like she’d skipped ahead, like she’d somehow slept through the entire discussion.

Elena’s bright smile rivaled the light pouring through the windows behind her. “Then I’ll call the vote! All those in favor?” Her own hand shot up, and the others’ were starting to uncurl from their sides when Naomi finally found her voice.

“Wait, wait, wait! Hang on—” All eyes were suddenly on her, but she was far too confused to feel self-conscious. “You mean my classmate Mateo, right? The guy that got his wand stolen by noblins on your first day?” She searched their faces for an explanation. “Are we thinking of the same Mateo?”

Elena chuckled, folding her arms on the table. “Do you know any other Mateos?”

“Do you know any other wizards?” Francisco tacked on. “There are only so many people we could appoint to this position.”

“But even if there were more,” Luisa cut in, shooting her husband a stern glance before softening her voice, “Mateo would still be an excellent choice.”

Another chorus of agreement circled the room. Naomi looked around frantically, feeling like there was a joke she hadn’t heard.

“Naomi, you went to school with him, right?” Elena asked. “Can you think of any reason we wouldn’t want to appoint him?”

“I’m not really trying to argue against him,” she explained. Why were they leaving this up to her? “I’ve just barely seen him do any actual magic.”

Across the table, Esteban laughed, a harsh, taunting sound. “Surely you, Miss Turner, do not mean to suggest you take issue with his qualifications.”

He watched her, something far too smug in the set of his mouth, and Naomi felt shame crawl its way up the back of her neck. Mateo at least knew magic. Whether he was any good at it was irrelevant; he was by default more qualified for Royal Wizard than she was for Grand Councilor. Practical or not, she wasn’t a politician, and Esteban took every opportunity to remind her of that.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” she insisted, hating how petulant she sounded. She was already the youngest in the room—she didn’t need to give them any more reason to see her as a child. “It’s just that you guys are talking about him like he’s the greatest wizard you’ve ever seen, and I feel like I’m missing something!"

“Yes, well, it wouldn’t be the first time,” Esteban remarked. The words felt like a slap.

Elena narrowed her eyes. “Esteban.” He rolled his eyes at her reproachful tone but kept his mouth mercifully shut. Face softening, Elena turned to Naomi to explain. “Mateo was an immense help during the revolution. He helped get me out of the amulet, and my abuelos and Isabel would still be trapped in that enchanted painting if not for him.” She tilted her head, puzzled. “Did he not tell you that?”

Helped out a little bit, he’d said. Didn’t really do that much, he’d said.

Naomi’s strained expression must have answered for her, because Elena went on with an apologetic smile. “That’s right, you weren’t in town, were you? I’ll have to make sure to tell you the whole story sometime. We can make a day of it! I know a good place to hike.”

“Yes, yes, you can plan that later,” Esteban cut in. “Are we prepared to vote?”

Francisco nodded again. “If no one has anything else to say, I don’t see why not. Elena?”

She beamed. “All those in favor of naming Mateo de Alva the Royal Wizard of Avalor?”

Her hand shot up, closely followed by Esteban’s, and Luisa and Francisco weren’t far behind. Naomi watched them all, something unsure fizzling in her gut, and then slowly raised her own hand, her fingers uncurling.

Elena grinned. “Then it’s unanimous! I’ll write up the letter and have it sent to him at once. Actually—” she suddenly stood, face brightening further and fingers pressed to her chest. “I’ll deliver it myself!”

Esteban sighed. “Elena, you do not have the time to go running around delivering royal decrees yourself. You have other duties you must attend to today!”

“I know that, but this is important, and Mateo’s my friend. And,” she added in a conspiratorial stage-whisper, “I want to see the look on his face when we tell him the good news.”

Luisa tutted gently. “Esteban, surely Elena has enough time to spare for a little break. Her other duties aren’t going anywhere.”

He didn’t look impressed, but conceded anyway with another weary sound. “I suppose presenting appointments is a royal obligation…”

“Great! Then let’s get going!” Elena rounded the table, hooked her arm through Naomi’s and had dragged her out of the seat and halfway to the council chamber doors before Naomi had a chance to protest.

“Wait, hang on!” she cried. “You want me to go with you?”

Elena paused and fixed her with a look of innocent confusion. “Of course,” she said. “You’re his friend, too, right?”

A friend that had spent their first year together avoiding him. A friend that he didn’t tell something as important as “helped overthrow the government.” A friend that had to shake on it.

But a friend that had to start somewhere.

“I guess I am,” she finally said, and Elena hauled her through the doors with another enthusiastic smile.

Soaring over the city on the back of a jaquin had gotten less nerve wracking with time, so long as Naomi didn’t think too hard about it. The city sprawling below looked like rows of toys from the distance, and she could almost pretend that she wasn’t hundreds of feet in the air above them. Skylar was at least holding back on the tricks she’d seen him do when Elena was riding alone—having two passengers was putting more of a strain on him, enough that he had to fly straight for once. Still, as breathtaking as the views were and as careful as Skylar was being, Naomi could feel her stomach flip every time she thought about the drop, and she clung to Elena ahead of her even as they saw the roof of Mateo’s house rise up out of the hills.

They landed just a few feet from the front gate, and Naomi didn’t waste any time clamoring off, reveling in the feeling of solid ground beneath her. Good old terra firma. She might have had excellent sea legs, but her sky legs still needed some work. Elena’s dismount was far more casual, sliding off Skylar’s back with practiced grace. She smoothed her skirt down, adjusted the document case on her shoulder, and then knocked on the gate, waiting patiently with her hands folded in front of her.

The latch clicked and the gate swung open, revealing a petite woman that left Naomi wondering if they’d somehow gotten the wrong house. She didn’t look much like Mateo, between her lighter skin, darker eyes, and vastly different face. But she had the same loose curls, pinned up at the back of her head, and the way she lit up and spread her arms at the sight of her guests was eerily familiar.

“Princess Elena!” she exclaimed, so much like Mateo had that first day, and Naomi stifled a chuckle. This was definitely his mother. Her eyes jumped over to Naomi and had barely skimmed her blond hair before recognition set in. “And you must be Naomi! Mateo’s told me so much about you.”

Ah, so that was what hearing that line felt like. Mateo’s mom didn’t seem displeased, but every rude thing Naomi had ever said to him surged to the front of her memory. She let out a weak laugh. “Good things, I hope.”

Elena smiled at the woman. “Rafa! It’s good to see you!” She suddenly covered her mouth, looking sheepish. “Oop, sorry. I guess I should be calling you Señora de Alva now, shouldn’t I?”

Sra. de Alva scoffed. “Oh, don’t worry about that, Your Highness. Now, come in, come in!” She ushered them through the gate, leaving it open so Skylar could follow. “Make yourselves at home. Are you here to see Mateo? I’ll fetch him from downstairs and make some snacks.”

“Thank you for the offer, Raf—Señora, but I can’t stay for long. Esteban’s got me on a tight schedule today.” She rolled her eyes for emphasis, and Sra. de Alva laughed, clicking her tongue.

“That cousin of yours, I swear. Well, don’t hesitate to let me know if you need anything. You’re always welcome here, as are any friends of Mateo’s.” She gave Naomi’s arm an affectionate tweak and then bustled her way inside, leaving them alone in the yard.

“She seems fun,” Naomi said as they started toward the cellar. She hadn’t been sure what to expect from Mateo’s mom, given everything she’d heard about her, but somehow, this seemed to fit. “Did you two know each other?”

She didn’t have to specify the ‘before Shuriki’ part. Elena nodded. “Alacazar used to bring her by the palace when she was little. Rafa and Isabel were about the same age back then, so they would go and play together.” Freezing, she squeezed her eyes shut in frustration. “Señora de Alva,” she corrected. “She’s a señora now. She has a son and he’s my age.”

Naomi stood beside her, feeling awkward and unsure what to say. She couldn’t imagine how jarring it would be to be so displaced from your own time, and to remember how things were before. She’d thought it strange at first that this princess, who surely had more important people to spend time with, had attached herself so quickly to a girl from the port and an amateur wizard, but most of her old friends were probably grown by now. Old in every sense of the word.

Elena recomposed herself and tried to wave it off. “It’ll take some getting used to. It’s almost a relief that you’re not from Avalor—I don’t think I could’ve handled knowing any more of my friends’ parents as kids.”

That stung. She surely hadn’t meant it to, but it settled between Naomi’s ribs like something sharp. Once an outsider, she supposed.

“Actually, my parents weren’t even born yet,” she replied stiffly.

Elena’s smile grew taut, a little too fake and uncomfortable. “Ah.”

Guilt welled up into the hole left by alienation, and Naomi tucked some hair behind her ear, looking away. “Anyway, we should get Mateo.”

“Right!” Elena hauled open the cellar door and stepped down into it, calling Mateo’s name in a sing-song as she descended. If she was still upset, she was doing a good job of hiding it, perhaps just so Mateo wouldn’t think he was the target of it. Naomi followed her, squinting as her eyes adjusted to the dim light.

Mateo was on his feet when she got downstairs, the stool at the table beside him wobbling like he’d just leaped up from it. “Elena, Naomi! What do you guys need? Hang on—I can be ready in just a second—” He dove across the room for his tamborita. He’d shrugged his makeshift robe half off by the time Elena could get him to slow down and listen.

“Mateo! Mateo, it’s okay. There’s no grand mission or anything. We’re just here to tell you something.”

“Oh.” Awkwardly clearing his throat, he pulled the sleeve of his robe back up his shoulder.

“Okay! So,” Elena straightened up like she did whenever she was addressing an audience, though her excitement undermined her professionalism, leaking through in her voice and rushing her words. “At the Grand Council meeting this morning, we discussed the remaining staff positions to be filled at the palace, including that of the Royal Wizard. As you know, the last person to hold that job was your grandfather forty-one years ago, since Shuriki left it vacant under her reign. We decided that it’s high time that position be filled again, and between your knowledge of old Avaloran magic and the dedication you’ve shown in using it for the good of the kingdom, I can’t imagine a better candidate. Which is why,” she smiled, warm and wide, no longer trying to temper the excitement in her voice, “the Grand Council has unanimously voted to appoint you as the new Royal Wizard!”

Silence yawned in the wake of her speech. Mateo said nothing, just staring at her in open-mouthed shock. He remained frozen there, stunned, so still Naomi wasn’t even sure he was breathing.

She leaned toward Elena. “I think you broke him,” she whispered.

His grip had slackened around his tamborita and it slowly slid to the floor, clattering against the stone, and the sound was enough to snap him out of his stupor with a full-bodied jolt.

“That—I—you—” he tried, nothing coherent coming out. He pointed at himself. “Me?”

Elena nodded. “You!”

An incredulous smile slowly crept onto his face, and he reached one hand up to thread it into his hair like he needed to hold himself on the ground. “I’m—that’s—” Something undefinable crossed his face, toggling between disbelief, terror, and elation, and he sputtered out a few more unintelligible sounds before managing a blurted, “You guys!” and tossing himself toward them.

Naomi jumped. She’d never really taken Mateo as the touchy type, so to have his arm suddenly around her shoulders as he pulled her and Elena into a hug, his head between theirs, was unexpected and odd. Elena looked delighted, though, meeting Naomi’s eyes across Mateo’s shoulders with a grin.

“I—I don’t know what to say,” he said, breathless and eager, like he still couldn’t quite believe it.

“Well, you could start with a ‘yes,’” Elena suggested.

“Yes! Absolutely! I mean—” Mateo suddenly leapt back, nearly whacking them in the face as he dislodged himself from the hug and dropped into a waist-deep bow. “I would be honored, Your Highness. And, uh, Grand Councilor,” he added, shuffling his feet to turn his bow toward Naomi.

Chuckling, Elena pulled the document case off her back. “You can save the formalities for the actual ceremony. Right now, we just need you to sign this for us.”

“Right! Of course!” Mateo took the letter from Elena as she retrieved it from the case and he smoothed it out on his desk, dropping back onto his stool and fumbling around for a pen.

Elena poked Naomi in the side as he quickly checked the pen on a scrap paper and began to sign. “Definitely worth the personal delivery,” she whispered, something fond in her tone. Raising her voice, she addressed Mateo again. “Once you’ve done that, I’ll bring it back to the palace, get it properly filed, and then we can start preparations for the official ceremony on Saturday.”

Mateo’s pen skidded across the bottom of the document, leaving a jagged line of ink trailing off the last ‘a’. He swiveled his head back up, something panicked in his eyes. “Wait, this Saturday?”

“Uh-huh!” Her brow furrowed in concern. “Oh, does that not work for you?”

A sound that might have been a laugh squeaked out of him. “No, it works, I just—I didn’t really think it would be so… soon?”

“Why wait?” She popped her hands on her hips. “We’re well overdue to start bringing magic back to the country. If you think you need a little more time to prepare a spell for the ceremony, I can push it back a week or two, but I’d like to get you set up sooner rather than later.”

“Prepare a spell…?” he echoed, sounding faraway. His hand gripped the edge of his desk, and he looked like he was about to faint.

“Well, I figured we’d have you do a little performance after all the formal stuff was over with. Nothing big! Just something to show off a bit. Most people in Avalor have never seen magic, and if they have, it was Shuriki’s, so I think it’d be good to show everyone another side of it. Something flashy and fun, you know? Like… um…” She looked at Naomi, waving a hand for a prompt.

“Oh! Um, what about…” Naomi scanned the room, her eyes settling on the open door, where she could catch a glimpse of Skylar’s tail swishing above. “What about something to do with jaquins? They’re an important cultural symbol here, right? And they were something else that came back after Shuriki’s reign.”

Elena clapped her hands together. “That sounds perfect! Mateo, do you think you could do something like that?”

Mateo still didn’t look relaxed by any stretch, but he rubbed at his chin and stared thoughtfully at the wall, the puzzle of thinking through spell possibilities enough to bring him back from the blank void of panic. “Well… I know a simple illusion spell. Maybe I could adapt that to conjure up some jaquin images?”

“Great!” Elena stepped over to him and picked up the signed paper. She gave it a quick skim to make sure everything was in order before rolling it up and sliding it back into the case. “I’ll leave you to get that ready, then,” she went on, giving his shoulder a squeeze. “I better get back to the palace before Esteban throws a fit. Naomi, we’re all done with Grand Council business for the day. Do you need a ride anywhere?”

Cultural icons or not, Naomi wasn’t sure she was up to another jaquin ride so soon. Besides, if she was going to do this whole ‘friends’ thing properly with Mateo, then she should probably know the way to his house on foot. “You know what? I’ll take the scenic route home,” she said.

“Okay! Then I’ll see you tomorrow. And I’ll see you,” she added, bopping Mateo on the nose, “on Saturday, at the latest.”

“Y-yeah, see you then,” Mateo stammered, waving to her as she went. “I’ll definitely be ready!” Elena shot him another winning smile from the top of the stairs and then left the basement. They heard a flap of wings and a rustle of grass as Skylar took off, and then Mateo turned to Naomi, frantic. “I am definitely not ready for this.”

She’d figured as much. “You maybe should have mentioned that before she got on the jaquin.”

“Naomi!” He hunched over, groaning and grabbing fistfuls of his hair. “Ugh, what do I do?”

“Start working on that jaquin spell?” Mateo shot her a dirty look, and she crossed her arms with a huff. “When she said we voted to name you the Royal Wizard, what exactly did you think she meant? That we were only appointing you in theory?”

“Yes! No? I don’t know!” Sighing, he leaned against the desk. “I thought she meant ‘eventually’, after I had more experience. Like how she can’t actually be queen until she’s old enough.” He looked at her, his eyes wide and pleading. “I’m not a good enough wizard yet to be qualified.”

“Mateo, I’m pretty sure you’re the only person in the kingdom that can be qualified.”

That was the truth, but possibly the wrong thing to say. A daunted shadow passed across Mateo’s face and he shrank in further on himself, looking far too small against the imposing stone and dark wood of his workshop.

“Look, I don’t know what you want me to say,” Naomi went on, more gently. “I can talk to Elena tomorrow if you want me to, but you had the chance to refuse when you realized what she meant. If you don’t want the job, why didn’t you tell her then?”

“I didn’t want to let her down. And I do want the job, I just…” He sighed again, shaking his head. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Yeah, well, join the club.” Sighing herself, Naomi finally dropped into the uncomfortable-looking wooden chair propped up in the corner. His eyes met hers again, still looking big and sad, and she continued, frustrated. “I don’t think any of us really know what we’re doing. Esteban won’t let me forget that I don’t have any political experience, Elena ignores the Grand Council votes more often than not… I’m not even sure Gabe knows what he’s doing half the time, and he’s actually had training. I mean, between the three of us, we almost set off a volcano the other week.”

“Wait, that was you?” Mateo straightened up, something confused and almost entertained on his face. “I heard about that in town.”

Naomi grimaced. “Yeeeah, that was us. There was this rock guy that lived up there that made the lava overflow when he got angry, and we managed to keep upsetting him.”

Mateo brightened, his curiosity only growing. “You guys met a rocador?”

“A what-a-dor?”

“A rocador,” he repeated, leaning across his desk to grab a book he’d pushed aside earlier. “I’ve read about them. When they move into a new volcano, they bond with it in a way that ties its flow to their emotional state.” Pages fanned past as he flipped through before he finally settled on one and turned the book around to show her. A stylized drawing of the creature in question stared back at her, surrounded in handwritten annotations and glyphs she couldn’t identify.

“The Maruvians used to see them as protectors, and they considered it good luck when a rocador moved in,” he explained. “As long as they kept the rocador happy, they could guarantee that the volcano would never erupt, and it would be safe for them to build villages and farm in the rich soil around them.”

Naomi peered at him over the top of the book. “And you just knew all this?”

He frowned. “Well, I had to read it first.”

“No, I meant—” She laughed it off. “Ah, never mind. Where were you three weeks ago?”

“Down here, probably.”

She snorted again, rolling her eyes. “What I’m saying is it kinda seems like you know what you’re talking about with all this magic stuff. I don’t get why you’re so worried about doing this for a job.”

Mateo’s more relaxed attitude evaporated and he snapped the book shut. “I know theory,” he said, holding it to his chest. “I don’t have very much practical experience.”

“Then get practicing!” She stood up and stretched, her back twinging from the chair. “You’ve got what, five days? All you have to do is not blow yourself up before then.”

A tiny distressed sound came up from the back of his throat, and he watched as she headed for the stairs.

“I gotta get going—I told my dad I’d be able to help him this afternoon, and I’ve got a long walk. But I’ll see you Saturday, or something. And, uh,” she paused by the bottom step, “try not to freak out too much in the meantime. Somehow, I don’t think it’s gonna help.”

“I—right. Thanks.” She climbed the stairs and had just reached the top when a shout from below had her stop again. “Naomi! Wait, wait, I have one more question!”

She stared down at him, head tilted.

“Am I supposed to know who Gabe is?”

Chapter Text

Esteban was trying to kill her.

It was the only possible explanation for why he seemed intent on dragging every Grand Council meeting to its temporal extreme. In fairness, they’d had a lot on their agenda that day. Naomi had to report on the status of the Maruvian dig she’d been placed in charge of in the city, and Elena needed to discuss her plans for the upcoming Royal Retreat she’d be attending, all on top of their usual litany of policy review and administrative tasks. But they still would have been done sooner if Esteban didn’t insist on taking every opportunity to pontificate.

Naomi’s stomach growled, an insistent reminder of the hour. Grand Council meetings were usually done well before noon, let alone lunchtime, and she could feel her energy flagging. Esteban could be difficult enough to tolerate on a full stomach. At least she had Elena, equally exasperated, to commiserate with. They’d finally broken down during Esteban’s ongoing dissertation on “Why Our Budget is Better Spent on Ships than Roads,” their attention spans dwindling to nothing. With Luisa sitting between them, they couldn’t manage any note passing or discreet games under the table, so they resorted to making faces at each other and seeing how long it took for the rest of the Council to notice.

Elena started with a classic, puffing out her cheeks and crossing her eyes, and Naomi returned fire with a lolling tongue. Muffling a snicker, Elena pulled a strand of her ponytail around to hold beneath her nose like a mustache. Not to be outdone, Naomi pursed her lips and balanced her pen on top, holding it in place under her nose. She pretended to twirl the end of it for good measure, and this was enough to shred what little sense of decorum the two had left. Elena belted out a laugh, slapping her palm on the table, and Naomi followed suit, the pen clattering to the ground as they both doubled over, cackling at the inanity of it.

“I beg your pardon?” Esteban said, his mustache twitching like the hair itself was offended.

“I think that’s a sign we may need to take a break, and let our minds recover,” Francisco said. “We can reconvene after lunch to finish up any other time-sensitive matters.”

Still giggling, Elena managed to eke out an apology. “Sorry, Abuelo. Won’t happen again.”

Naomi sobered up a bit faster. If they were going to meet up again after lunch, then she’d have to hustle home if she wanted to get back in a reasonable time.

Luisa must have caught the cloud that passed over her face. “Naomi, why don’t you join us for lunch? There’s no sense in making you rush home and back for the rest of the meeting.”

“Well, we could just start without her,” Esteban remarked. He turned his head away as his grandmother shot him an admonishing look, pretending he hadn’t noticed.

Naomi, in turn, pretended she hadn’t heard him. “That’d be great, Luisa!”

She beamed. “Good! It’s never any trouble, you know. We’d love to have you.”

With that settled, Naomi, already seated closest to the door, made her way toward it and pulled it open, and almost ran directly into Mateo on the other side. He jumped back with a squeak, one hand raised like he’d been about to knock. Naomi stifled a gasp, her own heart racing from shock.

“Mateo? What are you doing here?”

“In general, or…?” He caught the way her eyebrow arched and quickly course corrected. “Oh, why I’m here here. I wanted to let Elena know that I’d just gotten in, and see if there’s anything she’d needed from me. Armando said she was in here.” Leaning around her, he tried to peer into the room, where Esteban had somehow recaptured the rest of his family before they could escape and pulled them into another meandering speech about funding allocation. “I didn’t realize the Council was still in session. Kind of late, isn’t it?”

If the meeting had picked up again, she should probably go back in, but if they were trying to adjourn, then enabling Esteban wouldn’t help. Dragging her eyes away from the other councilors, Naomi stepped fully into the hall and pulled the door shut behind her. She didn’t need to hear what Esteban was saying literally behind her back.

“We ran long,” she said. “I could say the same to you. You don’t usually get in this late, do you?”

He rubbed at his neck, his shoulders pinching up in embarrassment. “No. I went into my basement to double check a spell this morning and completely lost track of time.”

Naomi blinked. “What, again?”

Mateo’s posture crumpled even further.

He’d been doing that a lot lately. Showing up to work hours late was a new one, but there had been multiple days in the month since his appointment where Naomi had popped in to visit him only to discover he had no awareness of the current time. At first, she’d chalked it up to just spending all day in his workshop. The room had no windows, one door he often kept half closed, no clocks or other obvious measures of time. It made enough sense that he’d struggle with that.

And then she’d arrived early for the Grand Council meeting one day to discover him already in the library, not because he, too, was getting an early start on the day, but because he’d never even left the palace the previous evening. He’d simply spent the night. On accident.

She could follow losing a few hours to the void of an isolated room, but forgetting to go home and sleep was an extreme she couldn’t understand. If she hadn’t seen how frantic he’d been by the realization, she wouldn’t have believed it was even possible to be unintentional.

The door clicking behind her pulled her back to the present, and she and Mateo stepped aside as Luisa and Francisco finally left, looking worn down.

“Chicos, don’t take too much longer!” Luisa called into the room. Esteban acknowledged her with a wave, not breaking concentration in the slightest from his lecture.

Naomi barely caught the pleading look that Elena shot past him and a frustrated, “Esteban, can’t this wait?” before the two of them vanished again behind the closed door.

Luisa patted Naomi’s arm. “Do you know the way to the dining room?”

“Probably. If not, I can just wait for Elena.”

“We’ll see you girls there, then,” Francisco said, and with a quick nod of greeting to Mateo, took his wife’s arm in his and started down the hall with her.

“You’re having lunch with them?” Mateo asked as Naomi turned back to him. “Do you normally eat here?”

She shrugged. “Not all the time. We usually finish up the meeting before then, so it’s really only when Elena and I have plans for the afternoon. But since we ran so long today…”

Mateo hummed. He was watching Luisa and Francisco’s receding backs, looking thoughtful. There was clearly something else on his mind, yet. Naomi glanced at the door. If Elena and Esteban weren’t done yet, she could spare a second to humor him.

“Should I be wondering why you ask?” she prompted.

“Oh, I’ve been trying to figure out if it’s okay for me to eat lunch here or not. I live so far away that if I went home and back for it every day, I’d spend almost as much time traveling as working.”

Naomi stared, not sure which part stuck out as the most strange. “Is that… what you’ve been doing?”

“Well, no, I—”

“Wait, back up, I just realized—‘if it’s okay’?”

Mateo hesitated. “...Yes?”

“Why would it not be—” She cut off with a harsh inhale, pressing her palms together and resting her fingers against her lips. “Mateo, if you haven’t been going home for lunch, and if you don’t think you’re—what, allowed?—to eat here, then what have you been doing?”

“Well, you know,” he said, and no, Naomi didn’t know, so she stared him down until he continued, “I’ve just been. Not? Most days?”

There was no way to keep the incredulity out of her voice. “Mateo—”

“I tried going to the staff dining room once and everyone gave me weird looks, like I wasn’t supposed to be there!” he said, suddenly defensive. “And I’ll sometimes grab a few things from the kitchens throughout the day, but that just feels like I’m stealing, or at least doing something dishonest. And if I told my mom now that I needed to bring something along to eat, she’d freak out since then she’d know that I haven’t been, and—”

“Mateo,” Naomi repeated, burying her face in her hands. “You’ve been working here for a month. How have you not figured this out?”

“That’s exactly how!” Further down the hall, Elena’s grandparents startled at the sudden spike in volume, checking over their shoulders with confusion etched onto their faces. With a deep breath, Mateo lowered his voice to an annoyed hiss. “I’ve been here for a month! I’m supposed to know this already, right? How can I ask anyone about it without looking like I’m completely clueless?”

Peering back up at him, Naomi saw that his embarrassment had faded, replaced by frustration and disappointment. He was pouting, his arms crossed and his back hunched.

“I know it’s probably really obvious to everyone else,” he said. “But this kind of thing isn’t obvious to me.”

As unobvious as the passage of time, apparently. Who knew if he even noticed when it was meal time?

“It’s probably fine,” Naomi said, hoping she sounded more assuring than annoyed. “Seriously, I don’t think anyone’s gonna stop you if you just go and eat like a normal person.”

“Well, maybe, but…”

Alright, so he wasn’t going to believe it if she was the one to say it. Glancing down the hall at Elena’s grandparents, an idea struck her, and she had to bite down on a sly smile. “Hold that thought,” she said. “I’ve got some important council business to take care of real quick.”

Mateo startled, straightening up. “Wh—”

She breezed past him. “Just a second!”

Calling Luisa’s name, she jogged down the hallway toward her and Francisco, catching their attention and bringing them to a stop.

Luisa smiled. “What is it, Naomi?”

“I wanted to know if I could extend my lunch invitation to Mateo, too,” she said. “He says he’s been skipping meals.”

Luisa’s reaction was immediate, her mouth dropping open in scandalized shock. “He’s been what?!” she cried, looking past Naomi at the very bewildered Mateo further down the hall. With a huff, she started marching toward him.

Mateo’s reaction was also immediate, his confusion buried under terror. “W-wait a second,” he tried, but Luisa was on the warpath.

“I can hardly believe it—it’s no wonder you’re so thin!” She dragged him in front of her and began to push at his shoulders, forcefully ushering him down the hallway. “I will not have people going hungry under my roof!"

“But I wasn’t—but I’m not—but—” Mateo’s protests fell on deaf ears, his heels skidding against the runner. He shot Naomi a horrified look as he stumbled past, his eyes wide. “What did you tell her?”

Naomi responded with a dainty wave, wiggling her fingers.

“Naomi?!” And then he was gone, with Luisa guiding him around the corner and Francisco following with a low chuckle.

Back at the council chamber, the door finally swung open again, letting Elena escape into the hall. “We’ll figure it out after lunch, Esteban!” she said, and slammed the door shut again, cutting off a final protest. It opened again a split second later, Esteban blustering his way into the hall, but Elena ignored him, having already joined up with Naomi.

“I’m sorry. Were you waiting for me?” she asked.

Well, it was partly intent, partly just consequence. Naomi shrugged. “Sure. Let’s go with that.”

By the time they got to the dining room, the grandparents and Mateo were already seated with plates piled high. A servant hovered by Mateo’s side, still doling out more beans onto his plate and looking not at him for a cue to stop, but Luisa.

“That’s really more than enough,” Mateo was saying, mortified, but Luisa just clicked her tongue.

“Now, now, there’s no need to be shy! Go ahead and take as much as you’d like.”

“This is already more than I’d like, please—” He raised a hand to block the server’s spoon, the two of them engaging in a brief battle of wits as the servant tried to find a way to dodge around Mateo’s arm. He finally relented, stepping back from Mateo to prepare plates for Elena and Naomi.

Elena took in the scene with a perplexed expression. “Mateo, I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”

He looked like he was hoping the floor would open up and swallow him whole. “Your grandmother kidnapped me,” he said, his voice strained.

“You’re welcome!” Naomi chirped, earning a withering glare. She sat beside him anyway.

Luisa addressed Naomi and Mateo as the rest of the family arrived and everyone began to eat. “I hope you two know that any friends of Elena’s are like part of the familia. You’re welcome to join us for meals whenever you’d like, okay?”

Naomi had gotten that impression already from the initial invitation, but it still felt nice to hear out loud. Welcoming. Like she belonged. Warmth bloomed in her chest from both the food and the familiarity. “Thanks, Luisa!”

“Right,” Mateo said. “Thank you.”

“Really,” Luisa insisted, looking more directly at Mateo. “Anytime you need something, food or otherwise, or have a question, you don’t have to hesitate to say so.”

Maybe it was some kind of grandmother superpower, knowing exactly what the crux of the issue really was. Mateo nodded stiffly, still looking self-conscious, but he’d relaxed by a fraction, his awkward picking at his food turning a bit more natural.

“Thank you,” he repeated, a tiny smile creeping onto his face.

“See,” Naomi whispered, leaning over as the meal continued and conversation rose up around them. “It was no problem.”

“I’m still mad at you,” he shot back, stabbing his fork into a piece of chicken.

“Oh, come on. At least I didn’t tell your mom.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

Naomi just raised an eyebrow, smirking.

“You could have at least warned me you were going to do this,” Mateo continued. “Or, you know, actually asked me if I wanted you to.”

He sounded genuinely hurt, and some of Naomi’s good humor vanished, leaving her feeling a bit scolded. “Sorry. I will next time,” she said, “but I’m not gonna let one of my friends not take care of himself, okay?”

He pushed some food around on his plate, ashamed. “I don’t do this on purpose.”

“I know. But you still do it. So I’m gonna help you outsource.” She bumped his foot under the table. “Okay?”

Jumping slightly at the contact, he looked back up, lingering skepticism flickering in his eyes. As quickly as the doubt appeared, though, it was gone, swallowed down with a piece of food and covered by a tired, but appreciative, smile. “Okay.”

Chapter Text

Naomi stomped through the palace halls, irritation simmering under her skin. She’d pulled off her sweatband shortly after leaving the arena and was still clenching the damp fabric in her fist, like if she just squeezed it hard enough it could bolster Team Avalor’s odds.

How could Gabe be so completely, impossibly awful at olaball?

He should have been a natural at it; he was big, strong, coordinated in a fight, all things that should have contributed to his olaball playing ability. She’d always taken him to be the jock type, between his dedication to the royal guard and his general bravado. But apparently, that didn’t translate to sports. Whether Elena was training him or not, if they wanted even a remote chance of not getting humiliatingly crushed by Cariza, they’d need a miracle.

She’d been so distracted by disappointment that she hadn’t even realized that she’d asked the coach driver to take her back to the palace instead of the docks right away. So now, she paced the halls, willing herself to pull it together before she went home and baffled her poor dad to death. It was just a game. It wasn’t that big a deal. Not like it was her first chance to participate as an Avaloran in the eyes of another country or anything like that. She could live.

Letting out an annoyed sigh, she paused and leaned against the wall, stretching the headband between her hands and staring through the doorway across from her. Her march through the palace had carried her all the way to the library. Inside, a thin stripe of warm, gold light cut across the floor, leaking out from the gap in the painting that concealed Mateo’s workshop.

Bitterness blossomed into hope in Naomi’s chest, and she released the headband with a satisfying snap. Maybe miracles were a bit much to ask for, but she did know someone with magic.

She slipped into the library. Squeezing her fingers into the opening at the side of the painting, she quietly pried it open and poked her head in. Mateo was bent over his worktable, one hand tracing down the page of a spell book and the other carefully adding seeds to a vial of garishly blue liquid, one by one. The rest of the table was laid out with a collection of vials of mystery ingredients—tiny leaves shaped like hands, a pale liquid that roiled unheated and filled its bottle with smoke, something that looked suspiciously like a tangle of dried worms. Naomi suppressed a shudder, but knew she was probably pulling a face anyway. Magic could be fascinating, especially the way Mateo talked about it, but it turned out to be pretty weird sometimes, too.

Mateo didn’t so much as look up as Naomi slid further into the room and shut the painting behind her. She leaned against the edge of the short corridor into the main room, trying to look casual. “Hey, Mateo!”

The pellet between his fingers shot up into the air as he flinched and gripped it too tightly, and he made a frantic grab for it with a small, distressed sound only to launch it across the room instead. It skittered across the floor, bouncing and rolling its way somewhere into the opposite corner. Naomi pressed her lips together to swallow a laugh, trying to look innocent as he sighed heavily and turned his unamused expression on her.

His eyes flicked up and down her body, taking in the sight of the uniform, and before she could so much as draw breath to apologize, he announced, “I’m not going to use magic to help Gabe cheat at olaball.”

Naomi’s posture slipped against the corner and she lurched to right herself. She gaped at him, eyes jumping between the vial and his face. “Uh, that’s not a mind-reading potion you’re working on, by any chance, is it?”

Mateo laughed and smirked. “No, but Luisa was in here twenty minutes ago asking about that same thing.” His smirk faded into a disapproving frown, though, and he raised an eyebrow at her. “You did know I’d say ‘no’, right? Magic isn’t a shortcut.” He turned back to his potion and carefully corked the vial. “And cheating is wrong,” he added, almost as an afterthought, sparing one last glance in Naomi’s direction.

“I know, I know,” she sighed, drooping against the wall. “But we’re desperate to pull our team together and at this point I feel ready to try anything. Gabe’s a total disaster!”

“Wow. He’s really that bad?”

“I’d believe it if he’d never even seen an olaball before today.” Sighing again, Naomi finally crossed the threshold into the workshop and dropped into the wooden chair in the corner, suspiciously similar to the one in Mateo’s old basement workshop. It was no more comfortable than its twin, the back digging into her shoulders and her arms catching on a splinter, but after a day of olaball and annoyance, it was at least a relief to be off her feet.

She watched as Mateo circled his work table and dropped to his knees to start pawing around for the lost kernel as she elaborated. “He can barely kick the ball, and when he does, he can’t kick it straight. He fumbled every single shot we sent his way, and he spent half the practice lying on the ground because he either got knocked over or just fell down on his own.”

Mateo didn’t look up, invested as he was in his search, but he nodded in acknowledgement as he listened. “So are you just here to rant about Gabe?”

“It’s rant worthy,” Naomi retorted. “Seriously, you should have seen him. I mean, even you’re better at olaball than him!”

He snapped his head upward at that, face scrunched up in offense. “What do you mean, even me?”

“Oh, you know what I mean.” Waving a dismissive hand, she rocked the chair back so that it leaned against the wall. “You’re not exactly the sporty type, but even you can at least pass the ball.” An idea suddenly snapped into place in her head, and she dropped the chair forward onto the stone with a resounding clack. “Say, Mateo, you can pass an olaball.”

“I’m not taking Gabe’s place on the team, either.”

Naomi swore, slumping back in the chair again, and Mateo had the gall to actually cackle at her reaction.

“Luisa asked me that, too,” he admitted, still snickering. Shooting her one last amused look, he returned to his search, running his hand along the seam between the floor and the nearest counter. “But even if I was, as you said, ‘the sporty type’, I’m way too busy right now to practice for something this big.”

“So you don’t make any more potions tonight; big deal,” Naomi said. “What are you even working on that’s so demanding?”

“A decoy potion for the gardener. He says something’s been eating all the tomatoes, so we want to give it something else to snack on instead. Once these seeds sprout, the potion should make them more interesting to whoever our little troublemaker is, and they’ll hopefully keep its attention long enough to trap. Aha! There you are!” He held the stray seed up in the light like it was some kind of delicate treasure, and then stood, brushing off his knees. “Anyway, he wants to get these in the ground tomorrow morning, so I have to finish up this potion tonight. And since we need them to grow fast, too, I’ll have to add a secondary effect, and I’ve never done that before, so...”

Naomi sighed. “Okay, okay, I get the picture.”

“Besides,” Mateo went on as he returned to his work table, “you’ve played olaball with me. You know I’m only okay, at best.”

She slid further down in the chair. “‘Only okay’ is still better than terrible,” she muttered. “Maybe you could just sub in tomorrow, then, if Gabe hasn’t gotten any better tonight.”

“I think my mom would have a heart attack if she saw me doing something that dangerous.” It was a polite enough refusal, but a tense edge was starting to creep into his voice, and Naomi caught the brief flash of annoyance that crossed his face in his raised brows and his flat mouth.

She found herself protesting on principle, anyway. “Olaball’s not that dangerous!”

Mateo frowned and looked up from his work again, jabbing a finger toward his face. “The last time I played with you, you gave me a black eye!”

“That was an accident!” She threw her hands up. “And we weren’t even playing when that happened! Ugh, look, maybe she’d be excited that her son helped Avalor bring home the glory of the Peace Festival olaball trophy, despite the danger?”

“She used to make me wear a helmet when I played chess.” He sighed out an exasperated sound and popped the vial open again, returning to dropping seeds in. “Sorry, but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life getting lectured about the hazards of concussions.”

Naomi narrowed her eyes. “...You’re totally making up that chess thing.”

“You don’t know my mom.”

She leaned heavily on the armrest, propping her chin up on her knuckles and drumming her other hand against her leg. Deep down, she knew that the team was going to be stuck with Gabe no matter what she said—once Elena set her mind on something, it was impossible to convince her to do otherwise, and Elena was dead set on Gabe’s participation—and she knew that she was being obnoxious by continuing to press the issue with Mateo, but some strongly-rooted stubbornness kept her clinging to the idea anyway.

“Whoever wins this game will basically be the coolest people in the kingdom,” she said. “You could be a part of that.”

It was a dirty move, given his history, but it was the first thing that seemed to give Mateo pause. He tilted his head like he was considering it, but quickly shook away whatever he was thinking with a quiet huff. “Sorry, but it’s still a ‘no’. Besides, this seems like it would be really important to Gabe, and I don’t want to take that away from him.”

Naomi opened her mouth, and then snapped it shut, dropping back against the chair with a groan. “How am I supposed to argue against something as sappy as that?”

“You’re not supposed to,” Mateo replied, grinning.

“Okay, fine. You win. I’ll be supportive of our friend.”

Looking far too proud of his victory, no matter how trivial it really was, Mateo tore open a second package of seeds and carefully shook them out onto the table. They popped and clicked against the stone as they landed, and he kept a hand behind them to keep them from rolling away.

“So, do you think you’ll be too busy to even come watch the game?” Naomi asked. “I know you’d probably rather just stay here, but the game by itself probably won’t take too long.” Especially if Cariza obliterated them the way she was expecting.

“I was planning on it. On watching, I mean,” he quickly clarified, “Not on staying here. Even if I’m not playing myself, all my friends are on Avalor’s team, so I wouldn’t want to miss it.”

‘All my friends’ was unexpected—was his social circle really still just the three of them?—but Naomi didn’t have time to fully unpack it before he continued.

“I made sure that I’d be free tomorrow afternoon. It’s kind of why I’m trying to get as much of this done now as I can.” He swept his hand over the worktable, gesturing to the in-progress potion. “Everything should be done in time.” He scratched the back of his neck. “I think.”

“You want help with anything?” Naomi offered.

Mateo blinked, surprised, and with his attention on her, managed to set his hand back down directly in the middle of the seed pile. They flew in every direction, scattering across the floor in an asynchronous, ticking chorus and settling out of sight in every shadowy nook. Mateo didn’t even watch them go; he just kept staring at Naomi, his mouth in a tight line, like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to laugh or cry.

It was an easy choice for Naomi. She muffled her laughter against her hand, unable to stop an undignified snort from slipping out as Mateo let out a resigned sigh through his nose.

“Yeah,” he finally managed, “I can think of a few things you could do.”

“You got it, boss,” she said with a mock salute, and still giggling, she joined him in the search.

The two of them crawled around on the floor to scrounge up the lost seeds. Whatever path Mateo was searching dragged him closer to Naomi, and they nearly knocked heads twice while reaching for the same seeds (to the tune of a hasty string of apologies from Mateo) before she deliberately scooted herself to the other end of the room. Perhaps it was better he’d declined her spontaneous team offer. Knowing him, he’d get distracted partway through the game and crash headlong into his own teammates. They were more efficient after that, working in a companionable silence. Naomi had gathered up a sizable handful of the pellets when Mateo spoke up again.

“So does it really matter that much if you guys don’t win tomorrow?”

“Um, yes?” Naomi threw him an incredulous look from across the room. He didn’t even lift his head to catch it.

“I just thought sports were supposed to be about having fun,” he replied.

“Spoken like someone who never won a lot at sports,” she shot back. He looked up this time, his nose wrinkled in a pout. “C’mon, where’s your sense of Avaloran spirit? Your cultural pride?”

“In my spellbooks, mostly, not the sporting arena. Obviously I’m going to be rooting for you guys tomorrow, but that you considered cheating…” He frowned and stood back up to deposit the seeds he’d collected on the table. Mateo wasn’t all that tall, but with her still on the floor, he seemed towering, and the disapproval in his voice made her feel even smaller.

“I know,” she tried. “I wasn’t being serious.”

“I mean, you’re not even Avaloran.”

Naomi winced. She knew he didn’t mean it as an insult, but it dug into the heart of the problem with startling efficiency.

“...I know. That’s kinda why I want to help Avalor win.” Sitting back on her heels, she stared down at the seeds rolling around on her palm. “I want to be part of the team. I want people to see me as part of the team.”

Mateo studied her for a moment. From the corner of her eye, Naomi could see him shifting his feet as he weighed his next words. “Somehow, I don’t think people will see you that way if you have to lie to make it happen.” His voice was not unkind, but Naomi found herself feeling abashed anyway, her head drooping even lower. “Besides, you’re still going to be on the team, even if we lose, right? I feel like supporting us even when we mess up is probably the most important thing. I mean,” Naomi could hear the teasing smile in his voice, and she looked up to confirm it on his face, “it’s not like I’m going to stop cheering for you guys even when you start falling over yourselves.”

She scoffed, the sound coming out more like a laugh. “Oh please, you could have at least a little faith in us.”

“I have had two separate people in here in the last half hour telling me it’s basically hopeless.”

“Okay, fair.” Chuckling again, she curled her fingers around the seeds and made to stand, pausing as Mateo reached a hand down to her.

“So, go and prove us all wrong tomorrow,” he said, and Naomi took his hand with a smile.

Chapter Text

“So, I bet you’re all wondering why I gathered you here today.”

Elena was pacing the floor of Mateo’s workshop, her fingers laced and her features set in a thoughtful frown. Naomi glanced at Mateo and Gabe across the room from her perch on Mateo’s worktable. They looked equal parts curious and concerned; Elena hadn’t given them much clue as to whether this meeting was a social one or a serious one. It wasn’t unusual for her to round them all up for a spontaneous hangout, and the workshop was rapidly becoming their de facto meeting place, but she’d usually offered an inkling of what she had in store for them by now.

“Well, don’t keep us in suspense,” Naomi finally said, crossing her arms with a light chuckle.

Elena’s expression turned soft—not too serious an issue, then—and she elaborated. “Isabel is planning to start going to a public school in the city next week. I wanted to make sure it’ll be a good environment for her, you know? And since I never went, I figured you guys would have a better idea of what it’s like. I thought I’d get some advice, you know?”

For the first time, it clicked for Naomi that her royal friends wouldn’t have ever been to a public school. A surreal thought—though she’d been in and out of different schools her whole life, it was something she’d expected her peers to have all taken for granted, and she didn’t realize that they might not have all had that life. So why the sudden change?

Mateo beat her to the question. “Wait, why are you sending her to public school? Aren’t there tutors at the palace?”

“There are! But Isabel really wants to study with other kids her age.”

He let out a dry bark of laughter that dissolved in the air as the others turned to stare at him. The crooked smile slowly dropped from his face. “Wait, you’re serious? She’s doing this on purpose?”

Something in his tone tripped an alarm in Elena’s head. Face falling, she lowered her voice to a horrified whisper. “Is it that bad?”

Mateo froze. “Uh.” His face was stuck in a guilty grimace, his eyes wide with the panic of someone who knew they’d said the wrong thing. He met Naomi’s eyes across the room in a silent plea for rescue.

She ended up not needing to intercede—Gabe cut in before she could. “I don’t really remember it being too bad. Boring, mostly. A lot of pro-Shuriki propaganda in the history lessons, but hopefully that’s not being taught anymore.”

He might not have intended to be Mateo’s rescuer, but Mateo latched onto the out anyway with a tiny sigh of relief.

“Right! Yes, the propaganda,” he said, a bit too quickly. “There used to be a lot of that.”

“Aside from that, there’s nothing that really stood out,” Gabe went on. “Some classes were hard, some weren’t, some people were easy to get along with, and some were… ehhhh. But I think that’s all pretty standard.”

He looked over at Mateo with a raised eyebrow, as if expecting confirmation. Mateo forced a smile and a stiff nod.

Elena’s shoulders fell in relief. “Okay. That all doesn’t sound so bad. So there’s nothing really unusual to expect?”

“I guess it depends on what you count as ‘unusual.’” Gabe rubbed at his chin, thoughtful. “It might be more structured than what she’s used to? I don’t know what her tutoring schedule was like.”

“Oh!” Elena waved a hand, suddenly in even better spirits. “Isa loves when things have structure. That’ll be fine!”

“Sorry I can’t be of more help. It’s been a while since I’ve actually been to school. Even longer since primary. But your sister’s pretty smart. I’m sure she’ll do fine no matter how it turns out.”

“Hey, Gabe,” Naomi started, something occurring to her, “I never asked. Did you actually go to upper secondary?”

Avalor required schooling through ninth grade for its students, with the upper three years of secondary being an option for those who intended to go on to university. Naomi’s decision on whether or not she’d attend was made for her by her Grand Council appointment the summer between ninth and tenth grade, but Gabe was three years her senior. He would’ve had the time to pursue that before Elena’s return if he’d wanted.

“Hm? Nah. I knew I wasn’t gonna do university, so it wasn’t really worth it. I helped out at the bakery for a few years, instead.” He frowned, his brow furrowing at the memory. “Honestly, I think I would’ve preferred school.”

“Wow, I never would’ve taken you as a nerd,” Naomi teased, and he arched an eyebrow at her.

“Hey, let’s see how you like working for my dad.”

“What about you, Naomi?” Elena asked. “You were in school here more recently, right?”

“I guess. But it’s not like it was recent, recent. Not since last spring. And I never did primary here at all, so I don’t know if I can offer any advice about that.”

“But you know what it’s like to go from homeschooling to public school, right?” She straightened up, back to being attentive and serious. “What’s that like? Is it easy to adjust?”

Naomi stilled. She did have experience with that, a dozen times over, and it had never stopped being a challenge. Her situation had been unique—jumping in and out of different schools for just a few months at a time. A year, tops. It wasn’t just switching from homeschool to public; it was that each time she did so, it was in a completely different culture that she had to acclimate to while she was readjusting to the more structured school day. Inevitably, then, right when she’d gotten used to the new schedule and standards, her life would be uprooted and she’d be on the move again, just to start the process all over.

In one way, it had gotten simpler with time. Once she knew she could handle one move, she knew she could handle every other. But the increasing complexity of her peers’ social lives got a lot harder to navigate as the years went by, especially when her usual contacts in the travel seasons consisted mostly of her parents and the occasional pen-pal.

“It’s easier when you’re younger,” she finally said. “The classes are more general, so you’re less likely to be missing something everyone else already knows, and the other kids are less likely to have really long histories with each other already, so it’s a little easier to make friends faster.”

Elena nodded, her face relaxing and her posture loosening again. “That’s good. I think that’s what Isabel was actually the most worried about.” Her smile grew somber and a bit faraway. “She had a hard time making friends even before Shuriki, but the few that she had back then are all grown up now. It’s a miracle she met Cristina when she did. I really want this to work out for her.” Turning to Mateo, her brow creased again, just enough to betray the worry behind her deliberately light voice. “Mateo, is there anything you wanted to add?”

Mateo had never looked so badly like he wished Elena had forgotten he was there. He’d stepped back into the shadow of one of the columns, crossing his arms like he was hoping to disappear into it, and his smile as she addressed him looked artificial. “Um,” he started.

And then he did not continue.

The silence stretched on, turning awkward, and then oppressive. Mateo fidgeted, unable to get any other words out, like there was some blockage he couldn’t force them past, all the while Elena and Gabe stared at him in increasing confusion and concern. His gaze flickered helplessly to Naomi for the second time that morning, something desperate in his eyes.

Oh. Of course.

Naomi hadn’t spent much time with Isabel, but the younger princess reminded her of Mateo in many ways. Quiet and bookish and a little bit awkward, at least until one of her niche subjects of interest came up, and then it was like she had a personal mission to make sure everyone in the room was as informed about it as her. All her sister’s energy, but with none of the social grace. She spent most of her time alone, but still clung to Elena’s attention in the moments they were together. None of it had struck Naomi as unusual—Isabel was still young—but presumably Mateo’s quirks hadn’t popped up overnight.

For him, this wasn’t just an uncomfortable question, probing at old wounds—it was an uncomfortable answer, one he no doubt knew was the last thing Elena would want to hear. Public school was going to eat Isabel alive.

“You stopped going when Elena came back, too, right?” Naomi prompted. “So you’re kinda in the same boat as me.”

Their histories with school weren’t remotely the same, and it didn’t really answer Elena’s question, but he wasted no time in gripping the offered lifeline nonetheless. “Yes! I also haven’t been to school in a while. Didn’t really see the point in going on to upper secondary when I could be studying magic full-time instead,” he said, a nervous laugh slipping out as he concluded.

Gabe raised a curious eyebrow. “Really? You didn’t go before your appointment? I’m kinda surprised.”

“You didn’t go to upper secondary,” Mateo retorted, sounding defensive.

“Well, yeah, but I had a job lined up.”

Mateo’s pose was starting to tighten, his expression turning sour. “Wizard is a job,” he muttered.

Either Gabe missed the quiet remark or the prickly warning in its tone, because he went on with a grin. “Besides, we already knew that you were a nerd. I bet you were the guy that reminded the teacher whenever they forgot to collect homework.”

“No. I only did that once or twice.”

Naomi couldn’t recall him ever doing that—it must have been before her time—but she could hardly imagine it going over well with their classmates, at least the ones she’d gotten to know. Considering how sharp Mateo’s voice had become, it sounded like it definitely hadn’t.

Regardless, Gabe lit up with a surprised laugh. “Wait, really? Oh man, you actually were that guy! I was joking!”

“Well, it’s not funny—” Mateo tried, his shoulders hunching, and something cautionary flared in the back of Naomi’s mind at the sight. But still, Gabe pressed on.

“If it makes you feel any better, I—” he leaned in, his smile growing embarrassed, “—was also that guy. Always real popular with the other kids, huh?” Laughing, he swung an arm across Mateo’s shoulders, a fair enough attempt at camaraderie and commiseration.

But Mateo, already agitated, flinched away like he’d been burned. He shoved Gabe’s arm off and wheeled on him, lips pulled back in a snarl.

“Knock it off!”

“Hey!” Gabe protested, rubbing his wrist and sounding hurt. “I was just teasing.”

And that was the final straw. Mateo tensed further, his hands balling into fists and his eyes narrow, like he was gearing up for a fight. The sudden pressure in the air was palpable, the mood swinging from awkward but friendly to a brewing shouting match in record time, and Naomi’s stomach dropped at the awful familiarity of it.

“Anyway!” she cut in loudly, hopping off the worktable and interrupting Mateo’s next sharp intake of breath. Gabe and Elena’s attention swiveled around to her almost comically, both looking startled at how quickly things had escalated. “The point is that none of us really have recent experience to pull from that might help your sister. But she’s probably gonna be fine. Primary school is as easy as it gets.”

Technically not a lie. Maybe she was cut out for politics after all.

Elena looked relieved, more or less, though she cast another worried glance toward Mateo. He’d retreated against the column, eyes closed, and was drawing slow, deliberate breaths through his nose in a clear bid to calm down. His mouth moved soundlessly as he repeated something to himself. Whether it was working or not was more dubious—his brow remained furrowed, and his fingers dug into his arms, hard enough that it looked painful.

“And even if it doesn’t work out, it’s not like she doesn’t have options, right?” Naomi went on, finally addressing the uncomfortable possibility. “She can always just go back to having tutors.”

“I know that,” Elena sighed, “but she’s really looking forward to this. And I am too, for her sake. I’m worried she’s going to get lonely as I get busier with ruling. Cristina can’t come to the city every day to play, and even if she could, Isabel should have more than one friend by now, right?”

Against the column, Mateo squirmed.

The motion went unnoticed by Gabe and Elena. “Seriously, your sister is gonna be fine,” Gabe said, smiling. “The Castillo-Flores family raised some pretty great daughters. Everyone’s gonna want to be her friend.”

Elena’s shoulders relaxed again, and the room fell into a lull.

“And now that that’s taken care of,” Naomi started, voice light with false levity, “I’m sure Esteban’s got some important Crown Princess stuff he needs you to look at.”

Gabe snorted as Naomi rounded him and Elena up, urging them toward the door. “Since when were you so concerned with what Esteban wanted anyone to do?”

Since he turned into the easiest out to get her other friend some privacy. “Since he agreed with my opinion on increasing Professor Mendoza’s research fund last week,” she said instead.

“Oh, don’t tell me I’m going to have to deal with constant bossiness from both of you now,” Elena said, frowning.

Naomi scoffed. “I would never. Me, acting like Esteban? Imagine the scandal.” She gave the two another insistent nudge.

But Elena’s eyes flickered over Naomi’s shoulder, and she hesitated at the door. Is he okay, she mouthed, tilting her head minutely toward Mateo.

I’ll talk to him, Naomi volunteered, before she really considered what she was mouthing back. I get it.

And with another nudge, she finally cajoled the two into leaving. When she turned back to Mateo, he was still pressed against the column. His eyes were still closed, but as if he was merely dozing—the tension had drained away into exhaustion. Now that they were actually alone, she had no idea what to say to him.

“You good?” was what she went with, immediately cringing at how blunt it sounded.

“Sure,” he replied, his voice faint. Cracking his eyes open, he added, “Actually, can I ask you something?”

Well, that question rarely preceded anything good. Withholding a sigh, she waited for Elena and Gabe to clear the library. “Sure. What’s up?” she asked, hoping she wouldn’t regret staying behind.

Nodding, he took a slow breath, like whatever he wanted to say was particularly difficult. “Do you think Elena was looking for honesty, or reassurance?”

“Oh, um…” That wasn’t what Naomi had been expecting. A complaint about Gabe, maybe, or a request for comfort of his own. Elena’s chatter had receded into the hall, leaving Naomi unable to make out any of the words, but she could still catch the tone of it, a breathless sort of maternal concern she reserved only for her sister.

“I think most people usually want reassurance,” she finally said. “It sounds like her sister’s pretty set on this, so whether we tell Elena public school is the worst or not isn’t going to change anything about what Isabel does—it’s just gonna stress Elena out more.”

Mateo’s face pinched, and an uncomfortable sound wrung itself out of his mouth. “I really messed that one up, huh?”

“Well, I don’t really think you helped,” she admitted. “But if you ask me, a bit of reality every now and then is a good thing. Public school is the worst.”

That earned a quiet laugh and a small, lopsided smile. Mateo averted his eyes, rubbing at his shoulder. “Yeah, I guess that’s one way of putting it.”

He was rubbing the shoulder Gabe had grabbed.

Naomi bit her lip, curling her fingers together. By unspoken agreement, the two of them hadn’t discussed their time in school together ever since they left. It felt taboo, a forbidden relic of an ancient era, where lifting the lid on it would release a curse they couldn’t contain. She wanted to leave it behind, that feeling of ostracization and loneliness, in favor of her new life, with her new friends, and she could imagine Mateo felt similarly. He always seemed far more comfortable in his robes than he ever had in his uniform.

But at this rate, that seal would split open on its own, whether they wanted it to or not. Might as well do it while they still had some control.

“Seriously, are you okay?” she finally asked. “We never really talked about how awful things were last year.”

He hummed, still not looking at her. “Does it matter? Things are better now, right?”

Naomi drummed her fingers against her thigh. “Well, if you have to ask…”

It took a heavy moment for him to speak again, just slouching against the column instead. Finally, he met her eyes with a plaintive expression, and when he spoke, his voice was small. “I’ve been trying so, so hard to not just end up as ‘the weird kid’ again.”

Heart panging, Naomi went to speak, but Mateo wasn’t done.

“Elena and Gabe actually seem to like me,” he said, a sort of hopeful disbelief in his tone. “I don’t want them to think that there’s something wrong with me.”

“I think flipping out like that is gonna do that faster than just admitting you don’t like certain jokes,” Naomi replied, and Mateo winced. “Give them some more credit. I mean,” she forced some humor into her voice, “I know you’re weird, and I still like you.”

He offered her a weak smile of gratitude before folding in on himself again.

Naomi sighed. “Gabe’s not a jerk, you know,” she said. “I’m sure if you told him how badly that kind of stuff actually upsets you, he’d back off right away. He’d feel awful for doing it.”

“That’s the issue. The sort of stuff Gabe does is normal, right? I don’t want to make him feel guilty for jokes I’m supposed to get. It’s not his fault I’m…” He waved a hand around before drawing it back in, despondent. “...so sensitive. And, ah,” he swallowed, “there’s the alternative. That Gabe doesn’t care. And—and I’d rather never find out if that’s the case.”

“Do you want me to talk to him for you?” Naomi offered. “Then you don’t have to find out, either way.”

He straightened up abruptly, horrified. “What? No! That’s even worse!”

“Okay, okay,” Naomi raised a hand, “I just figured I’d ask.”

Finally unpeeling himself from the column, Mateo shuffled past her and over to his worktable. He rifled through a neat stack of spell books, like the motion would cover up how morose and weary he still looked.

Feeling awkward and unsure how to continue, Naomi shifted her feet. She could tell when her presence wasn’t wanted, but it didn’t feel right to leave with things still so unresolved.

“So… I guess I’ll let you guys sort this out on your own, then,” she tried. “Or are you really planning on never saying anything about it?”

“I’m planning on getting used to it. And in the meantime, I’ll just think about other things until I calm back down. My spells. Baby jaquins. I don’t know.”

Naomi raised an eyebrow. “How’s that been working out for you?”

“It works sometimes,” he said, shooting her an annoyed look. “Today just—” face hardening, he shook his head and turned back to his books, “—I don’t know.” And then, sounding anxious again, “Hey, um… so, even if I blow it with the others…” he peeked over his shoulder, “...at least I’ll always have you, right?”

Something in the back of Naomi’s mind cautioned her against offering anything she couldn’t guarantee. Her life had been miraculously stationary for well over a year, but that didn’t mean it would stay that way forever.

But then, if honesty wouldn’t change his mind, then reassurance was probably the best policy.

“Hey, I wasn’t planning on going anywhere,” she said, smiling. “I think I can promise you that.”

Chapter Text

So she was leaving, after all.

Telling Elena that her family’s move was going ahead as planned had been hard. Naomi had to drag the words out of her mouth like they were anchored in her stomach, and it pained her to say them out loud, like doing so was what made it all real. She’d spent most of the morning fighting back tears as the two of them reminisced on every adventure they’d had since they met and promised a hundred times over that they’d write.

Telling Gabe after Elena had rushed off to make final preparations for the formal goodbye had been marginally easier, if just because Naomi had ripped the bandage off once already. They could joke about it, too, in a way she just didn’t with her other friends, poking fun without fear of bruising or tripping over some critical royal protocol mistake. Humor made the deed lighter, and with a promise he’d be there for the send off, she went on her way.

But she had no idea how she was going to tell Mateo. She’d barely seen him all week, and it was possible he didn’t even know about the move at all, let alone that it was happening that day. Naomi dragged her feet as she headed to the workshop, like if she just took long enough getting there, maybe her parents would forget the whole thing. Maybe she could at least delay the inevitable. When she arrived in the library, she took a deep breath and rapped on the edge of the open painting frame.

“I’m here, you can come in,” Mateo called from inside. He looked a bit ruffled as she entered, like she’d startled him, but he was still a good deal more composed than she knew she looked, blotchy and miserable, the salt of dried tears stinging on her cheeks. His expression shifted after one look at her, twisting in silent apology. “I don’t actually think I can freeze the whole bay,” he said, “or stop all the wind. I could probably sink your mom’s ship, but, uh…”

Naomi grimaced. “Yeah, please don’t.” She sighed, crossing her arms like she was cold. “So, I take it you’ve heard the news, then?”

“Elena came by after you went home last night.”

Well, that was one load off Naomi’s back. She didn’t have to actually break the news to him. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t make saying goodbye any easier. Wandering closer to the worktable, she pretended she was fascinated by the spellbook he’d been studying, watching as he rolled his pen back and forth under his fingers.

“I don’t suppose you guys came up with any out-of-the-box solutions to get my parents to stay, did you?” she asked. “Maybe… a suggestion spell or something? Something to make them believe it’s just a better idea to stay here?”

The pen stilled. “What, like mind control?”

There was a warning in his tone, suspicious and taut, and Naomi chanced looking up at him to catch his wary expression. She shrugged. “Maybe like… mind nudging?”

He stiffened, his eyebrows scrunching together. “Even if I knew any spells like that, that’s malvago stuff. You can’t seriously expect me to—”

“No, no, I know.” Sighing, she began to droop down toward the table, her throat tight and tears threatening to well up again. “I’m just… we’re leaving today. As soon as Elena’s done getting everything ready, we’re all gonna gather in the ballroom, and then,” she swallowed, “and then that’s it.”

Another farewell. Another reset. She’d been starting to believe this part of her life was behind her.

Mateo’s stance relaxed by a fraction, and his voice was soft when he spoke again. “I’m sorry. I wish I could do more to help, but I don’t know any spells that wouldn’t just make things worse.” Reaching out, he set a hand on her shoulder, the touch feather-light, like he thought any pressure might make her disappear. “So I guess just telling your parents you wanted to stay didn’t work, then, huh?”

She shrugged again, shaking her head. “I actually didn’t tell them.”

His hand flinched away, and he tucked it against his chest like she’d slapped it. “What do you mean, you didn’t tell them?” He sounded confused, and almost offended, and Naomi looked back up, perplexed.

“I mean I didn’t tell them,” she said. “They’re so excited about this. How could I?”

“How could you not?” He’d taken a step back, his face pinched like he was in pain. “You don’t actually want to leave, do you?”

“Of course not!” The idea was downright insulting. Avalor had become her home, more so than any other place she’d lived, and she couldn’t imagine wanting to leave it. That Mateo would suggest otherwise set her blood boiling. “How can you even ask that?”

The bite in her voice was enough to put him on the defensive, and his own tone sharpened as well. “Because you could’ve stopped your family from leaving, and you didn’t even try!”

Reeling from the accusation, Naomi pushed back, her voice rising. “You really think I didn’t try? Elena and I did everything we could think of to change my mom’s mind—”

Mateo was rolling his eyes. “Except talking to her, apparently—”

“You’re acting like I’m doing this on purpose!”

“You literally are!” He spread his arms, incredulous. “You said you didn’t talk to your parents about it!”

“Because I can’t!” Her mother’s fiddle tune from the night before still echoed in her ears, alongside her parents’ laughter, her dad’s heavy footfalls as he twirled her around. They were happy, and together—this was important to them, perhaps more than anything else. “They’ve wanted this for so long. What am I supposed to do, tell them that it’ll make me miserable?”

He scoffed. “What, now all of a sudden you can’t tell people what you think? They’re your parents!”

Some screw in her mind, over-tightened by stress and impending loneliness, finally stripped out. Naomi pushed around the table, jabbing a finger against his chest. “I don’t need to hear that from the guy that used to sneak out of his house rather than tell his mom he was a wizard!”

He recoiled, aghast, and swatted her hand away. “That’s completely different! That was for her safety!”

“And this is for my family’s happiness!”

“Well, what about the rest of us? How are we supposed to feel?” He pressed a palm to his chest. “How am I supposed to feel?”

“Why are you mad at me about this?” Dimly, she noticed that her eyes were tearing up again. She was well and truly yelling, now, rage at the unfairness of it all ripping out of her throat. “You’re not the one that has to leave! You’re still gonna be here with Gabe and Elena!”

“And you would be, too, if you actually cared!”

Naomi felt the bottom drop out of her stomach, a swooping, sinking dread. It settled like something cold, a reminder of her seemingly permanent outsider status, and she swallowed a frustrated sob that made her voice shake anyway. “Well, I’m sorry you’re just so inconvenienced by this. Maybe I do want to leave, if sticking around means putting up with you.”

Mateo froze. His arms hung at his sides, and he worked his jaw like he physically couldn’t get words out, catching on the same distressed syllable. Naomi felt a brief pang of guilt, but smothered it as he finally found his voice, almost spitting out his bitter response. “Okay, fine. If you want to leave so badly, then go right ahead.”

She grit her teeth. “Fine.” And she turned, and left.

She marched down the hallway, anger churning in her head like thunder. Pretty soon, this wouldn’t mean anything. So what did it matter if her insides felt like they were being compressed, if her stress had turned to nausea? Maybe this was a sign, a final push to make the departure less overwhelming. One less person to worry about. Barely ten feet away from the library, though, a sudden thud sounded from inside and Mateo came stumbling out after her, tripping over the threshold.

“Naomi! Naomi, wait!”

Turning around, she fixed her best glare on him as he picked himself back up, her eyes narrow and her mouth tight. Her expression softened, though, when she saw how devastated he looked, a weary sadness in his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice forlorn. “I didn’t mean any of that. I don’t want our last conversation to be a fight.”

Any snarky reply she might have prepared withered away, and the storm clouds in her head turned into a downpour. This really was their last conversation, wasn’t it? Who knew when they’d see each other again, if ever. Mateo was one of the first people she’d really met in the country, and one of the only people that had carried over from her time Before Elena to After Elena. The idea of leaving any of her new friends felt like ripping away a piece of herself, but Mateo had been a constant, and the threat of that loss hit her with just how much she was truly leaving behind.

A year and a half. Avalor wasn’t just another rest stop anymore, and hadn't been for a long time. It felt like home. It was home. The fact that she’d been able to make friends here at all was a testament to that duration, an implausible length in the face of all her family’s other, more temporary residences. The first time in years where she felt like she could really establish herself, and it was all being uprooted overnight.

A fresh wave of renewed grief washed over her, and she struggled to speak through a suddenly clogged throat. “Me, neither,” she croaked. “I’m not actually mad at you, I promise, I just—”

She couldn’t take it anymore. She surged forward for a hug, grabbing Mateo even as he startled at the sudden motion.

“I swear, I don’t actually want to move,” she said. “But my parents have wanted this for so long, and if we don’t go my mom might have to leave again, and I—” She swallowed thickly. “How selfish would it be of me if I didn’t let this happen?”

“Probably not that selfish,” Mateo replied, sounding petulant. He returned the hug with a sniffle, though, and continued, “I’m not mad either, I just really, really don’t want you to go. I—I’m the one being selfish.”

“But probably not that selfish,” Naomi echoed with a watery laugh. “I think it’s pretty normal to not want a friend to move away.”

“I shouldn’t have yelled at you, though. Or acted like you didn’t care. It’s just that—” He squeezed her a little tighter, and when he continued, his voice was a hoarse whisper. “I only have so many friends. And Elena and Gabe are great, and I wouldn’t trade them for anything, but they don’t, um…” He squirmed his way out of the hug like saying something uncomfortable carried over to the contact and stood within an arm's length, chewing his lip. Naomi watched the battle play out on his face as he tried to find a tactful way to conclude.

“They weren’t there for, you know, everything,” was what he finally settled on. “There’s a lot that I haven’t told them about, that I’m not sure they’d really get. When you leave, I’m not sure how I’m going to—how I’m—” He cut off, wringing his hands together.

And there it was again: that history, that constant. Naomi’s stomach gave another painful, guilty lurch as she thought about it.

“Eh, you’re smart,” she finally said with a half-hearted shrug, unable to offer much more. “You’ll figure it out.”

The tiniest of sad smiles appeared on his face. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I’m just really going to miss you, and I don’t know how to deal with that.”

“Me, too,” she said, the words catching on another sniffle. “I’m sorry, and I’m gonna miss you.”

He shifted his feet. “And… we’re still friends?”

She laughed, the sound coming out wobbly. “Always, you dork.”

As difficult as the individual goodbyes had been, Naomi was glad she’d gone through with them. She had a hard enough time getting through the formal send-off without breaking down. If she hadn’t gotten the worst of the despair dredged up beforehand, she wouldn’t have been able to take it, and holding it together in front of her parents was the far more important thing.

Mateo remained remarkably composed during the ceremony, as well. He kept up a placid smile and returned Gabe’s good-natured teasing, and he’d held a straight face even as Gabe started to get teary-eyed. He did get visibly more anxious as they headed for the docks, worrying at the strap of his tamborita holster, but he didn’t say a word. Naomi only barely registered it—there was a lot going on, and a lot of other people demanding her attention, and a lot of her own worries to keep leashed.

So it wasn’t until after her mom cut the send off short, after the farewell party spontaneously transformed into a homecoming party instead, after Gabe had scooped her up into a hug and Elena had pulled her into a dance and her parents had cracked open a barrel of juice, that she noticed Mateo had disappeared.

It stung a little, that he’d made such a big deal about her leaving but couldn’t be bothered to stick around once it was decided she’d stay. But in the back of her mind, a worry twinged alongside the hurt, that he was still upset with her after all. She slipped away after the upteenth toast in her family’s name, wishing she could bottle that feeling of being loved and wanted and save it for a rainy day, and after grabbing an extra drink, went to look for him.

She’d perhaps underestimated how easy he’d be to find. The sun was starting to set, painting the docks in alternate stripes of shadow and gold, and a cool breeze blew in from the bay, as if trying to coax her back to the center of the party. Drawing her arms closer to stave off the slight evening chill, she pressed on anyway, the lively music and conversation growing muffled under the sounds of the regular port workers wrapping up for the day. Near the end of the docks, she was starting to feel a bit silly—if Mateo hadn’t wanted to stay at the party, then why would he still be hanging around the harbor?—until she spotted a pair of boots kicking over the water, their occupant hidden behind a barrel.

For once, she managed not to startle him. He craned his neck around as she got close, before she even had to wonder which greeting would be least likely to launch him into the ocean.

“Hey,” she said, “mind if I join you? I, um, brought a peace offering.” She held out the extra cup.

Mateo blinked. “Why would you need…” It dawned on his face a moment later, and he waved a hand. “I’m not mad at you. Today was just a lot, and I needed some quiet.”

“Oh, okay.” Withdrawing her arm, Naomi shuffled her feet. And then, “Do you want some juice anyway? I don’t really need two cups of it.”

“Oh! Uh, sure!” He made a show of scooting aside. Unnecessary—there was already plenty of room for Naomi—but it served as a clear enough invitation for her to join him. Sitting down, she handed him the cup, and the two drank in the relative quiet for a moment, watching the sunset glint off the water and listening to the music drift down from the other end of the harbor.

It was Mateo that finally broke the silence. “So, I guess you’re staying after all?”

Naomi let out a dry snort. “Not too disappointed, I hope.”

“Of course not! I’m beyond relieved.” Sighing, he slouched down, watching his feet swing below them. “I… I really am sorry about blowing up at you earlier,” he said. He sounded ashamed, and with the way the fading light played out on his face, he looked exhausted, like that argument had been enough to drain him completely.

“Hey, we’re already past that,” Naomi said, shaking her head. She took a sip of her drink to give herself a moment to find her next words, her own remorse rising to the surface like a bubble. “Besides,” she finally said, her voice low, “I wasn’t acting much better. And when you really think about it, we were both upset for the same reason. So,” she raised her cup, “how about we agree to put it behind us, and be less of jerks to each other in the future?”

Mateo smiled. “Sounds like a plan.” And he raised his own cup to hers.

They toasted to the Turner family, and to Avalor, and to each other, and to their friendship, and when the juice was gone they just sat and talked. They talked about the last week and all the weeks they would have from then on, until Mateo laughed so hard at one of his own jokes that he almost fell off the pier, and Naomi had to pull him back upright under his arms. When the wind got too cold, they finally decided to return to the party, still snickering amongst themselves, and despite the setting sun, the world felt lighter than it had all day.

Chapter Text

Naomi sank against the railing, something sour and heavy swirling in her stomach as she watched Elena follow Esteban out of the library. The idea of having a royal quinceañera (plus one) at the palace had sounded so exhilarating at first. It was a chance to have something she’d never gotten, and an opportunity to really feel like she was a part of her friends’ world of pomp and magical grandeur. But the expectations of formality were proving far more precise than she was used to. At sea, efficiency was more important than appearances—you couldn’t waste your time line fishing with fancy lures when a net could feed the whole crew, and the prettiness of a patch job didn’t matter as much as making sure it was thorough. In formal settings, if you didn’t walk and talk like you were made of silk, you were apparently committing a social crime.

Sighing, Naomi looked over at the full-length mirror Esteban had brought in for their diction practice, and her reflection scowled back at her. Her hair frizzed from the humidity and the beginning of a sunburn was spreading along her part. Her posture was a mess, slouched over the railing as she was, and her clothing was plain and casual, a fresh grass stain from that morning on her skirt. She didn’t look very royal. She didn’t even look very “Grand Council”. She just looked like Naomi.

But maybe that was something she could fix. She straightened up and smoothed her clothes down, squaring her shoulders and looking herself in the eye. There, better already, right? She tugged her glower up into a facsimile of a smile, missing the mark of “poised” and landing somewhere in the territory of “uncomfortable” instead. Even in the corner of the library, she felt exposed and out of place, her pale reflection sticking out like a ghost among all the bookshelves. And even without Esteban present, she could feel his disapproval looming over her. A burst of stubborn frustration swallowed her discouragement at the thought and she stuck her chin out with a huff. No, she could do this, she just needed a little more practice without anyone butting in, and with the library empty she could take that opportunity.

She took a breath. “I am delighted, you were invited.” So far, so good. “Extremely… delighted, that you…” And the words slipped away as she second-guessed herself into a pitiful finale. “...are… delighted?”

“It’s ‘extremely excited to be reunited.’”

Naomi yelped and clapped a hand over her mouth, her heart racing. She crept back over to the railing and peered down into the library, and her eyes fell on one of the sofas where Mateo was sitting, legs crossed, a book open in his lap, and his head tilted over the backrest, grinning at her upside-down.

Naomi wanted to shrink down into the landing. “How long have you been sitting there?”

Mateo’s grin grew even wider. “Long enough,” he replied, almost sing-song.

Her face was burning, and she could barely get her voice to work. “And… why are you sitting there?”

He twisted around on the sofa so he was leaning one arm on the backrest instead. “I work here,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the massive painting that hid his workshop. “Honestly, I don’t know how you guys missed me on your way in.”

Well, time to find a nice hole to bury herself in. It was awful enough messing up with Esteban staring her down, but at least she could write that off as Esteban being uptight. The thought of Mateo sitting down here snickering to himself the entire time—and easily echoing the line she’d been struggling with, no less—had her wanting to pack up a ship and sail off into the horizon for the indeterminate future.

“So, I guess you’re very delighted then, huh?” Mateo joked. He’d set his book aside and folded both arms over the back of the sofa, beaming up at her innocently.

Shame burned up and down Naomi’s spine, and the sick feeling in her stomach bubbled up as frustration. “Listen,” she snapped, “It’s a lot to keep track of, okay?”

He laughed. “It’s eleven words.”

It hit like a blow—it was just eleven words, and she still couldn’t get it right. How was she supposed to handle the rest of the quinceañera preparations if she couldn’t even do that? Her voice started to wobble as she shouted down again, “I’m trying my best!”

And her best wasn’t good enough.

That thought was the final straw, and she shoved away from the railing and spun around, sitting down hard with her back pressed up against the metal. Her throat was tight and her eyes stung, and she blinked rapidly to keep from actually crying. This was mortifying enough without having a full-blown breakdown over something so trivial.

Something shuffled down below, and the spiral staircase creaked beside her as Mateo made his way up. “Naomi?” he called softly as he poked his head up onto the landing. “Are you okay?”

Naomi sniffed and turned her head away, drawing her knees closer to her chest.

Mateo sat down beside her. He lifted a hand for a moment, like he was about to pat her back, but let it fall back into his lap. “You’re actually upset.” It wasn’t a question.

“You think?!” she spat, wiping her nose with her hand. Ah, yes, very dignified. Very ladylike. Esteban would throttle her.

“I’m sorry,” Mateo said. “I thought we were just messing around. I didn’t realize this was bothering you so much.” He leaned forward into her periphery. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“I just—” her voice sounded thick, and she swallowed to clear the feeling. “All this formal stuff is so far out of my comfort zone! And Esteban hasn’t been letting up, and he won’t explain why any of this stuff is just so important for a single party, but he’s acting like if I can’t do this, then there’s no point in even trying to help me. And it shouldn’t be so hard! It’s just walking and talking! It’s humiliating!” She swung an arm toward Mateo. “I mean, you memorized the greeting just fine, and you weren’t even the one saying it!”

His solemn expression gave way to a weak huff of laughter. “Well, part of my job is memorizing weird phrases no one will ever use in a real conversation.” He gave her the world’s most tepid punch in the arm. “I’ve just had more practice.”

Naomi spared him a ghost of a smile. He was trying, and she could appreciate that, but it did little to stem her frustration. “You have an advantage,” she said. “Esteban actually likes you.” Mateo shot her a puzzled look, and she went on, “He calls you by name, he invites you to his stupid dinner parties…”

“Oh.” He scratched at his ear. “I thought that was just because I’m the Royal Wizard.”

“And I’m on the Grand Council.” Naomi hung her head and picked at her sleeve. “Face it, it’s like he’s going out of his way to make sure I know I don’t belong here.”

Mateo sank back against the railing with a quiet sigh, and when he spoke, it was so softly Naomi wasn’t sure she was supposed to have heard. “Yeah, I know how that feels.”

Silence fell over the two, and as it dragged on, Naomi continued to wallow, watching the clouds moving outside the library window. The initial burst of distress had passed and she no longer felt like she was about to cry, but her very skin still felt wrong around her. Once an outsider, once again.

After a minute, Mateo shifted beside her. “Well… what does Esteban know?”

Naomi turned her head, unsure if she’d heard him correctly. “What?”

“Really! I mean, he used to work for Shuriki, and it’s not like she knew a thing about fun. Or basic decency, really.” He rolled his eyes. “He had to help enforce the whole ‘no parties’ thing, so I don’t know if I’d trust his judgment on what really matters for one. He’d probably say something like…”

He straightened up and cleared his throat, and Naomi barely had a second to prepare before he launched into a passing impression of Esteban’s accent.

“Forget dancing or celebrating, the most important part of the royal quinceañera is obviously having the poofiest hair in the room.”

Naomi choked on her first surprised laugh. The impression wasn’t bad—Mateo had captured Esteban’s haughty, down-the-nose stare and the judgemental arch of his eyebrow, and she started to giggle as he carried on.

“What is this? Laughter?” He clicked his tongue and waggled a finger at her. “No, no, no, you cannot have laughter at a party—that would sound like you were having fun!”

She laughed louder, and Mateo fought to keep from smiling as he continued, wrinkling his nose to mask it with mock disgust.

“And what are you doing sitting on the ground? Everyone knows that to be a proper royal, you have to walk around like I do, with a massive stick up your—”

He cut off with an ‘oof’ as she elbowed him playfully in the side. “You sound just like him,” she said between snorts of laughter.

He stroked at an imaginary goatee. “Yes, this is true.” And then he dissolved into giggling as well, unable to keep a straight face any longer.

“You better be careful,” she said once she’d composed herself a little. “He helped get you your job.”

Mateo shrugged. “Ah, I think I can spare one vote. Besides,” he smiled at her, “your opinion matters way more to me anyway.”

Something loosened in Naomi’s chest, and she took her first deep breath since entering the library.

“And if you care about my opinion,” he went on, “I think you belong here. And so do Elena, Gabe, and Elena’s grandparents. So Esteban? Even if he’s, you know,” he grimaced, making an unsure sound, “—he’s outvoted.”

“Alright, you can stop now,” Naomi said, giving him another good-natured shove. “You’re gonna get me all weepy again. But thanks,” she added, stretching her legs out and staring at her knees. “I really needed to hear that.”

Mateo beamed. “Always happy to help!” He settled back again, his smile turning wistful as he rubbed at his upper arm. “Honestly, I’m kind of surprised that this was bothering you so much. I always thought you were immune to embarrassment.”

Naomi snorted. “Are you kidding?”

“No, really! You always seemed so cool and self-assured, and you would just say whatever you wanted, like you didn’t care what people thought of you.” He met her eyes again. “I really admired that about you.”

“Pfft, sorry to burst your bubble, I guess.”

His eyes widened. “Wait, no, I didn’t mean it like that! I’m just—” He threw his hands up. “I’m saying you’re cool!”

Her face heated up from embarrassment again, the good kind this time, and she prodded his side. “I know, I know, I’m just giving you a hard time. Didn’t I just tell you to stop being so sappy?” A butterfly passed by the large window across from them, and Naomi watched it go by as she tried to collect her next thoughts.

“To be perfectly honest, it’s a lot easier to act like that when you don’t have to worry about what comes next,” she admitted. Mateo tilted his head in silent query, and Naomi charged forward before she could lose her nerve. “Everywhere I’ve lived before has been temporary. If I made a mistake, or embarrassed myself, or hurt someone’s feelings—well, I still didn’t want to do any of that stuff, but it didn’t really matter, y’know? I’d be gone in a couple of months and no one would really remember, and I wouldn’t have to worry about what those people thought of me. But now…” She curled her fingers against her lap and let out a breathless laugh. “It kinda seems like I’m here to stay.”

Her mom had a local job now. She had a home. And that was thrilling. Terrifying. Amazing. Agonizing.

“I know this is just a party, but it’s also an Avaloran tradition, right? Like I’m really a part of the community.” Her stomach gave a swoop equal parts ecstatic and anxious, and her fists tightened further. “I don’t want to mess that up.”

“You won’t,” Mateo said, in a kind of tone that left no room for argument. “You’re gonna be great, I know it.”

And just like that, the fear settled. Naomi smiled, crossing her arms and leaning back. “And you said you admired my confidence.”

Mateo sputtered, surprised, and Naomi went on before he could undermine himself.

“So did you get the invitation?” she asked.

“Oh! Yes! Armando brought it by this morning. I’m really looking forward to it!"

“And you’re okay with being on my court?”

“Of course! I’ve never—well, you probably figured. But I’m honored. I wouldn’t miss it.” He grinned. “Although I’ll warn you, I have two left feet.”

“And my only dancing experience is still just standing on my dad’s feet,” Naomi reminded him with a chuckle, “so I think it’s safe to say you’re not the only one.”

Just then, the library door crashed open down below and Esteban burst into the room, calling up to them. “Miss Turner! We have to move on to the next lesson!” Whatever Elena had said to him must have been inspiring—he sprinted across the room and clambered up the stairs with surprising agility for his age. He froze when he reached the landing, though, and blinked down at where Naomi and Mateo were still sitting, disappointment cutting through his bizarrely renewed enthusiasm. “What are you doing sitting on the ground, Miss Turner? A proper royal needs to stay poised, with proper posture.”

Beside her, Mateo let out a wheeze, and she shared a look with him before they both burst into another bout of laughter, made worse by Esteban’s baffled and offended expression.

He looked at Mateo as if noticing him for the first time. “Mateo, what are you doing here?”

“I work here!” he managed between giggles.

“Ah, yes, of course.” Esteban shook his head to refocus. “Now, Miss Turner, if you will. We do not have the time to dally!”

He grabbed hold of Naomi’s wrist and dragged her upright, and as she stumbled behind him toward the stairs, she took one last glance at Mateo.

You got this, he mouthed, giving her a thumbs-up, and Naomi found that she actually kind of believed him.

Chapter Text

Naomi stepped out her front door into the bright sun of the Avaloran late-morning and shivered at the abnormal bite in the air. Winters in Avalor didn’t even get chilly, at least not by Naomi’s standards, so for the late spring air to smell of snow and make the hair on her arms stand on end was a truly freak act of nature. Could the outdoors be drafty?

Rubbing her arms, she scanned the area to see if anyone else was caught in a mysterious cold snap. Thankfully, she didn’t seem to be losing her mind—passers-by similarly rubbed their arms or blew into their cupped hands, and following their confused gazes, Naomi spotted a pair of unmistakable silhouettes dressed in red and frolicking in a snowbank several docks down.

Ah, so that was it then: not a freak act of nature, but a pretty regular act of magic.

Shaking her head and chuckling to herself, Naomi made her way across the port. As she got closer she could more clearly make out the shapes of Elena and Mateo crouched in the snow on opposite ends of a menagerie of small snowmen and snowcats, as well as a duo of young kids that romped around them with a bright orange tabby at their heels. Occasionally, someone nearby would dip their toe into the edge of the snow or grab a wad of it to throw at a friend, or a small cluster of bright-eyed children would wander close to see if they could catch some of the still-falling flakes on their tongues. Overall, people were regarding the phenomenon with a blend of caution and curiosity—no one was running around in a panic, as irregular as it was, but by and large they gave it a decent berth, as if it might still kick up into a storm.

Naomi stepped up to the edge of the dock, her shoes crunching in the powder.

“I don’t remember seeing snow in the forecast for today,” she called.

Elena waved enthusiastically from further down the dock, and Mateo looked up at her from nearby, a surprised smile on his face.

“Oh, hey, Naomi,” he greeted, standing up and brushing some snow off his knees. “What are you doing here?”

Naomi gestured behind her at her house. “Uh, I live here? I think the better question is ‘what are you doing here?’” She looked around at the snow again, amused. “And what’s with the winter wonderland?”

“Oh, you know, just a little magical mishap. Things got a bit out of hand during a lesson with my apprentice.”

That was news. Since when did Mateo have an apprentice? Naomi glanced back across the dock, figuring that it had to be one of the kids. Probably the one with the pigtails—save for her glasses, she was dressed like Mateo in miniature, which, okay, that was actually kind of precious.

Her gaze landed on Elena at the far end of the dock, who sprang to her feet with a mischievous grin. She pressed a finger to her lips, pointed emphatically to Mateo’s back, and then held up a hefty snowball, her grin broadening.

Naomi snorted, pressing her lips together to conceal a smirk and trying to play the sound off like a cough. “So what all happened?” she asked, a little too loudly.

Mateo had started turning back around, but his attention was successfully caught by Naomi’s query. “Well, it’s kind of a long story.”

“Hey, I’ve got time.” Over Mateo’s shoulder, she could see Elena begin her slow creep across the snow, and she bit down hard on her lip, desperately trying to feign innocence.

If Mateo noticed anything amiss, he didn’t comment on it. “Well, last night, Olivia came by the palace with her family to talk to me about magic, and I offered to teach her some.” He started to turn around, raising an arm to point. “She’s the—”

“—The little girl in the robe,” Naomi cut in, drawing his attention again. She had to keep his back to Elena. “I figured.”

Elena had maneuvered around the field of snowmen, gradually closing the distance.

“Oh, okay. Well, she came by this morning for her first lesson, and I gave her some really unclear instructions, so the experiment kind of exploded—”

The two kids had caught on to Elena’s scheme by now, watching her closely and giggling behind their hands.

“—so since it made a mess, I left her alone in the workshop to clean up while I went into town to help Elena—”

Just a few more feet.

“—and she ended up borrowing one of my tamboritas and accidentally summoning a water spirit, which we had to chase down to the port—”

Elena was slowly reaching for his hood, the snowball raised level with his head.

“—where we froze it solid and turned it into snow. So, there you have—”

He cut off with an ear-splitting shriek as Elena tugged on his hood and shoved the glob of snow down the back of his robe. Leaping away, he wiggled around, shaking his clothes to try and jostle the snow loose, but it had settled against where his belt was tied fast around his waist, falling apart in the extra folds of fabric.

The two kids were howling with laughter, and Elena readily joined in.

“It was too good to pass up,” she explained as Mateo shot her a betrayed look. “Your back was to me, and you were so focused on your conversation…”

Mateo forced a laugh, breathless from screaming. “Hah, yeah, that—that was a really good one.”

His back was to Naomi.

She shared a look with Elena, whose eyes brightened in a silent cry of do it! And before she could second-guess herself, she stooped, grabbed a handful of snow, and smushed it against Mateo’s neck.

Mateo yelped again and sprang away from her, frantically trying to brush the snow off.

“Why?” he lamented. “Why would you do that?”

Naomi shrugged. “It was too good to pass up.”

He let out a sound that might have been a laugh, somewhere between anxious and amused. He was smiling, even as he shook his head and shuddered at the feeling of ice on his back, but there was a strain to it that kept it from being completely genuine. That had probably been enough teasing for the day, then.

Naomi opened her mouth to apologize, but didn’t get a chance to. Something whooshed through the air and before anyone could react, a snowball splatted against Mateo’s cheek. Any remaining humor vanished from his face as he slowly turned toward the source, one eyebrow raised.

Mini-Mateo—Olivia—was on the ground, laughing harder than ever and holding her stomach. Beside her, the little boy hastily stuck his hands behind his back, toes pointed together and not quite able to mask his guilty expression.

Mateo said nothing at first, simply closing his eyes and drawing a slow breath through his nose, his hands in fists. Naomi tensed. It would be one thing if he boiled over at her and Elena, but he wasn’t about to start yelling at some kids, was he?

But he just raised an arm, wiping the snow off his face with his sleeve. “Alright, if that’s how it’s going to be. Olivia?”

She perked up in the snow, her laughter ceasing immediately.

He glanced at Naomi and Elena out of the corner of his eye, his mouth curling into a sly smile. “How would you like to learn how a wizard has a snowball fight?”

Olivia gasped. “Really? Can we really?” She scrambled toward him and he gently ushered her around the snowmen, shooting Naomi and Elena a grin over his shoulder that looked downright devious.

Elena let out a low laugh. “Uh oh, we’re in for it now!”

Naomi’s eyebrows shot up. “Sorry, ‘we’?”

“Lucas, come on, you’re on our team,” Elena went on, waving the boy over. He scampered across the snow, giggling and scooping up the cat as he went.

“‘Our’?” Naomi demanded, laughing. “Don’t drag me into this!”

Elena gasped. “Abandoning me in my time of need? How could you? You dropped snow down his back, too!” She gestured down the dock, where Mateo was demonstrating a spell to Olivia, showing off a snowball wreathed in orange light as he floated it around in front of them. “See? They’ve got magic on their side! We need all the help we can get.”

Lucas nodded, deathly serious, and started packing snowballs together, piling them beside where his cat had curled up.

Naomi huffed out a laugh. “Alright, alright, you guys got me,” she said, and she crouched down to help Lucas.

The teams worked in the intense silence of people on a mission, each making a small stockpile of snowy ammo. Team Whiskers (Lucas had decided the name, after the cat) had the numbers advantage. Three people could churn out a much higher number of snowballs than two, and they didn’t have to waste their valuable time practicing spells, but whatever spells Team Magic decided to use could easily end up turning the tides.

And then there was the distinct disadvantage of their titular mascot. Señor Whiskers insisted on winding between their limbs, batting snowballs around, and bumping up against them for attention as they worked. Naomi liked cats most days—they made good ship mousers—but after the second time she had to gently nudge him off her lap, she found herself wondering if it wouldn’t be better to keep him away from the battlefield. The last thing she wanted was to trip over him while trying to dodge.

“Alright, you ready, team?” Elena asked, snatching up a snowball with a grin. Naomi and Lucas followed suit, and the three of them all stood, primed to throw. Across the line of snowmen, Mateo and Olivia stood up as well, tamboritas at the ready.

“Okay, the game starts in three!” Elena called.

Naomi gave her snowball a light toss in her hand, eyeing Mateo.

“Two!”

Mateo narrowed his eyes back at her, grip shifting around his wand.

“One!”

“Wait!” Olivia blurted. “We didn’t say what the rules are yet!”

Elena blinked and looked over at Naomi. “Do snowball fights usually have rules?”

“There are always rules! And it’s important that we follow them,” Olivia insisted, looking up at Mateo like he held the secrets of the universe. “Right?”

“Uh…” All eyes were on Mateo, and he flustered under the sudden attention. “...Yes? I mean, yes! Yeah, the first rule is…” He rubbed his chin. “Oh! No headshots! Keep everything shoulders or below.”

There was a chorus of nodding and ‘sounds reasonable’, but Naomi caught the way Mateo’s hand moved protectively behind Olivia’s head. The look on his face spelled a very clear if you hurt my apprentice I will llévaluq you into the ocean myself. Yeah, she wasn’t gonna cross that. She was mostly planning on aiming for Mateo, anyway.

“Second rule!” Elena chimed in. “No freezing spells! Ice is a little more hazardous than snow.”

Mateo nodded solemnly, looking down at Olivia. “Got it. Llévaluq and canaza only, okay?”

She nodded back, and then shot her hand up in the air. “Oh! Oh! Third rule! No hitting the snowmen! If you hit the snowmen you lose!”

“We worked really hard on them,” Lucas added, looking at Naomi.

“I believe it,” she said, smiling. “They look pretty cool.”

“Hah! Nice one!” Mateo laughed, and it took a second for her to realize what exactly she’d said.

“No!” she tried, but Elena let out a whoop beside her.

“Nice one?” she prompted, and she and Mateo both burst out cackling, to Naomi’s displeasure.

“No!” she groaned again. “That’s it, fourth rule! No snow puns! I’m banning them!”

“You started it!” Mateo said. She stuck her tongue out at him.

Elena placed a hand on Lucas’ shoulder. “Anything you want to add? You’re the only one that hasn’t made a rule yet.”

He stared thoughtfully at the ground for a moment before perking back up. “The fifth rule is no hitting Señor Whiskers.” That had seemed like a given, but he continued to explain anyway, very seriously, “He’s just a cat, so he can’t throw any snowballs back. He doesn’t have any thumbs!”

“Yeah! If you hit Señor Whiskers you double lose!” Olivia added.

“How do you double lose something?” Naomi asked Elena, voice low.

“By hitting the cat, apparently,” she replied, and then she straightened up, projecting her voice again. “If no one has anything else to add, then I think we can get started. Everyone ready?”

Everyone got back into position, retrieving the snowballs they’d abandoned when the conversation had started to drag on.

“Three, two, one, go!”

Naomi pitched her snowball hard at Mateo’s arm, and he caught it midair with a spell, slinging it back. She lurched away, kicking up snow as she slid to a stop. Snatching up another snowball, she ducked left, right, then hurled it again at his arm. If she could get him to drop his wand, he wouldn’t stand a chance. Further down, Elena was playing a much less intense game, lobbing gentler throws toward Olivia and twirling away from the levitated return shots, laughing. Lucas used her as a shield from his sister, popping out whenever she took time to cast to pelt her sides with snowballs.

A snowball whizzed past Naomi’s face. “Hey, watch the head—” she started, when the snowball reeled back and smacked between her shoulder blades. She stumbled forward with a gasp. So that was his game. His magic-wrapped snowballs were impossible to predict, swinging around no matter which way she dodged, and with the row of snowmen ahead of her and the cat somewhere behind, she had little room to maneuver. Snowballs burst against her sides, her stomach, her back, leaving no time to retaliate.

“Elena! Lucas! Help!” she cried, shrieking as another snowball exploded on her leg.

The two leaped to their teammate’s aid with a snowy onslaught against Mateo. The snowballs hurtled against him, and he curled away from them as Olivia stepped up to fling one at Elena’s midsection. Naomi dove for the stockpiles, but Mateo recovered faster. A firm strike of the drum lifted over a dozen snowballs into the air at once, and a flick of his wrist launched them across the dock, raining them down in a volley. Most of them splatted harmlessly against the ground, but Naomi froze as one rushed toward her face, paused, and then yanked itself over her head to drop down her back.

Mateo straightened up, wiggling his eyebrows and giving his tamborita a twirl.

That was it—that was what Naomi wanted. She reared back, throwing with all her might, and the snowball hit the drum like a bullseye, sending it flying from his grip. Mateo blinked. And then he recoiled, gaping at the empty space where the wand had been and twisting his head to look for where it landed. Naomi didn’t give him time to search—she flung another snowball at his shoulder.

“Not so tough now, huh?” she shouted.

“We’ll see about that!” he countered, retrieving a snowball to throw the hard way.

And then several things happened in rapid succession: A snowball burst on the ground, dangerously close to Señor Whiskers, who leapt up with a yowl and hurtled across the battlefield. He raced between Naomi’s legs mid-throw and she flailed, lobbing the snowball higher than she intended. Across the dock, Mateo squinted at the errant snowball, not watching his footing as he stepped forward onto an exposed patch of ice. His foot skidded out in front of him and he careened backwards, arms spinning, and before he could catch himself, the snowball that was supposed to glance harmlessly against his shoulder crashed into his face, tipping the balance in gravity’s favor and toppling him with a heavy thud that shook the dock.

Elena winced. “Ooh, I felt that one. Mateo, are you okay?”

“I’m so sorry!” Naomi said. “I swear I wasn’t trying to do that!”

Mateo let out a low groan in response, briefly lifting one hand to his head before letting it drop back to his side in the snow.

Olivia tiptoed over to him, having recognized that the game seemed to be over. She peered at his body, eyebrows up, before turning back to Naomi and announcing, “I think you killed him.”

It was an obvious exaggeration, but Mateo still hadn’t made any moves to get up. The awful thought that she’d actually hurt him bounced in Naomi’s skull, and she shared a frantic look with Elena before taking off down the dock.

“I didn’t think I hit him that hard!” she said, jumping over the snowmen and dropping to her knees by his side. Elena came up on the other side, eyes blown wide with worry. She gave his shoulder a gentle shake, leaning in and calling his name again. Naomi hovered closer as well, stomach flipping from guilt.

Muscles in Mateo’s face shifted and he cracked an eye open, his mouth twitching into a smirk, and that was all the warning they had before fistfuls of snow shoved into their faces. Naomi sputtered, jerking back and wiping her face, and she could hear Elena doing the same across from her. Mateo meanwhile burst into raucous laughter, joined by Olivia, the sound serving as a backdrop to their indignance.

“Okay, okay,” Elena said, flicking a stray piece of snow from her cheek. “I suppose we deserved that. Still, you had us worried!”

Still lying down, Mateo shrugged. “I know. I’m sorry. But…” he grinned, giggly again, “as you two would say, it was too good to pass up.”

Elena let out a short, amused sigh. “Well, I think it's safe to say the game’s over now.”

“I think you triple lost,” Olivia said, nodding solemnly toward Naomi.

She opened her mouth to protest on principle. She wasn't the one that hit the cat, nor had her headshot been deliberate. But some things just weren’t worth arguing with an eight year old, and ‘triple losing’, whatever it was, was one of them.

“Yeah, I guess I did,” she said instead. “Although for the record, I did not hit you on purpose,” she added anyway, shooting Mateo a stern look.

He raised an eyebrow, crossing his arms with mock severity. “Oh really? So this kind of thing is always an accident with you, huh?”

“Come on, that’s just cold. Stop—” she added, eyes closed, realizing too late what she’d said as Mateo snickered. Shaking her head, she dropped a glob of snow directly on his face.

“Naomi!” He sat up sharply, coughing and spluttering. “Ugh, it went up my nose!”

She just barely caught the sound of snow crunching behind them through everyone’s laughter.

“Olivia, Lucas,” a woman called. “It’s time to go home for lunch.”

“Aw, already?” Lucas whined, but he scooped up the still-ruffled Señor Whiskers like a baby and shuffled his way over.

Olivia looked more alarmed. “But I was supposed to help Mateo finish cleaning up…”

Somehow, Naomi didn’t think they’d ever started cleaning up, unless that was what they were calling ‘playing in the snow’ now.

Mateo scrambled to his feet, putting a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “We’ll figure it out,” he said, and then approached her mother, surreptitiously straightening out his robe. “We got a little distracted…”

Olivia’s mom watched him with a patient smile as he explained. Mateo was standing stick straight in a futile bid to look professional despite his soaked clothes and snow-covered hair. Naomi chuckled to herself as she watched, tuning out the actual conversation. He was too funny, trying so hard to look like an adult. Dork. The woman eventually left with her kids in tow, and Mateo returned to Naomi and Elena, rubbing his neck.

“Okay, Olivia and I are going to meet up again after lunch to actually clean up the damage the water spirit caused, so I have to get going if I want to have time to eat before then.”

“You guys could just eat at my place,” Naomi offered, standing up and brushing herself off. “I mean, it’s literally right there.”

Elena stood up as well. “That sounds great! Thanks!”

Naomi had to fumble with the doorknob for a moment, as numb as her fingers still were. Finally pushing the door open, she led her friends inside.

“Make yourself at home,” she said. “I’m gonna go change real quick. Do you guys want some clothes, too?”

Elena smiled, wringing out her dress. “That would probably be a good idea.”

“I think I’ll be okay.” Mateo’s voice was muffled by his robe, half-off and over his head. “My robe got the worst of it.”

Naomi snorted as he flailed around inside the fabric and Elena approached him to help. “I’ll grab you a shirt, anyway.”

By the time she dried off and came back downstairs with spare clothes for them both, he’d managed to free himself. He was tucking his shirt back in with one hand, the damp robe over his other arm and his hair disheveled. He peered around the room, amused.

“Are we sure this is the right house?” he asked. “I can actually see the floor.”

“Har, har,” Naomi said, tossing the shirt at him.

Elena looked up from the sofa where she was combing out her ponytail with her fingers. “Mateo, have you been here before?”

“Sure, once. I got trapped here by the weather, what?” He looked at Naomi. “About a year ago now, right?”

Naomi jolted. It hadn’t even been a year. The day of the storm felt like eons ago, in an era before she’d become entrenched in the world of royals and magic. It felt like part of a completely different life. “I… guess so, yeah. That was a little over a month before Elena came back.”

“And we’re just under two months out from the anniversary of that,” Elena mused, hands pausing over her hair. Naomi set the spare dress down beside her for whenever she was ready.

“It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long,” Mateo said, finally voicing what they were all thinking. “It feels like it should either be way longer or way shorter, but a year just sounds so… normal.”

A year ago, she and Mateo could barely look at each other, even when trapped in the same room. Talking to him had been an obstacle course, where every joke felt like an attack and every pleasantry was like pulling teeth. A year ago, he’d still had his magic locked up in a basement and hidden behind excuses and uncomfortable laughter. A year ago, she hadn’t even met her other friends; Elena had still been in that amulet and Gabe was who knew where. Her whole perspective of Avalor was the narrow window of her classroom and the walk back to her house. If someone had told her then that she’d spend her days riding jaquins and having magical snowball fights, or hosting lunch simultaneously for the Crown Princess and the quiet kid from her class, both of whom she’d consider two of her best friends, she wouldn’t have believed them.

She might have wanted to, though.

The atmosphere had gotten weird and ponderous, far too heavy for what had started as lighthearted goofing around. “What’s really crazy though is how long it’s been since I’ve had a snowball fight,” Naomi said, pushing the serious mood away. “I don’t think I’ve lived somewhere with regular snowfall since I was ten.”

“I’ve actually never seen snow that isn’t magical,” Mateo said, and both girls’ heads swiveled toward him.

“Wait, really?” Elena asked. “But the mountains get snow almost every winter. I’ve been to some of the villages there when they were covered in it!”

He simply shrugged. “My house was the furthest I’d been from the city until last year. I’ve only seen snow when I’ve conjured it by mistake. Or blown up a water spirit, I guess.”

Elena crossed her arms. “Well, we obviously have to fix that.”

“And Gabe, too,” Naomi added. “I bet he hasn’t seen a lot of it, either.”

“Oh my gosh, you’re right! Okay, that settles it!” She stood up suddenly, dropping her fist into her palm. “This winter, all four of us are going to take time off and go into the mountains to play in the snow.”

“That’s still a while away,” Mateo pointed out, but Elena waved him off, scooping the dress off the sofa and heading for the stairs.

“I know that, but I’m sure it’ll come around soon enough.” She shot him and Naomi a dazzling smile. “I mean, this last year has just flown by!”

Chapter Text

Naomi was cheering louder than anybody as Gabe stepped across the finish line of the captain trials, Rico’s arm over his shoulder. Whatever bizarre mood had possessed him the day before seemed to have vanished, and he was back to being his decent and reliable self. She’d have to ask him what all that had been about. Firstly, though, she’d have to congratulate him properly. Pride on his behalf swelled in her chest as he accepted the captain’s sword from Elena, and she grabbed Mateo by his elbow as the other guards began to crowd around Gabe below.

“C’mon, let’s go see him!”

Mateo nodded, and the two of them began their descent from the royal box. The relative privacy and the view of the whole arena were definite perks of being friends with a princess, but the distance from the field meant they had to squeeze their way down the steps past the throngs of people all trying to exit at once. By the time they got to the field, Elena was nowhere to be seen, no doubt whisked away on more royal business, and the guards were filing out of the arena, Gabe’s familiar silhouette at their head.

“Gabe!” Naomi sprinted toward the group, the lines of guards parting up the middle as she barreled through them. She threw herself up around Gabe’s shoulders before he could turn around, and he staggered forward with a grunt, craning his neck to look at where she dangled against his back. Naomi laughed. “What are you doing, trying to sneak off before we could congratulate you properly?”

Gabe raised an amused eyebrow. “We?”

Naomi turned her head and scanned the empty space behind the scattered guards. Whoops. “Well, Mateo was here. I guess I lost him somewhere.”

“You lost him?”

“He’s fine. He’s somewhere.” She dropped from Gabe’s neck and looked around, spying Mateo stuck on the opposite side of a large crowd of exiting spectators. He was up on his toes, trying to catch a glimpse of them over the crowd’s heads, and he pulled an apologetic face and waved as he finally noticed Naomi looking. “He’ll be here in a minute,” she said, turning back to Gabe.

The other guards continued past, some clapping Gabe’s shoulders or offering him an extra ‘congrats again’ as they left. One guard remarked, “See you soon, Baker Boy,” as he passed, and Gabe straightened up with a chuckle, puffing out his chest.

“Hey, that’s Captain Baker Boy to you,” he said. “And the barracks better be empanada-free by the time I get there!”

There was a chorus of laughter and ‘yes sir’-s as they went on their way, and Gabe squared his shoulders, looking proud.

Mateo ran up to them, finally free of the blockade. “Whew, okay! I’m here.” Smiling, he reached up to slap his hand into Gabe’s, gripping it firmly. “Good job today!”

“Thanks! Both of you.”

“So,” Naomi piped up again, “are you gonna show us your fancy new sword or are you gonna leave us hanging?”

“Well, I saw it before the contest,” Mateo said, but he still leaned in excitedly as Gabe drew it from its sheath and held it out, one hand on the hilt and the other supporting the flat of the blade with his fingers.

“Pretty great, huh?” he asked, grinning ear to ear. It was a much nicer looking sword than his old, standard issue one. Its swooping, golden crossguard wouldn't look out of place on one of the ceremonial items that hung in the palace halls, but the blade was far more heavy-duty than any of those delicate, decorative pieces. If it was any heavier than Gabe’s old sword, though, he didn’t show it, his arms holding it perfectly steady.

So why had Mateo seen it before? She meant to ask, but Gabe spoke up before she could. “By the way, Mateo, thanks for the potion this morning. I’m not sure what I would’ve done without it.”

“Oh, no problem! I was actually a little worried there at the end. I thought maybe it hadn’t worked.”

An alarm wire tripped in Naomi’s mind and she yanked her head up, staring at him. What would Gabe have needed a potion for? And right before a contest, no less? No, the guys wouldn’t have done anything illicit.

…Would they?

“What potion?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

Gabe tensed at the danger in her tone, but shot his accusatory look at Mateo instead. “You didn’t tell her?”

Mateo wrinkled his nose, confused. “Was I supposed to? It sounded like the sort of thing you wouldn’t want people to know about.”

Naomi’s suspicions grew tenfold, the alarm bell now an entire symphony. “Oh, really?”

They wouldn’t have cheated the competition. They were both better than that. They had to be.

Gabe had sheathed his sword and was holding his hands out in a placating gesture. “Okay, it’s not what it sounds like.”

“Well it sounds pretty bad!” She put her hands on her hips, staring up at him in a challenge. “It sounds like you had Mateo make something to give you an edge during the competition!”

“No!” they both protested.

“If you’ll just let me explain—” Gabe went on.

“Gabe was cursed!” Mateo added.

The first thread of doubt at her conclusion wove its way between her assumptions, but still on high alert as she was, it morphed instead into something uglier. Mateo would’ve believed Gabe in a second if he told him he’d been cursed with ‘super-slowness’ or something and needed to combat it. Like their school days all over again. Gabe would never do that, she knew, he would never, but some deep seated defensiveness, hideous and deceptive, crawled up through her guts and had her wheeling on him, glaring.

“Oh yeah?” she snapped. “What kind of curse?”

Gabe had crossed his arms, hunching in on himself with his face pinched and downcast. He was embarrassed, Naomi realized, and her anger drained in a rush as he spoke, guilt flooding into its place. “I… picked up a sword I wasn’t supposed to touch, and it got stuck to my hand and changed my personality.”

“It’s why he was acting like such a clown yesterday,” Mateo chimed in, and Gabe winced.

“Ouch, Mateo.”

“Well, you were.” He turned back to Naomi. “If anything, it would’ve been more like cheating if Gabe hadn’t taken the potion, since then El Guapo would’ve been competing instead of him.”

“You’re not helping…” Gabe muttered.

“And even if it was cheating—”

“Which it wasn’t!” Gabe insisted. “Mateo!”

But Mateo plowed ahead, heedless of Gabe’s cautionary tone. “Even if it was, it’s kind of hypocritical of you to have an issue with that all of a sudden, considering how you wanted me to make him something for the Peace Festival olaball game!”

Heat flooded Naomi’s face. Why would he just announce that?

“Wait, you wanted me to cheat at olaball?” Gabe asked, sounding hurt.

“No! Mateo, I wasn’t serious about that!”

“You sounded pretty serious,” he countered. “You kept going on about how awful he was at it, and—”

Naomi leaped forward and clapped a hand over his mouth, with Gabe’s hand a split second behind. Mateo blinked rapidly, glancing between them, before letting out a bewildered ‘mmphf?’ through both their palms.

“Mateo,” Naomi said, her voice strained. She dropped her forehead onto his shoulder. “We love you, but you’re digging us all deeper right now. Please stop.”

“I really don’t need to hear any more about that,” Gabe added. He still looked wounded, between Naomi’s accusations and Mateo’s commentary, and Naomi’s insides gave another painful twist. “It really was just a cursed sword that I couldn’t get rid of,” he went on, as long as Mateo couldn’t jump back in. “Why would I go back for Rico if I was so desperate to win I was willing to cheat?”

“You didn’t go back when he fell yesterday,” Naomi pointed out before she could stop herself.

Gabe flinched. “Yeah. I know. I wanted to, but Guapo…” He let his hand drop from Naomi’s and ran it across the back of his head. “I know I shouldn’t have messed with the sword. I should have just taken it to the museum like I was supposed to. Believe me, whatever it was Guapo was doing to me, I didn’t want that.”

An annoyed noise slipped out of Mateo’s mouth as he finally pried Naomi’s hand off his face. “Hey, Gabe?”

He shot Mateo an unamused look. “What?”

“Where is the sword?”

Gabe blinked. “...What?”

“Where did you put it after you dealt with the curse?” Mateo clarified. “Where is it now?”

“Oh, uh…” He pointed toward one of the other exits. “Elena and I were able to get it stuck in a cart back behind the stadium. It should still be there.”

“‘Should still’ —You just left it there?! Where anyone could grab it?!”

“Well, I had to get to the contest—”

Mateo groaned, a guttural, angry sound. “Gabe! I was up all night working on that reversal potion!”

“You would’ve been up all night anyway! Okay, look, just calm down!” Gabe had his hands up again as he started backing toward the exit. “I’ll go get it right now.”

“No, I’ll go get it,” Mateo snapped, sticking an arm out to cut him off. “You can’t move it without touching it again!”

The remark struck a stubborn nerve, and Gabe bristled. “What, and I suppose that you—”

Mateo brandished his tamborita, gesturing at it with an incredulous, ‘duh’ expression.

“—You can. Wizard. Right.” Gabe hunched in again, his face flushing. “Never mind. Carry on.”

Rolling his eyes, Mateo stormed off, his irritated muttering fading into the distance.

Gabe rubbed at his neck as he watched him go. “...I really owe him one. I don’t think I could’ve competed if he hadn’t helped me, at least not honestly.” He looked over at Naomi, something sad in his eyes and plaintive in his voice. “You don’t really think I would’ve cheated, do you?”

Naomi’s heart sank, settling like lead into the pit of her stomach. It was a fair question, though it hit like a club. She had been willing to believe, for however short a time, that someone she was supposed to trust would do something so dishonest. Worse yet, she’d been willing to believe he’d betrayed not only the integrity of the competition, but Mateo’s trust as well, dragging him into it, and no matter how she tried to frame her overreaction as an act of familiar protectiveness, it painted neither of her friends in a flattering light. Gabe wasn’t manipulative, and Mateo wasn’t stupid. It had been unfair of her to think otherwise.

“No,” she finally admitted, her voice soft. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions like that.”

Relief dampened the hurt in his eyes, though it didn’t banish it entirely. He tried to laugh it off, anyway. “Well, I can see how you did. I did take the sword. And…” He let out a slow breath, a guilty, not-quite smile on his face. “I probably should have come clean about what was going on yesterday already. I know I was acting terrible, and as much as I want to blame Guapo, I was still the one that didn’t do my job in the first place.”

“Still. I didn’t mean to put such a damper on your big day.” She cringed, wringing her hands and giving him a weak smile. “Congrats again?”

Gabe’s face was tight with discomfort. “Actually, I was just thinking it might not be my ‘big day’ for long. Professor Mendoza is gonna kill me when she finds out I took the sword.” He shuddered. “I have no idea what I’m gonna tell her.”

“I could try talking to her for you,” Naomi offered. She’d been studying Old Maruvian with the professor ever since their dig the previous fall, and they’d built up a steady rapport in that time. Maybe it would be possible to soften the blow. “It’s the least I could do after. Y’know. Yelling at you for no reason.”

Before Gabe could respond, Mateo strode back up to them, the sword in question hovering in the air beside him in a ring of orange light. “Or you can tell her that the Royal Wizard has taken it for study, and the museum can have it back when he’s done with it.”

Gabe raised an eyebrow. “What, you want me to lie to her?”

“Who’s lying?” Mateo crossed his arms, sending the sword spinning in the air as he moved his wand. “I’m keeping it. I don’t know when I’m going to get another chance to study a cursed object, so I’m not missing this one.” He lowered his voice, annoyed. “Honestly, I don’t know why she didn’t bring it straight to me in the first place. I mean,” he spread his arms and rolled his eyes, and Naomi had to duck back as the sword swung again, “I’m the only person in the Kingdom that’s actually qualified to work with cursed items!”

“Maybe work with it somewhere no one’s gonna get stabbed,” Naomi said, still leaning away.

“I appreciate that, Mateo, Naomi, but I can’t let you guys take the fall for me,” Gabe said. “I should be honest with her.”

Once again, Gabe made perfectly clear how off-the-mark Naomi’s judgment had been, and she met his eyes, hoping the silent apology carried. He gave a small nod, the corner of his mouth tilting up.

Mateo, oblivious to the silent exchange, just shrugged. “Whatever you say. But I’m still keeping the sword.”

Chapter Text

It was almost unfair, having to go back to the Sunflower Festival.

Rita was a farce from the start, Fiero was free once again, and Shuriki was alive and well. And despite it all, as the ever faithful Crown Princess to her people, Elena had to return to the party with a smile on her face and a spring in her step, as if her world hadn’t been completely rearranged. She was the bastion of Avaloran hope, and she couldn’t afford to cause any more alarm than what her brief absence while she was chasing after the sorceress may have already done. As it was, people cast her strange looks, perhaps seeing through the cheery facade, or just concerned by her disheveled hair and rumpled clothes.

Naomi couldn’t imagine how she had to feel. It was hard enough to watch Elena freeze up at the sight of Shuriki, to feel the blood freeze in her veins as she thought she was about to lose one of her best friends. But Naomi hadn’t spent half a lifetime trapped in an amulet, or grown up under Shuriki’s tyrannical reign. She hadn’t lost any loved ones to Avalor’s tumultuous past.

It was a wonder her friends could endure it.

Gabe had taken off to the barracks the moment they’d returned to the palace, determined to rally the guard with an efficiency that would leave people surprised he’d only been Captain for a few months. Mateo had retreated into an eerie, pensive kind of quiet, shadowing Elena as she went about the palace courtyard, with unguarded concern for her etched across his face and drawing some odd looks from the still blissfully ignorant guests. And Elena kept smiling, right up until the moment she abruptly excused herself, turning toward the palace with an urgency that went far beyond her usual impatience.

It was completely unfair.

Mateo, always loyal, was close on her heels, and Naomi watched them disappear through the front doors, not even half listening to the conversation she’d been dragged into. With a curt goodbye that would have certainly offended Esteban’s sensibilities had he been nearby, Naomi took off after her friends. Even if she could never truly understand what they were going through, she knew she needed to be there for them.

What she saw inside made her breath catch, and she struggled to swallow past the lump in her throat: Elena was on her knees in a secluded corner of the main hall, and she was weeping. Strong, fearless Elena, who had endured nightmarish isolation and come back swinging, who had faced down villain after villain with unyielding resolve, was clutching at Mateo’s robe like a lifeline and sobbing into his shoulder. Mateo was holding onto her more tightly than he usually would, biting his lip and straining to keep his jaw from trembling. When he caught sight of Naomi standing nearby, he swallowed, and wordlessly, he held an arm out toward her.

Naomi didn’t wait for a second invitation. She ran to the pair and dropped to her knees by their side, the skirt of her festival dress pooling around her legs, and she reached out to wrap an arm around each of them, scooting close enough for her shoulder to be touching Mateo’s. Elena, realizing she was there, turned in her friends’ arms to rest her head between the two of them. They’d barely had time to settle in when Gabe came running into the room, in full guard mode.

“Your Highness, I’ve gathered the–” he started, but froze at the sight of his friends. “Elena,” he breathed, and Naomi waved him over, and Mateo grabbed onto his sleeve to pull him in as he dove to the floor, and suddenly Gabe’s arms had enveloped the rest of them in a hug that could rival a Norberg squeeze.

They sat like that for what could have been five minutes, or five hours. They sat, holding each other like the four of them were all that was left in the world, Naomi feeling hyper-aware of the weight of Gabe’s arm across her shoulders, and the way Mateo’s breath kept hitching under her palm, and the damp spot where Elena’s tears were soaking into her sleeve. They sat like that until Elena’s sobs died down into sniffles, and then finally petered out entirely.

She sat back, wiping at her eyes, and fixed her friends with a watery smile. “Thanks,” she said, her voice thick. “Today has been…” she waved a hand around aimlessly, searching for a word that could even begin to describe the horror they’d faced that afternoon. “...Hard,” she finally settled with. Sighing, she closed her eyes. “I’m not quite sure what the next step is,” she admitted, “but… can I count on all of you to take it with me?”

“Always,” Gabe promised.

“No matter what,” Mateo added.

Naomi smiled, and rested a hand on Elena’s. “What are friends for?”

Elena’s face relaxed, and she drew in one more shuddering breath. “Then what are we waiting for?” She opened her eyes again, a fire brighter than any of her scepter’s magic burning behind them. “We have a sorceress to catch. To start: Gabe, I want you to set up patrol groups around the borders of the city, just to make sure Shuriki doesn’t come back, and send a group of scouts after her to get a better idea of where she might be going.”

He gave her shoulder one last firm squeeze and then pulled himself to his feet. “Right away, Your Highness.” He saluted and took off back toward the barracks, though Naomi caught the mournful look in his eye as he turned, as if it pained him to leave her.

“Mateo,” Elena went on, “do you think you can fix some of the damage from the fight?” She gestured around the ruins of the main hall. The shattered remains of the frozen chandelier lay strewn between the pockmarks of magic, burnt into the floor like scars, and some of the support columns dotting the sides of the room looked dangerously close to crumbling. The acrid smell of Shruiki’s magic still hung in the air, burning in Naomi’s nose as she breathed.

Mateo jolted as she addressed him, like he’d been deep in thought, and as he tracked her hand, something finally kicked his brain back into motion. “Oh, uh, right. I can take care of that.” He looked faraway as he stood, the haunting quiet settling back in around him and slowing his movement like there was a physical weight to it he was straining against. Broken glass crunched under his feet as he made his way toward the edge of the room, and the normally familiar beat of his drum and crackle of his magic echoed ominously through the battered room.

The atmosphere pressed similarly around Elena, judging by the way she shuddered and worried at her lip. Her eyes were locked on nothing, and Naomi could see the way the shadows of the battle flickered through them, formless and dark. Carefully, slowly, Naomi reached out and took her hands.

“Hey, what do you need me to do?”

Elena’s breath caught in a hiccup of surprise and grief, but she gripped Naomi’s hands back, tightly enough that it pinched. “Stay with me for a bit? I—I don’t really want to be alone right now.” Naomi nodded, and Elena continued with a shaky exhale. “We’ll need to call an emergency Grand Council meeting. And we’ll need more search parties than just one group of scouts. And we—how did she even get a wand in the first place?” She stood sharply, her hands starting to slip out of Naomi’s. “How do we know that she can’t just make another new one—”

But Naomi followed her up, keeping her grip steady as an anchor. “Hey, hey, one thing at a time, okay? Shuriki’s not here right now, so we have a moment to catch our breath.”

“But—”

Mateo softly cleared his throat from a few columns down. He uncurled his fingers from around a handful of glittering shards—the obliterated remains of Shuriki’s wand. “I can start looking into how she got this,” he offered. “With the pieces, it shouldn’t be too hard to trace their source.”

“There, see?” Naomi said as Elena began to protest again. “Mateo’s got it covered. How about you and I just start with getting cleaned up a little?”

They were a bit of a mess. Their festival dresses were rumpled and stained, and their hair had long since started to pull from their elaborate updos. Something dark smeared across Elena’s forehead, either a smudge of dirt or a bruise, and Naomi was certain she had matching marks on her own face.

Elena looked between her and Mateo, and when he gave an encouraging nod, she let out another anxious sigh. “Okay, let’s do that first.”

“Great!” Naomi didn’t waste any time ushering Elena toward the stairs, pausing just long enough at the bottom of the steps to cast an expression of silent gratitude back toward Mateo. He didn’t look especially reassured, still loitering in a fog of melancholy, but the corner of his mouth twitched in acknowledgement before he turned back to his work, stuffing the crystal dust into the pockets of his robe.

The walk back to Elena’s room was tense and quiet. They encountered few people in the halls, just a handful of palace staff that weren’t out at the festival, and each time someone’s footsteps drew near, Elena’s body tightened more than an over-wound clock. Naomi kept a hand on her arm the entire way, squeezing every so often to bring her back to reality, but she was trying to patch a dam that was doomed to fail. She staved off the worst of it until they reached the room, and then another raw sob tore from Elena’s throat as she collapsed onto her bed.

“How can she be back?” she wailed into the sheets. “She was dead! She fell off the bridge! I saw it!” Twisting around, she looked back at where Naomi was closing the door behind them, her eyes swollen and red. “You remember, right?”

Something sharp lodged in Naomi’s chest. Now was probably not the best time to remind Elena that she hadn’t actually been there that day. Instead, she let out a noncommittal noise, busying herself with the door and hoping the discomfort hadn’t made it to her face.

“I just—I don’t understand—” She drew a shuddering breath, and the misery on her face darkened into rage. “And how could anyone work with her? Victor used to be my friend, I don’t get how he could ever—and he even dragged his daughter into it!” Suddenly standing again, Elena stalked around the edge of her bed, her hands balling into fists. “It’s like every time things seem like they’re getting better, someone has to ruin it! How is Avalor ever supposed to heal if there are so many people bent on making sure it never does? Ugh, I wish they would all just—”

Muffling a hoarse scream in her hands, she sank back onto the edge of her bed. The anger bled back out into despair, and she peeled her hands away from her face to stare blankly at the floor. Her ranting had pulled thick strands of hair loose from her bun, leaving them hanging around her like the world’s saddest streamers, and tears, angry and bitter and grieving, clung to her cheeks.

Naomi carefully sat beside her, brushing a hand against her shoulder to get her attention, and then wrapped her arms around her. Elena leaned into the hug, burying her face in Naomi’s shoulder and crying herself out for the second time that day. Any attempt at reassurance would sound empty, Naomi knew, so she just held her friend instead, listening as she tore her way through four plus decades of bottled up horror and resentment. Where her tears before had been distraught, now it all came out as fury, the kind that burned, venomous and caustic, as she spoke.

Fury at Shuriki, for the murder of her parents, for the tyranny over her people, for the indecency of refusing to stay dead.

Fury at the Delgados, for betraying her trust, for allying with a witch, for not staying out of Avalor when she gave them a second chance.

Fury at herself, for noticing too late, for trusting the wrong people, for not being strong enough to stop them all then and there.

The long shadows of sunset were stretching from the window by the time Elena had calmed down enough to pull away. She wiped her face off, sniffling and blinking rapidly. “I’ll catch her,” she concluded.

“We’ll catch her,” Naomi corrected. “We’re all gonna help you.”

Elena managed a weak smile against the exhaustion marring her features. “Thank you, but this is my responsibility.” Glancing down at herself, she grimaced as if just noticing her appearance. “I’m… going to get changed.”

She disappeared behind the screen further back in her room. Naomi let out a sigh she’d been holding in, quiet enough to not be heard over the rustle of clothes, and rubbed her hands against her face. Everything had gone so sideways so quickly. Her friends were hurt, her home was in danger, and she had no idea what to do about any of it. Still, she felt grimly vindicated; she’d been absolutely right about Rita all along, and if anyone had just listened to her…

No, that wasn’t fair. The others saw no reason to mistrust her, and Naomi herself had doubted her own judgment for several weeks in the middle of Rita’s stay. She could have been more forceful, she could have been more insistent, she could have gone to anyone earlier about her concerns, or to someone other than Elena when she wouldn’t listen. If she could have only explained why Rita’s overly-cheerful, sickening sweetness twisted so horribly in her gut, the familiarity of it reeking of betrayal from a mile away.

Heels clicking on the floor announced Elena’s presence as she reemerged from behind the screen, back in her red dress and combing her hair out with her fingers. “I need to find my grandparents,” she said. Her voice was still wobbly and thick, but she was comprehensible now, and she’d cleaned up the tear tracks. “And check in with the guys. And—well, I need to do a lot, actually.” Grabbing a hair tie from a nearby vanity, she bundled her hair back into a ponytail. “Your things are still back there, too, if you wanna go ahead and change. I’m going to get going—if I don’t work toward a mission right now I’m going to just sit down and start crying again, so…”

“Yeah, sure. I’ll stick with you. Just gimme a second to change—”

“You can take your time. I’ll be alright.” She checked her ponytail one last time and paused by the door, her fingers on the knob. “Thank you for being here. And I’m sorry again for not listening to you earlier. None of this would’ve happened if I had just…” Her lip trembled again and she swallowed.

Somehow, the apology didn’t feel as validating as it had earlier that afternoon. But Naomi plastered on a smile to mask the sinking guilt. “Hey, don’t worry about it.”

She waited until Elena’s footsteps had receded out of earshot to cover her mouth and scream.

In a sharp contrast to the funeral march to Elena’s room, Naomi’s journey toward the barracks was bustling. Guards hurried back and forth in small teams, gathering together supplies and distributing them among patrol groups. The door to the stables had been propped open as they rushed in and out, and the occasional confused whinny cut over the chorus of commands being shouted down the line. Gabe must have mobilized the entire guard. Naomi had never seen them outfitted for a full mission before—it was uncanny to see them so uniformly serious.

She waved to catch the attention of a pair of guards sharpening their swords. “Hey, have any of you guys seen Ga—Captain Núñez?”

One inclined his head. “Grand Councilor. The captain is outside, preparing for the scouting mission.”

Of course he was. It was just like him to throw himself into the heaviest of lifting. With a quick nod of thanks, Naomi squeezed through the doorway past another group of guards, thankful her day clothes were so much less unwieldy than the ruffles of her festival dress.

Seeking Gabe out hadn’t been her first plan. She was going to go home and fill her parents in on everything that had happened, but got halfway through changing before she remembered the emergency council meeting Elena had mentioned and then failed to provide any details about. Presumably, Elena would send Armando or Private Higgins to find her when it came time for that, but there seemed little sense in going home just to come right back. And if she was going to loiter around the palace until then, then she had no reason to not follow Elena’s lead in checking in on her other friends. Besides, she figured she might run into Elena again in passing, and could hopefully get the details about the imminent meeting in person.

Weaving between rows of guards, Naomi finally spotted Gabe by his horse, loading up one of its saddlebags and relaying a rapid set of orders to another guard nearby, who stood at attention. “Gabe!”

He lifted his head briefly and dismissed the other guard before turning fully to her, his expression serious. “Naomi, is everything okay? Did something happen?”

“You mean besides everything this afternoon? No.” His face relaxed almost imperceptibly. “I was just checking in. Have you seen Elena?”

“She was here earlier. Don’t worry; I assigned her a personal guard detail until Shuriki’s been caught.” That hadn’t been why Naomi was asking, and knowing Elena, she probably wasn’t pleased by the smothering, but Gabe continued before she could comment. “I’ll lead that group myself once I get back, but right now I need to head this scouting mission. Shuriki can’t have gotten too far yet—if we can just catch up to her—”

There was a familiar-sounding desperate edge to his voice, the very same one that Naomi had heard in Elena’s voice earlier that day when she’d led them in a frantic and ill-timed chase of the sorceress. Naomi frowned. While eagerness was common enough for Gabe, sloppiness wasn’t. Rushing headlong toward danger was more Elena’s speed than his, although she had seen him get careless when someone else was in danger, and this definitely qualified.

“You’re leading it yourself,” she remarked. It wasn’t a question, and judging by the way Gabe’s face crumpled, he caught the underlying warning. Don’t do anything reckless.

“I have to,” he said. “You don’t understand,” he lowered his voice and leaned in, tapping a hand against his chest, “I’m the reason she got into the palace. I’m the Captain of the Guard. It’s my job to make sure threats to the kingdom stay out, and if security was lax enough for Shuriki to get in, then that’s on me.”

Some vindictive part of Naomi wanted to agree with him. Shuriki hadn’t exactly been inconspicuous, loitering around in a quiet part of the gardens in clothes far too dark and heavy for the spring air. Naomi had picked her out as unusual right away. But even then, her focus had been on Rita, not the people she was with. The gates had been open to all visitors, and ‘unusual’ wasn’t a good enough reason to bar someone entry. Had she been anyone other than Shuriki, she would have had every right to be there. Gabe was no more to blame than Elena was.

Not to mention, Naomi never told him her suspicions about Rita until it was too late.

“You didn’t know Shuriki was even still alive,” Naomi reminded him, shoving the guilt to the back of her mind. “No one knew Shuriki was still alive.”

“A royal guard is supposed to plan for every possibility.”

She drew back, scrunching up her face. “How are you supposed to plan for things that are impossible?”

“I don’t know!” He threw his hands up. “But I could’ve done something! I—” he sucked in a harsh breath and looked away, locking his jaw, “When we split up to investigate what Rita was doing, I passed by the treasury. The door had been blasted in and the guards stationed outside it were knocked out. And you and Elena could’ve been hurt if Elena hadn’t broken Shuriki’s wand.” His face turned back toward her, his eyes despondent. “It doesn’t matter if I couldn't have planned for this. People got hurt today on my watch. I can’t let that happen again.”

So it was some kind of penance, then. That didn’t change the fact that it was reckless.

“So what exactly is your plan now?”

Gabe straightened up. “I’m going to take the scouting group to the edge of the jungle and start looking systematically from there. We’ll find her.”

“Okay, but what’s your plan,” Naomi repeated. “You always have one.”

Something uncomfortable swept across his face, but he was spared having to answer when another guard rushed up to them.

“Captain, the scouts are ready to go.”

“Right. Then we’ll move out.” He swung a foot up into the stirrup of Fuego’s saddle and hoisted himself up, even as Naomi tried to protest again.

“Gabe—”

“I’ll see you later. Stay safe, okay?”

“Gabe, don’t you dare—”

He shouted a command to the other guards in the scouting group and tapped his heels against Fuego’s sides, and before Naomi could challenge him a third time, they’d all taken off, galloping toward the bridge.

Naomi waved the kicked-up dust cloud away with a growl. So she was zero for two on getting her friends to listen to her. That was fine.

The main hall looked immaculate when Naomi passed back through. The columns were whole, the chandelier was suspended; she let out a low whistle at how pristine it all looked, as if there had never been a battle there at all. Mateo was getting good at this. Any trace amounts of rubble or dust were being swept away underfoot as festival-goers began to filter in, chatting amongst themselves and none the wiser that anything had happened. The only remaining signs of the conflict were the sour smell of Shuriki’s magic that would only air out with time, and the distress Naomi knew was still on her face. She squeezed between guests and staff, sending an occasional tight smile toward those that tried to address her, and made her way upstairs.

The path to the library was quieter than the more trafficked areas of the palace, and it gave Naomi a chance to gather her thoughts again. Carla’s masquerade as “Rita” had been targeted, and in hindsight, it made sense. Mateo’s magic made him versatile, and he was inclined to trust anyone that showed him any amount of kindness. After her failure in exploiting Naomi, he would’ve made a much easier mark. And if Naomi was feeling guilty just from failing to speak up sooner, she could only imagine how he felt, having been the fulcrum on which Carla’s plan hinged.

The temperature dropped abruptly as Naomi stepped into the library, and as she poked her head into the workshop, it wasn’t hard to figure out why. The room was a mess. Frost crept up the side of the worktable, upon which sat the Codex Maru, cracked open with frayed edges of torn pages jutting out of it. The ice spread along the ground, leaving the floor gleaming and slick as it stretched toward the center of the room, where shards of glass and globs of potion residue turned the room especially treacherous.

For how quickly Mateo had cleaned up the main hall, he was patching up his workshop the old-fashioned way. He was crouched on the floor, delicately plucking larger chunks of glass from the mess and dropping them into a wastebasket he’d pulled up beside him. His back was to the door, so she couldn’t see his face, but a thick sniffle made it obvious what she could expect to find.

“Mateo?” she tried, her voice soft so as to not startle him.

He flinched anyway, gasping and whipping his head toward the doorway. Sure enough, his eyes were wide and shiny, like he’d either been crying or was about to start. “Naomi, um, hi.” He turned away again, hastily wiping his sleeve across his eyes.

Out of courtesy, Naomi turned away from him and went to examine the damaged Codex. “What happened in here?”

“Carla happened,” he spat, pitching another glass shard into the bin. “When she took the key, she broke in and went through my potions. It’s how she un-stoned Fiero, which I figured out when he showed up in here and tried to steal the Codex.”

Naomi filed the information away, filling in the gaps of what had happened while she’d gone to warn Elena and while Gabe was stumbling across the broken treasury door. She hovered her fingers over the sheet of ice across the table, the chill seeping under skin even without direct contact. “You guys fought in here?” Glancing back at him, her face furrowed in concern. “Are you hurt?”

From the angle, she could see how drawn he looked. He shook his head, still not looking at her. “I’m fine.” The way his grimace tightened whenever he drew too deep a breath said otherwise. As if the world wanted to spite him further, he overbalanced as he tried to grab an out of reach shard, and he tipped palm-first onto it instead with a startled gasp.

Naomi jolted from her spot by the table as he recoiled with a hiss, red welling up across his hand. “Mateo, are you—”

“I’m fine.” Clutching his fist closed, he hauled himself to his feet. He rearranged his face into a tepid smile, like a half-hearted apology for snapping at her. “It’s just a scratch. I’m fine.”

It didn’t sound any more convincing the third time around. Naomi stepped out of the way so he could grab a clean rag from a compartment in the worktable. He pressed the cloth to his injured hand and pressed his mouth into a hard line, staring down at the jagged seam where the freezing spell met stone.

“You need any help with anything?” Naomi offered. “Another set of hands might help with the cleanup, especially considering…” she nodded toward his own hand.

“I’ve got it,” he said, sounding hoarse. Retrieving a small roll of gauze from the same compartment, he made to start securing the rag against his palm, but after a pair of false starts seemed to realize it would be a challenge one-handed. “Um, actually, could you…” he trailed off, turning toward her with his face tense from embarrassment.

“Oh, sure.” And she took the gauze from him. She wrapped his hand in silence for a moment, unsure of how best to broach her own concerns, until Mateo spoke up again, in an even smaller voice than before.

“I can’t believe I did that.”

She glanced up at him. “What, fell into the glass you were cleaning up?”

“Fell for Carla’s con.” He sighed, wincing as she tugged the fabric more tightly around his palm. “I should have noticed that something was wrong. I should have at least noticed when she took the key! I can’t believe I was so, so—” he swallowed, a tiny tremor in his voice, “—so stupid.”

“You’re not stupid,” Naomi replied automatically. “You know you’re not.”

An almost imperceptible disappointment flickered behind his eyes, and he looked away stiffly, retrieving his bandaged hand. “Okay. Did you actually need something from me?”

His tone was sharper than she’d expected, and Naomi drew back, offense pinching in her chest. “I’m sorry, do you want me to leave?”

“Please,” he responded, his voice tight. “It’s not you,” he quickly added, as if that made it any better, “it’s just that I—look, I already had this conversation with Gabe and Elena, and I—I don’t think I have it in me to do it a third time, so,” he sniffed, thick and gross, and it hit Naomi just how close to tears he actually was. Alarm bells clanged in the back of her mind. Just what had the others said to him?

“What are you talking about?” she asked. “What conversation?”

“You know,” he spread his hands, “the one where you tell me that it wasn’t my fault, and she had us all fooled, and that no one really blames me.”

He sounded sarcastic, and he also wasn’t making sense. None of what he was saying sounded bad. Reassurance hardly warranted the attitude, and though he’d hit the nail on the head for what Naomi had planned to say, she still felt like they were having two separate discussions.

He took her dumbfounded expression as a cue to continue, something almost pleading in his eyes. “Unless you’re here to skip the sympathy and just say what we’re all really thinking.”

Huffing, she crossed her arms. “Okay, I give up. What are we all really thinking?”

Mateo opened his mouth, closed it, and stared back at his hand, picking absently at the bandage across his palm. “That this is all my fault. That I should have known better. That my stupidity is causing nothing but problems.”

Oh. Naomi’s posture loosened, her face falling. She’d half expected something like this, after all. “None of us are thinking any of that,” she promised. “We really aren’t blaming you for this.”

But rather than be pacified, Mateo drew his face up into a sardonic, bitter smile. “I thought I could at least count on you to be blunt.”

He may as well have slapped her. Pity whiplashed into indignation as the accusation of dishonesty burned in her cheeks. Mateo started to turn away again in a retreat toward the back of the room, but Naomi swung around the other side of the table and cut him off. She jabbed a finger against his chest, boxing him in toward the potion shelf and trying not to notice how his eyebrows pinched together in anxiety and pain.

“You wanna know what’s stupid?” she snapped. “What’s stupid is that you think I have nothing better to do with my time than go out of my way to lie to you! What’s stupid is that after all this time, you still trust me so little that you can’t believe I might mean what I say!”

If she’d gone to him earlier, she wouldn’t have been nearly so wound up, she knew. But after an afternoon of guilt festering in her stomach, swallowed down like bile because it had been more important to give her friends reassurance than seek it herself, Mateo’s suggestion that she and the others were just being dishonest was the proverbial straw on the camel’s back. Like he was the only one hurting. Like the rest of them just didn’t care.

Mateo looked crestfallen, and he shook his head rapidly. “Of course not! That wasn’t what I was trying to say—”

Naomi folded her arms. “Then what were you trying to say?”

He shrank back under her glare, but his voice only climbed in volume, a defensive edge to it. “I’m saying—all of you went out of your way to reassure me that no one blames me. But doesn’t—” he swallowed, “—doesn’t that mean you had to think I did something deserving of blame?”

“That’s not—” Naomi let out a frustrated groan. “I didn’t come here to reassure you; I came here to apologize!”

Blinking owlishly, Mateo straightened up, the fight draining out of him in an instant. “You—what?”

Her arms still crossed, Naomi gave an annoyed huff. “Do you really think you’re the only person beating yourself up over this? Elena’s mad at herself for not catching on to ‘Rita’, Gabe’s mad at himself for not checking the festival guests enough—literally all of us could’ve done better these last few days.”

Mateo still looked confused. “What do you have to be upset with yourself about? You’re the one that actually knew that Rita was up to something.”

“Yeah, for all the good that did. I didn’t do anything about it until it was too late.” Sighing, she let herself sag against the worktable, leaning on it with one hip. “I knew she was up to something from the start, but I gave up when I couldn’t prove it, and by the time I made up my mind she’d already made her move.”

She sank further in on herself, guilt welling up at the memory of what she’d seen ‘Rita’ do. She’d heard the overly saccharine praise, seen the way she’d roll her eyes the second Mateo had turned his back. “It was like the Beatríz thing all over again,” she said. “I saw what she was doing to you, but I didn’t say anything back then, and I didn't say anything now.” She looked up to meet his eyes. “I’m sorry. For both times.”

But Mateo had squeezed his eyes shut, his fingers digging into his arms. “I was trying so hard not to think about the Beatríz thing,” he said, his voice brittle.

“Mateo—”

“I could’ve gone the rest of my life without thinking about the Beatríz thing.”

Something in his tone told her that was exactly what he’d been thinking about, for all his effort not to. Where his face had softened during her admission of guilt, it was pulled taut again at the memories, and Naomi saw his lip tremble for a second before he spoke again.

“How did I fall for the same trick twice? You’d think after the first time around, I would’ve actually learned something! And—and even if I know it was Beatríz choosing to target me, or Carla choosing to target me, there—” he swallowed, “—there had to be a reason why they chose me, right? Do I—what, do I have a sign on my back that says ‘con me, I’m gullible?’”

Letting out a sound part way between a bitter laugh and a hiccup, he thumped backward against the potion shelf and slid to the floor like he couldn’t hold himself up anymore. He shuddered, either from the ice he was half sitting on or just from stress, and pressed a shaking hand to his mouth, sucking in another harsh breath.

And then, almost too soft to hear, “I think there’s something wrong with me.”

Naomi’s heart clenched. Had the context been different, her gut reaction would have been to laugh it off with a scoffing “y’think?” She’d tease him a little, call him a dork or nerd, and they’d move on, leaving the air a bit lighter behind them. But Mateo sounded vulnerable and small, watching her with a look of abject misery. So instead she quickly sat opposite him, her back to the worktable, and bumped a foot against his. “Hey, there’s nothing wrong with you, I promise. None of us think that.”

Rather than look comforted, though, Mateo sniffled again, wrinkling his nose like he’d tasted something sour. “I’m not looking for reassurance. I’m looking for honesty.”

“This is honest,” Naomi retorted. “Do you seriously believe we think badly of you? Do you want me to sit here and insult you? Because I’m not going to,” she quickly added as Mateo lifted his eyes.

He shook his head. “No, I just… I just want you to think about it for a minute. If there’s anything you can think of that’s—” He waved a hand, frustrated. “I don’t know, maybe ‘wrong’ was the wrong word, but there has to be something, right? Because the alternative—” his voice caught again, “—the alternative is that I really am just an idiot, or that I’m just not trying hard enough. And I know that can’t be it, because—” another shaky breath, “—because I’m trying as hard as I can and it's still not enough. It feels like there’s always a joke I’m missing, like there’s some big secret that everyone else is sharing and I’m the only one not in on it. And it was one thing when I was in school, when it was just Beatríz, but now other people are getting hurt because of it, and I—I don’t know what to do.”

He trailed off, tracing circles in the frost on the ground beside him. “I know you guys care,” he concluded, sounding wobbly. “That’s why I’m having a hard time believing that you’re not just sparing my feelings.”

Naomi opened her mouth to say something, but couldn’t think of any kind of comfort that wouldn’t sound like a platitude. Frustration flared in her stomach again. Her friends were hurting, and her friends were blaming themselves, and her friends still weren’t listening to her, and she didn’t know how to fix things, that desperate helplessness rendering her angry.

And then she took a deep breath, and swallowed the feeling. He wanted honesty? She could do that.

She considered him silently, running their years together in her mind. He was as easy to impress as he was to goad. He offered up his trust to anyone who showed him the bare minimum of decency. He spent half his time distracted by rules that didn’t exist, and the other half focused on his work with such an intensity he’d forget to eat and sleep. He was a study in extremes—awkward and earnest and confusing and straightforward, all at once.

Mateo shifted, uneasy under the scrutiny. “Is—um, were you gonna say something?”

“You told me to think about it,” she said. “So I’m thinking about it.”

That alone seemed to banish some of his anxiety. Nodding, he straightened up, his eyes still glassy with unshed tears but far more alert.

“Okay, so,” she took a breath, choosing her words carefully for once, “I don’t always get what goes on in your head. There’s stuff that you get upset by that I don’t understand, and sometimes it does feel like we’re having completely different conversations. And…” she paused, another brief pang of guilt shearing through her, “...you do tend to just go along with whatever anyone tells you. It’s really nice of you, but I can kinda see how people like Carla might see you as an easy target.”

He nodded again, solemn. “Okay.”

“But that goes both ways,” she went on, “because a lot of the time it just seems like you care a lot. About us, and about the kingdom, and about your magic—” She chuckled. “You don’t really do things by halves, y’know? I dunno, maybe it’s a wizard thing. But the point is that I don’t think any of that stuff is really a problem, you’re just…”

An ironic smile crept onto his face and he huffed out a laugh, sounding composed for the first time all evening. “Oh, please don’t call me ‘special,’” he said, rolling his eyes. “I haven’t heard that one since primary school.”

“I was gonna say ‘different,’” Naomi muttered, her ears tingling.

“That’s not much better.”

“Well, you called yourself ‘wrong’ and somehow I don’t think that’s great, either!” She threw up a hand. “What word do you want me to use?”

Tapping his chin, he thought on it. His body had loosened dramatically, with his legs stretched out toward the worktable instead of drawn up to his chest, and his bandaged hand relaxed in his lap instead of digging into his arm. It was like some pressure had released, letting him unfold back into himself.

“Do you think I’m weird?” he finally asked, and Naomi had to laugh.

“Yeah, you’re pretty weird,” she stretched her own legs out alongside his, bumping them together, “but you’re our weirdo. Wouldn’t trade you for anything.”

He let out a shuddering breath, and when he wiped his eyes again, they stayed dry. “Okay,” he said, smiling, “then let’s go with that.”

Chapter Text

Naomi hovered outside the door to Mateo’s workshop, her heart stammering. It was late by her standards—she didn’t usually hang around the palace this deep into the evening—but she’d spent the afternoon looking for any excuse to keep herself busy, like she could procrastinate the waning hours themselves. She needed to go home for dinner, but doing so would close the day and send her into another restless night plagued by the shadows of the last week. She wanted to talk to Mateo before she left, but doing so would mean admitting how badly the week’s events were bothering her. Still, her childish attempt to stave off the relentless crawl of time had ended in failure, and she’d run out of excuses to not ask for Mateo’s help.

Finally padding across the threshold, Naomi stepped into the workshop. Mateo was bent over his worktable, engrossed in a heavy spellbook. His wand was laid out on the table beside it and a cauldron bubbled gently in the corner of the room.

Naomi cleared her throat. “Hey—”

—And he flinched, badly, snatching his tamborita from the table and wheeling on the doorway, the wand pointed right at her. Naomi stumbled backward, hands up and heart racing, a frantic protest on her lips, but the moment was over as quickly as it started. Recognition flooded out the panic on Mateo’s face and he let out a rush of air, his wand arm dropping to his side.

“Naomi,” he said, breathless. “It’s just you.” His other hand had been up in preparation to cast, and he tried to pass it off by running it through his hair instead. “Sorry about that.”

She forced a laugh, high pitched and uncomfortable. “Yeah, no problem! Didn’t mean to startle you.” She hated how scared she felt. This was Mateo, not a malvago—he wasn’t going to do anything to hurt her. But the sudden fight-or-flight tension coiling through her body at the sight of the tamborita leveled at her chest was a stark reminder of why she was there in the first place.

“Did you need something?” Mateo prompted.

“Yeah. I was wondering if…” She looked down at her hands. The scrapes on her palms were starting to scab over, but curling her fingers over them she could almost still feel—

—hands scrabbling for purchase against the cliff face, grit and gravel digging into her skin, nothing but a withering branch between her and the endless abyss of air, her feet kicking uselessly in the void below her, Shuriki and Fiero laughing down from above, the sweeping vertigo sending her down, down, helpless, alone—

“Naomi?”

She gasped, dragged back to the present. Mateo had crossed the room and placed his hands on her arms, grounding and firm. She was fine. She wasn’t falling.

“I was wondering if you have anything for nightmares,” she finally managed, her voice thready.

Mateo’s face fell, and he let out a sympathetic hum. “You too, huh?” He gave her arms one last squeeze and headed toward the cauldron, peering in to check its contents. “You’ll have to wait a few minutes. It seems like half the palace has been through here asking about that these last few days, and I ran out of the potion for it this morning. This batch should be done soon, though.”

“Should I come back later?”

“Only if you don’t want to stay.” He scratched at his neck, sighing. “Actually, I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to stick around.”

Naomi gave another breathless laugh. “That’s good, because I don’t really want to go anywhere else right now. It’s been a long week.”

“You can say that again,” Mateo said with a dry chuckle.

“It’s been a looooong week!” She dropped into the wooden chair against the wall, sinking into it. The rigid back and cushionless seat hadn’t become any more comfortable with time, but it was familiar in a way that felt safe, and she could finally stop and think about what that ‘long week’ really meant.

The Sunflower Festival felt like it had been a lifetime ago. They’d barely had a reprieve from it when they’d started their ill-fated quest for the Scepter of Night, and now it was all hands on deck in the search for Shuriki, Fiero, and the Delgados. The Council had voted at first to keep news about Shuriki’s return limited, so as to not cause a panic. But word inevitably slipped out among the palace staff, and after the failure with the Scepter, Elena had recommended a formal announcement to keep alarm from spreading too rapidly.

Judging by Mateo’s potion stock issues, people were not taking it well regardless.

“I feel like I really messed up,” Mateo said, breaking the silence. “With the Scepter. I feel like I handed it to Shuriki myself.”

Naomi looked up at him. “None of us blame you.” It may have been Mateo that led Shuriki to the staff and the first clue, but it was herself and Elena that had led her to the remaining pieces, and it was her alone that had failed to protect them.

“I blame me.” Closing his eyes for a moment, he let out a slow breath. When he opened them again, he fixed Naomi with a tired smile. “But I know. Thanks.” He turned back to the cauldron and gave it a stir. “I’ve been trying to do more research on it. Even if Shuriki has all the pieces, she still has to learn how it works. Maybe I can figure out a way to counter it before she does.”

Naomi let her eyes wander over to the book on the worktable. If she craned her neck a little, she could make out the violet lines of an illustration of the Scepter. “How’s that been going?”

His face twisted into a disappointed scowl. “Not great. There aren’t a lot of magical reference books here that I haven’t already read through.” His scowl deepened. “Shuriki’s last reign made sure of that.”

The potion burbled loudly, perhaps in sympathy, and Mateo gave the spoon another vigorous turn before withdrawing it from the pot, tapping it against the rim to shake the excess potion off inside. Globs of the stuff fell back in with a splat, and Naomi grimaced at the consistency. She wasn’t going to have to drink that, was she?

Mateo set the spoon aside and reached for a towel, wiping his hands off and then running it over his face as an afterthought. The steam rising off the cauldron had plastered his curls to his forehead, making him look even more worn out than he had when Naomi arrived, and she felt a pang of sympathy for him. As awful as the week had been for her, having her and her friends’ lives repeatedly threatened over a sorceress’s grudge, she didn’t have a lifetime of living under Shuriki’s heel to frame what a second takeover would really mean.

“What was it like?” she asked. “Living under Shuriki?”

“You’ve lived under Shuriki.”

Hardly. True, the port had been one of Avalor’s windows to the outside world, and so Shuriki had kept a high guard presence there to inspect each ship’s cargo with a rigor that bordered on obsession. But Naomi’s family owned one of those ships. They’d always had the option to leave. Shuriki’s villany existed distantly, as an inconvenience to be gossiped about at the dinner table, not something that loomed over their every waking moment.

“What was it like growing up here, then?”

Mateo leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms, staring into the middle distance of his workshop. He was silent for a long while, and Naomi was starting to worry she had dredged up something too painful to discuss when he finally spoke.

“It was lonely. And it was really quiet. Not just because of the ‘no parties, no music’ thing, but because…” He tightened his grip at his elbows, and the way he spoke sounded almost like a confession. “I didn’t exactly have a ‘typical’ childhood, you know? No one else was secretly studying magic. People found ways to hang on to the rest of our culture, but there was no community for that part of it. I had to do it all alone. And even now, it’s hard to wrap my head around how things could have been, what I was really missing all that time.

“I’m really lucky that I had my mom—someone who knew what things were like before Shuriki took over, and that could tell me stories about it. But even that was kind of isolating, because not everyone our age had that. Sometimes, it felt like I was living in a different world from them. I knew Shuriki was a liar, so how could they not know?

“The worst part, though, was that even with my mom and my magic, it was still so easy to forget that things hadn’t always been that way. The day to day stuff felt normal. I’d get up, go to school, come home and hole myself up with my books… I mean,” he shrugged, “it’s not like Shuriki’s guards were breaking down our doors every day and marching us all down to the execution block. The worst of that stuff was before my time.”

He sounded so matter-of-fact, and numb dread sank into Naomi’s stomach as she waited for the negation that never came. Surely that hadn’t been such a commonplace part of Avalor’s history, right?

“So it was the little things that stuck out,” Mateo went on. “The quiet things. You’d hear one of your neighbors complain about her, and then a week later you’d notice you hadn’t heard from them in a while. Your mom would teach you an old song and then spend just as long reminding you that you couldn’t sing it anywhere but at home, under any circumstances. You’d have to write an essay for your history class about—” his voice tightened suddenly, and he swallowed, continuing with audible disgust, “—about how the ‘benevolent and strong’ Queen Shuriki ‘saved’ the kingdom by purging it of all its ‘evil’ wizards, even when you knew that wasn’t true. Or you’d have to hear someone else actually praise her for it, say it was a good thing she did—”

He was getting more agitated by the word. One leg bounced and his brow furrowed, his words coming out fast and clipped. “And it all would start to sink in that none of it was normal. My mom’s stories weren’t just bedtime fairy tales; they were real! They were who we used to be! We were finally starting to get that history back, and then I had to go and—”

He staggered against the counter, clapping a hand over his mouth and drawing in a ragged breath, his eyes squeezed shut. Naomi didn’t waste a second—she sprang from the chair, making it rattle against the floor, and threw her arms around his torso. Mateo gripped her back, squeezing harder than she had expected. He wasn’t crying, but he was shaking from the effort of trying not to.

“We can’t—I can’t go back to that,” he whispered.

“I’m sorry,” she said, though it felt wholly inadequate. “Maybe I shouldn’t have asked.”

He swallowed. “No, no, it’s fine.” He leaned away from her, already hugged-out. “It’s a possibility, right? That she could take over again. It’s important to talk about.” He turned back to the potion as Naomi released him, but he just bounced the spoon against the rim of the cauldron in a rhythm, staring at the pot with a look of concentration.

Naomi wanted to say something, but she wasn’t sure what she could say. Her stake in Shuriki’s return was mostly personal—the sorceress was a danger to her friends and her new home. It hadn’t occurred to her before just how deep the scars of Shuriki’s last reign ran across the kingdom, and the scale of what her friends were really trying to protect was as dizzying as the drop in her nightmares.

She ended up not needing to say anything, because Mateo spoke up again before she could sort her thoughts out. “Is it okay if I ask what you’re getting the potion for?”

She let out a soft snort. “You worried I’m planning on spiking the punch at the next ball?”

He slowly turned toward her, one eyebrow raised. “Well, I might be now.” She snickered, and he managed a huff of a laugh as well, shaking his head at her. “I only meant that if you need something for nightmares, I thought you might want to talk about it.”

Chewing her lip, she hesitated. She hadn’t planned on discussing it—she’d relived it enough, thanks—but the offer was tempting for reasons she couldn’t place. “I’ve been having nightmares about everything that’s happened this last week,” she finally admitted. It felt almost petty to say in the wake of everything Mateo had told her, but his face grew somber again, and he nodded for her to continue. “Especially the part where Fiero chased me up a mountain and Shuriki pushed me off the top.”

His face fell further. “That sounds awful. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not really that big a deal,” she said, trying to play it off with a what-can-you-do kind of shrug. “With everything going on, it feels kinda silly to be so worked up about that.”

“It is a big deal,” Mateo insisted. “You could have died that day. We all could’ve—” He froze again, mouth set in an odd, terrified smile. “Oh, wow. We all might actually die.”

Naomi returned the smile, tense and exhausted. “Is that really just hitting you now?” It hadn’t fully sunk in for her yet, either. Things weren’t quite feeling like the next wacky adventure anymore.

He let out a strangled laugh.

“I could get us all out of here,” Naomi offered without thinking. “On my parents’ ship. If things got bad.”

She knew it was a misstep the moment the words left her mouth. Mateo went from anxious to appalled in a blink.

“This is my home,” he said. “I’m not going back into hiding. I can’t go back to feeling that—that helpless, and alone.” His face softened again, and in a small voice, he added, “I am scared, though.”

Naomi nodded. The feeling was mutual.

“You can run if you need to,” Mateo said, and Naomi was surprised to hear there was no judgment in his voice. “No one would blame you.”

“I’d blame me,” she replied. “I don’t really want—well, I don’t know what I want. I’m scared, too. But I’m not leaving you guys behind.”

Though he’d been the one to assure her she could go, Mateo looked relieved by her assertion.

The cauldron gurgled suddenly, and startling, Mateo moved back to it, finally hoisting it off the heat with a grunt. It clanged down hard on the stone countertop, and after a quick check inside, Mateo started lining up a set of short, glass jars beside it.

“I just wish there was more I could do,” Naomi said, watching as Mateo doled out a spoonful of glop into one of the jars and sealed the lid. “Waiting around like this while Elena trains with her scepter and Shuriki is planning her next move, and you and Gabe are working—it all just makes me feel…” She shook her head, waving a hand around.

“Helpless and alone?” Mateo suggested, and she gave a dry laugh.

“Yeah, something like that.”

“Mm. I know the feeling.” He placed the jar in her outstretched palm, and let his hand linger on top of it. “But we’re not, though, are we?”

Naomi shot him a puzzled look.

“Helpless or alone. Elena caught you when you fell, right?”

She had. The moment had been an immeasurable relief, swooping through her stomach with the same force terror had just before. Naomi nodded.

“And I made you a potion to help deal with your nightmares. And I’ve lost track of the number of times you’ve talked me out of feeling like an idiot. None of us is alone, and I don’t think ‘helpless’ is really fair, either.” He smiled, a tiny shake in his voice that he couldn’t quite mask, and he let his hand fall away. “I think we’ll be alright.”

Naomi couldn’t quite muster his optimism, but she felt comforted, and she drew the potion back to examine it. She gave the jar a small shake, watching the contents jiggle like flan. “So, I don’t… drink this, do I? Or do I go at it with a spoon?”

“Neither, unless you want to knock yourself into a coma for the next month,” Mateo replied, with a laugh that was far too cavalier. “What you want to do is dip a piece of cloth or something in it—I just use my thumb, personally—and smear it over your eyelids before you go to sleep.”

Naomi pulled a face.

“Yeah, I know,” Mateo said. “That’s about the reaction I’ve gotten from everyone, but it’s better than having to drink it. Trust me, you do not want to know what butterfrog spit tastes like.”

“Don’t think I want to know what it feels like in my eyes, either,” Naomi muttered.

“Slimy, mostly.”

“Ew.”

His laugh at her wrinkled nose was almost genuine. “You get used to it.”

Chapter Text

The warm sand of the Nueva Vista coastline sparkled in the noonday sunlight, and waves lapped gently onto the shore, where humans and sirenas alike mingled like old friends. A blend of traditional Avaloran music and sirena conches floated above the party as a bright and cheery constant, weaving in and out of conversations, laughter, and general merriment. Shuriki was dead, the kingdom was safe, and for once, all was well with the world.

It was a perfect afternoon, and Naomi had never felt more sick to her stomach.

Guilt churned through her as she watched the festivities. She’d been wrong about the sirenas. It wasn’t her first lapse in judgment and it surely wouldn’t be her last, but it was by far one of her worst, with old childhood grudges almost leading to renewed violence. Making matters worse was that even though everything had worked out with the unity pact, no thanks to her, a voice still fretted at the back of her mind, telling her to just wait for the other shoe to drop. After the way the day had gone, that remaining paranoia felt vile, like a betrayal.

So instead of partaking in the celebration, she drifted around the beach, unmoored and off-balance. Casting her eyes about, she looked for a friend she could use as an anchor until the party was over. Elena was with the young sirena royals, teaching them the sambarosa, and Gabe, still shirtless and wrapped in seaweed, was getting a lesson on sirena trident technique from their reef commander. Naomi’s stomach sank further. Daria had been as vehemently opposed to the pact as Naomi had, and even she was putting in the effort of making new connections.

Her gaze finally caught on Mateo at the edge of the party. He was sitting alone in the shade of a palm tree, his robe laid out under him like a makeshift beach towel, and he watched the goings-on with an absent smile on his face. He didn’t notice Naomi’s approach until she was nearly on top of him, when he turned to beam up at her.

“Mind if I join you?” she asked.

“Not at all!” he answered cheerily, gesturing to the sand beside him. He watched as she settled in, smoothing out her skirt, and then turned back to the party with that same relaxed look on his face, apparently content to continue his silent observation. He’d finally taken off his boots, setting them out beside his folded undershirt and vest, but he didn’t seem to have been in the water recently, judging by how his hair was starting to dry, sticking out at odd angles from the salt.

Another day, Naomi might have been fine to people-watch with him for a bit, but these particular people were making her anxious, and she needed a distraction.

“Partied out?” she asked.

“Ah, kind of.” He shrugged. “I’m just taking a break.”

“Me too, I guess.”

“Where were you this whole time?” Mateo sat up, looking at her with a curious expression. “I didn’t really see you while I was with everyone.”

Naomi tried not to grimace. Of course he’d noticed. “Oh, you know, around. Just kind of exploring.”

The answer, vague as it was, seemed to satisfy him, and he moved on to a new line of questioning. “Did you try the food?”

As if her turning stomach would have allowed it. “I don’t have much of an appetite right now,” she admitted.

Mateo laughed. “Okay, so what have you done with the real Naomi?”

She managed a weak smile.

“I totally get it though,” he went on, lowering his voice like he was telling her a secret. “The seaweed stuff is… ehhhh…” he held up a hand, palm down, and wobbled it in the air, “not the most appetizing. The taste is fine, I just can’t get past the texture.”

Naomi let out a genuine chuckle as he shuddered, his face scrunching up in disgust just at the memory. “You’re wearing seaweed right now.”

“First of all, this is milagra. It’s completely different.”

“Seems pretty similar to me.”

“And second of all,” he continued, ignoring her smirk, “it’s not in my mouth!”

She laughed properly at his indignant huff, but the gloom closed back in around her, chasing the brief burst of levity away. Curling her legs up to her chest, she stared out over the party, feeling pensive and ashamed.

“My judgment’s been way off lately, huh?” she said. “Getting mad at you and Gabe over the Captain trials, dropping the ball on the Rita thing,” she waved a hand out toward the beach, “this.”

“But you were right about the Rita thing?” Mateo replied, audibly confused.

“I couldn’t make up my mind about the Rita thing. And that still doesn’t change the other two.” She sighed, resting her chin on her knees. “Maybe I’m losing my touch.”

“It all worked out, though,” Mateo pointed out.

It was a small comfort. “How do you do it?” she asked, turning toward him. “People give you crap all the time, and you still always end up trusting the next person. How do you just do that so easily?”

“Uh, well…” He rubbed at his neck, his face twisting in discomfort. “I think people usually call that ‘being really gullible.’ It’s not really considered a good thing.”

“Better than being paranoid all the time,” Naomi shot back. “I could’ve messed up peace between us and the sirenas all because I didn’t want to give them a chance.” She settled her chin back on her knees, staring down at the sand. “And I really let you guys down, too, by not going along to fight the malandros.”

“But it all worked out,” Mateo repeated. “It’s in the past, right? So now you can give trusting them another try.”

“I—I don’t know. I want to, I think. I feel guilty about everything I did, and—” she squeezed her arms more tightly around her legs, “—what if they don’t trust me now? I made just about the worst first impression possible.”

“Well,” Mateo started, drawing the word out, “when we met, you gave me a black eye as an introduction, and now we’re best friends, so…”

Stifling a surprised snort, Naomi pushed against his shoulder. “You’re not gonna let me live that down, are you?”

He grinned. “Literally never. But seriously,” his face softened, “what I’m saying is that you’ve come back from rough starts before. And now you have the rest of us backing you up!”

He wasn’t wrong, but it almost made the shame worse, knowing that her friends would help her patch up her own problems even when she’d refused to help them with theirs. Naomi curled up again, turning away and feeling her ears burn.

When she didn’t speak again, Mateo sighed, and Naomi braced for a scolding.

“I do get it, though,” was what he said instead, his voice more gentle than she felt she deserved. “Why you had such a hard time trusting them, I mean. With what happened with your grandfather, I think it would’ve been harder for me, too, if I’d been in your place.”

She peeked up at him, watching out of the corner of her eye. Of course. She’d seen the sympathy on his face when she’d explained her family’s history, how the sirenas had cost her both her grandfather and the chance to ever meet him. He would know better than anyone what that was like.

He rocked forward, crossing his legs under himself. “But,” he went on, and Naomi sank further into her arms. There it was. “If you really want to get past those first impressions, you’re going to have to start somewhere. There’s a certain point where you just have to give someone a chance, even when you’re worried it might be a bad idea.”

“I know,” she muttered. “I just wish I knew where that ‘somewhere’ was.”

A sudden gasp beside her caught her attention, and she lifted her head, concerned, only to recoil at Mateo’s expression. He was staring at her, eyes wide and over-bright, his mouth stretched into a grin that showed far too many teeth.

“I don’t like that look on your face,” she said.

He scrambled to his feet. “Hold that thought!”

“Mateo?!” She sat up, properly alarmed now.

“Just—wait right here. Don’t move!” And then he took off across the beach, sand kicking up in his wake. He beelined toward where Elena was still talking with Marisa, Marzel having left to chat with Gabe some time before, and Naomi could just barely make him out calling their names before the conversation became too distant to hear. Mateo was animated, whatever it was about, with a lot of hand waving and bouncing as the girls nodded along, suddenly looking excited themselves and ohhhhh no, they were all looking at her: Marisa, with her hands clasped in front of her and tentative hope on her face; Elena, with a single hand pressed to her chest like she did when she was feeling moved; and Mateo, still grinning like a maniac, something smug and victorious in the way he held himself.

“Oh, I really don’t like that look on your face,” Naomi said to herself.

Marisa took off toward the ocean, disappearing beneath the waves with a flash of purple light as her tail reformed, and Mateo and Elena were headed back toward where Naomi was sitting. She reluctantly pulled herself to her feet, brushed the sand off her backside, and met them halfway.

“Mateo said you really wanted to try the milagra but were too nervous to ask,” Elena said, taking one of Naomi’s hands and tugging her toward the shore.

Naomi let out a high-pitched laugh. “Did he, now?” She shot him a glare through a fake smile, but he just squared his shoulders, looking proud.

“You’re welcome!” he chirped.

“I’m just so happy that you’re ready to give the sirenas another chance,” Elena went on. “I was a little worried when I saw you avoiding everyone earlier, but if it was just nerves, you could have told me! Marisa and Marzel would be happy to show you around some sirena landmarks. Or, seamarks? Hm.” She’d led Naomi to a stony outcropping that hung out over the water like a natural dock in a more secluded part of the beach, when she clapped suddenly, dropping Naomi’s hand. “Actually! I should go get Marzel and Gabe. I bet they’ll want to go swimming with us. I’ll be right back!”

Naomi watched her run back toward the party and then wheeled on Mateo, bearing down on him with the full force of her glare.

He remained unfazed. “Two years,” he announced.

Naomi blinked, the dozen different choice words she’d been about to unleash evaporating on her tongue. “Two… what?” was what she managed instead, dumbfounded.

His self-satisfied smile curled further upward. “I’ve been waiting for two years to get back at you for making Luisa drag me to lunch that one time.”

She had to rack her brain to even know what he was talking about. The memory felt so unassuming and distant—was he really still holding a grudge about that?

“That’s what this is about?” Naomi blurted. “Mateo! This is completely different!”

He shrugged. “Seems pretty similar to me.”

“You—that—ugh! Mateo!”

Someone cleared their throat behind her, and Naomi spun around.

“What?” she snapped, only for her anger to burst into mortification as she realized she’d yelled, unprompted, at Princess Marisa. She straightened up, uncurling her fists and tucking some loose hair behind her ear, feeling shame creeping back up her spine. “Ah, um. Sorry. Hi. Marisa?”

She offered an awkward smile. “Yeah. Naomi?”

Naomi took a shaky breath. “Yeah.”

Shifting her feet, Marisa raised the bundle of slimy, green ocean plants in her arms. “So, I went and got some milagra, plus some extra if anyone needs theirs refreshed.” She looked past Naomi at Mateo, who patted his seaweed-shirt down.

“I’m still good,” he said.

“Okay. Then, whenever you’re ready, Naomi,” she looked back at her with another small smile, “we can get you wrapped up.”

Naomi stared at the proffered milagra, and sweat prickled on her neck. “Right.”

Sirenas were dangerous; everyone knew that, at least until they didn’t. Everything had been fine since the pact was signed, the party had been great, and still Naomi couldn’t shake the heavy miasma of irrational fear that clouded her judgment. What if it didn’t work? What if it dragged her down into the depths, or suffocated her? What if it turned her into a sirena? Never mind that her friends had been using the milagra all day, and they were still fine. Not trusting sirenas had been an absolute lesson of her childhood. How was she supposed to unlearn that now?

She glanced back across the sand and saw Elena coming back with Gabe and Marzel in tow, and swallowed. It was now or never, wasn’t it?

Shooting another dirty look at Mateo, she said, “If I drown, I’m taking you with me.”

He nodded. “That’s fair.”

“Wait, why are we drowning Mateo?” Gabe asked as the group approached, looking back and forth between the two with an amused expression.

“No one is drowning Mateo,” Elena said, frowning, “or anyone else, for that matter!”

Naomi fiddled with the edges of her vest. “So… am I gonna need to take anything off, or…?”

Marisa chuckled. “Oh, no, the milagra can go on over your clothes. I actually don’t know why these two took their shirts off,” she said, raising an eyebrow at Gabe and Mateo.

Gabe put his hands up. “Hey, I only started undressing because I saw that he was,” he said, pointing at Mateo.

“Wait, what?” Mateo blinked at him, confused. “I only started undressing because I saw that you were.”

Gabe stared back. “...Huh.”

“Hm.” Mateo turned back to Naomi. “Ignore us, then.”

“I wish I could,” she muttered, and then took a deep breath. She still wasn’t ready, but… “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”

Before she knew it, her torso was wrapped in sea plants and she was being ushered toward the edge of the outcropping, overlooking the dark surface of the ocean.

“Why don’t you guys go ahead,” she said, staring down into the water.

Elena gave her arm a squeeze. “Take your time,” she said. “We’ll wait for you below.” She dove into the waves with the sirenas close behind her, and Naomi held her breath, half expecting them to resurface. They didn’t, of course, and dread once more began to wind its tendrils through her guts. This was fine, right? Elena was fine. All Naomi had to do was jump.

“I don’t know, Mateo,” Gabe teased from behind her. “Think she might need a little encouragement?” She looked over her shoulder just in time to see him mime pushing her with a wink, and Mateo snickered at the gesture.

She pivoted. “Don’t you guys dare—”

—And her back foot came down on nothing. Pinwheeling her arms, she hung in the air for an impossible second, and then she tumbled back with a tiny scream, just barely able to catch the guys’ twin looks of surprise before she plunged into the water. It flooded into her nose and mouth as she went down, and she held her breath on instinct. Gut clenching terror seized her as she kicked, thrashing, frantic—

Up. She had to go up, find the surface, she had to breathe—

Something grabbed one of her arms and she lashed out again, her free arm grasping at empty water and her legs swinging until—

“Ow! Hey!”

The sound was so normal, not remotely distorted by the water. Naomi gasped, and then immediately clapped a hand over her mouth at the mistake, opening her eyes.

Across from her, Mateo was rubbing at his shin, pouting. Gabe swam up beside him, a concerned frown on his face.

“I wouldn’t have actually pushed you,” he said, and Naomi balked at the sight—Gabe was talking underwater.

“The milagra works better if you breathe,” Mateo added, and only then did Naomi notice that her confused gasp hadn’t killed her.

She slowly lowered her hand, her lungs starting to burn from lack of air, and with trepidation still buzzing in her head, she took a cautious breath. Water swirled into her windpipe, unnatural and cold, but she did not feel the urge to cough, and her body relaxed even as her mind was still racing. She was breathing water. She could feel it moving through her chest in a way that air just didn’t feel, far too thick and heavy, but against all logic, she wasn’t drowning in it.

“Oookay,” she said, testing her voice. “That’s unpleasant.”

“I think it feels neat!” Mateo remarked.

Gabe laughed, giving him a gentle shove. “Yeah, you would.”

“Naomi! You made it!” Elena swam up to the group, beaming. “Come on, there’s so much to show you!”

She took Naomi’s hand and led her deeper into the water, and as Naomi turned, her breath caught again—not from the water moving in and out of her lungs, but from the sight before her. Banks of coral rose up from the seafloor, a kaleidoscope of shape and color that caught the eye from every direction, and the bright, powerful tails of sirenas wove between schools of equally vibrant fish as they went to and from the party above. A carpet of sea grasses waved peacefully in the tidal currents, and sunlight filtered through the waves, sending halos of light rippling across every surface like drifting rings of magic. Naomi had been on the water plenty of times in her life, but she’d never given much thought to what lay beneath the surface. She’d never seen it like this before.

Marzel joined them, a glint in his eye. “Pretty great, huh?” he asked. He was much steadier in the water than on land, with confidence and precision in how he moved his tail as opposed to his wobbly legs.

Naomi scanned the reef again and let out a short, incredulous laugh. “I—yeah, it’s something else.”

And so began the grand tour. Marzel and Marisa proudly showed off some of their favorite spots among the coral, where it rose up from the silhouette like complex art, and a myriad of different sirenas swooped in and out of the area to chat with the royals and introduce themselves to Elena. Gabe started to chase Mateo after the latter accidentally kicked him in the head while trying to do a flip, and a massive, sea-green seahorse that introduced himself as Cuco gleefully joined in the game. More assured that the milagra was working and curiosity winning out over her initial panic, Naomi began to explore on her own. She was watching a crab scuttle by with a fish trapped in its tiny claws when a shadow fell over her, and a soft voice spoke beside her.

“Hey,” Marisa said, smiling warmly.

Naomi cast her eyes about for the rest of her friends. Elena was still talking with a group of curious sirenas, and Gabe had finally caught Mateo at the far end of the reef, one arm around his shoulders and the other rubbing his knuckles into his skull. She hadn’t realized she’d drifted so far away from everyone. Marisa was holding herself as non-threateningly as possible, her hands carefully folded and her tail half curled beneath her like she was sitting, but even still, Naomi tensed at the realization that the two of them were relatively alone.

“Hey,” she replied, forcing herself to smile back.

Marisa bit her lip, wringing her fingers together and looking away like she was trying to think of what to say, and it finally hit Naomi that Marisa was just as nervous as she was, another thread of guilt winding through her.

“I’m really sorry I didn’t trust you,” she blurted, right as Marisa finally announced, “I’m really happy you’re giving this a chance.”

The two blinked, and then laughed, awkward and loud.

“I’m so sorry,” Naomi said, “I totally interrupted you.”

“No, no, that’s okay!” Marisa replied. “I was talking over you—”

“It’s fine! You can go ahead—”

“Oh, are you sure?”

“Yeah, sure, of course.”

Marisa let out another awkward giggle and then took a deep breath. “I’m really happy you’re giving this a chance. I know your history with sirenas isn’t the best, and after what happened with your family, I can understand why trusting us would be hard. But I really want humans and sirenas to be able to move forward together. So when you said you were willing to try the milagra…” She smiled again. “It meant a lot to me.”

Something lanced through Naomi’s chest. She knew she could just accept the gratitude and move on, but with how she’d been acting all afternoon, doing so felt dishonest. “You’re giving me too much credit,” she said, sighing. “This was Mateo’s idea. I didn’t want to do it at all.”

“I actually kinda figured,” Marisa admitted, and Naomi snapped her attention back up, surprised. “He’s not a very good liar, and you seemed really uncomfortable.”

They looked out across the reef—Mateo had finally wriggled out of Gabe’s grip, and both of them were trying to do flips, now.

“But you did it anyway,” Marisa went on, turning back to her. “And you didn’t leave as soon as no one was watching.”

Naomi snorted. “That’s a pretty low bar.”

“Well, we have to start somewhere.”

Shoulders falling with a new release of tension, Naomi finally managed a tentative smile. She had a better idea now of where that ‘somewhere’ might be. “I’m sorry I didn’t trust you before,” she said. “After everything you guys did to help us with Shuriki, I should have given you a chance.”

Marisa gave a tiny nod. “I appreciate that. So…” She ran her hands over her braid, her tail swishing below her. “How about we take that chance now? We can go back to the others, and I could introduce you to some of my friends. If you’re okay with that.”

She reached a hand out, offering it to Naomi, and Naomi looked at it with a deep, water-filled breath.

“We have to start somewhere, right?” she finally said, and she took Marisa’s hand.

Chapter Text

“I still can’t believe I’ve been back in the country for over a week and I’m just now finding out that you’ve moved into the palace,” Gabe said, adjusting the box of books in his arms.

Sitting across the room and surrounded by his own small forest of boxes and book stacks, Mateo shrugged. “What was I supposed to do, write you a letter? Address it to Gabriel Núñez: Somewhere in the Wilderness?”

“You could have said something when I got back.”

“He didn’t tell me right away, either,” Naomi chimed in from over the crate she was packing. “I found out when Elena brought it up a week after the fact.”

“Funnily enough, I wasn’t actually trying to do a grand reveal,” Elena said. She hopped down from the stepladder and deposited another armful of books onto one of the piles. “I thought that Mateo would want to tell everyone himself. I really thought you would’ve said something by then,” she added, turning to him.

“It never came up!” he protested, waving a book around. “Besides, I thought it would’ve been obvious something had changed when I was suddenly spending the night at the palace all the time.”

“But you do that normally,” Naomi and Gabe said in unison, and they shared a grin across the room as Mateo rolled his eyes.

Gabe shifted to hold his box with one arm. “I think you can forgive me for not realizing,” he went on, swinging his free arm out toward the half-empty basement, “considering that none of your stuff made the trip with you.”

Mateo opened his mouth with a sharp breath, and then closed it again, pouting. “Well, I guess I can’t really say you’re wrong…” he finally said.

Cleaning out Mateo’s old basement wasn’t really how Naomi had planned to spend her Saturday. She assumed he would’ve taken everything he wanted with him from the start, but apparently there’d been some confusion between him and his mom about who was actually keeping his grandfather’s things. It had taken half the winter to get it straightened out, and after his mom picked out some personal effects to keep as mementos, she finally told Mateo to clear the rest out. From there, all it took was an offhand mention to Elena for her to volunteer everyone’s help with the task.

Not that Naomi was really complaining. The four of them had fallen into an easy rhythm as they worked, bantering playfully all the while as Elena unloaded shelves, Naomi packed crates, and Gabe hauled them up out of the basement. Mateo did a little of everything, bouncing around the room as needed and keeping up a running commentary on his history with every item they packed.

“I really do appreciate the help,” he said. “You guys didn’t have to do this.”

Elena scoffed. “Oh, it’s no trouble. It’s not like you’ve never dropped everything to help the rest of us.” Handing off a book to him, she knelt down and began to divide a small book pile by size, looking for ones to fill the remaining gaps.

Instead of packing it, though, Mateo cracked the book she’d given him open with an intrigued sound and started to flip through. Naomi chuckled.

“Besides,” she said, humor in her tone, “someone has to keep you from getting too distracted. If you had to do this alone, you’d stop to reread every single book along the way!”

“What? No I wouldn’t!” He snapped the book shut again, flustered, and quickly tucked it into the box before standing and fumbling with trying to pick it up, his attempted burst of efficiency ruined by his surprise at the box’s weight.

Gabe came back down the steps, another round-trip finished, and jumped into the conversation without missing a beat. “And someone was gonna have to help you with the heavy lifting.” He winked, teasing, and then hoisted another full box with a grunt. He balanced it on his shoulder, watching for Mateo’s response.

Straightening up, Mateo scowled, until he made a big show of drawing his tamborita and clearing his throat. “Llévaluq!” he called, striking the drum, and he smugly faced Gabe again, arms crossed, as a quartet of packed crates all drifted off the ground, hovering around him in the air. “You were saying?”

Gabe frowned and adjusted his own crate. “Yeah, well, you don’t have to show off.” He made for the stairs, with the still-grinning Mateo and his gaggle of floating crates close behind, and had barely made it two steps up before a wayward box thumped against his back.

“Ow! Mateo! Watch where you’re going!”

“Sorry, I guess I couldn’t see you around all these heavy boxes I’m carrying by myself.”

“Then just carry one like a normal person!”

Their bickering receded up the stairs, and Elena met Naomi’s eyes across the room, pressing her lips together to poorly conceal a smile. The two burst into a fit of giggles at the familiarity of it all as the boys’ voices faded out completely—it was good to have everyone back together again.

“They seem like they’re having fun,” Naomi remarked.

As if to dispute her, there was a dull thud from the yard above, followed by the distinctive, shrill yelling of a very unhappy Mateo.

With a resigned sigh, Elena pulled herself to her feet and brushed off her skirt. “...I’ll go check on them,” she said, and Naomi waved her off, laughing.

“Good luck!” she called after her, and turned her attention back to the room, taking stock of what they’d accomplished so far. Distractions aside, they’d gotten through a sizable chunk of Mateo’s belongings, leaving half the shelves barren. The workshop looked unbalanced and strange, the absence of Mateo stark in the emptiness and the thin lines of dust disturbed by their activity. Empty crates and stacks of still-unpacked books were scattered on the floor, bringing an uncharacteristic chaos to the room that still somehow felt intimately familiar. Naomi was nothing if not used to moving house.

Rolling her shoulders, she pulled herself to her feet. The crate she had been working on was full, which left her to get started on the next one. She stretched her legs out, cramped from sitting on the stone floor, and looked around for a good place to pick back up, until her eyes fell on the desk against the wall. That could work—depending on how long damage control took upstairs, she could possibly get the desk cleared out herself before anyone came back down.

Grabbing a loose satchel from an otherwise empty box, she headed over and started rifling through the drawers. There were a lot of old notes that Mateo would have to go through on his own to decide if they were worth keeping, so she set them aside and focused on the other contents. Pens, pencils, a heavily dogeared pocket dictionary, and a mysterious vial of purple goo that Naomi knew better than to question all got stuck into the bag where it was propped open on the back edge of the table.

The deeper she got in the drawers, the larger and more childish Mateo’s handwriting got. It was like a time capsule of his studies, and Naomi found herself fondly examining one of the older pages from near the bottom. It looked like one of Mateo’s earliest attempts at writing in Maruvian. He’d repurposed one of the heavily-lined pages of a basic writing primer to print the same runes over and over again the way one might practice their alphabet. His name, large and nearly illegible, was scrawled in the upper corner like it actually was a school assignment.

Naomi chuckled softly at the sight, conjuring the image in her head of a young Mateo, too little to even write yet, valiantly trying to master a second set of letters anyway. It was no small wonder he was so dedicated to magic now; if he had started studying that early, then it really had been his entire life. Still smiling, Naomi carefully folded the page and tucked it into the satchel.

The desk shuddered when she opened the next drawer, and before she could stop it, the satchel tipped backwards against the wall. Naomi snagged the edge of it before it could topple completely, but she heard a clatter against stone as something spilled out anyway. Groaning, she righted the bag and set it on the floor to keep it out of the way, and then crouched onto hands and knees herself, wedging between half-packed boxes and peering into the dark space below the desk.

As tidy as Mateo normally was, even he wasn’t immune to letting dust pile up in hard to reach places. Feathery clumps of it caught on Naomi’s fingers as she crawled further under, clinging to her skin like a layer of fur, and she sneezed as she disturbed it, sending it billowing around even more. Scraps of paper were buried completely under the dust, long since lost and forgotten, and she unearthed stray bookmarks and what looked like an old algebra assignment as she felt along the edge of the wall.

“Amazing magical powers, and you can’t be bothered to clean under your desk every once in a while,” she muttered as she retrieved a pair of fallen pens. Well, that was what she had dropped; if Mateo wanted anything else from down there, he could dig it up himself. She gathered up everything she’d found and gave her hand one last pass along the seam between the wall and floor, just to be sure. Suddenly, her hand caught on a stiff paper corner, jutting out from where it was wedged behind the sturdy leg of the desk. A firm tug pulled it free, and with a quick shake to loosen the dust from it, Naomi finally backed out from under the desk and pulled herself to her feet.

Setting the collection on the desk, she brushed off her skirt and examined her latest find. It looked like an envelope, tightly sealed and ignored. She turned it over in her hands, curious about who it was from, and froze, her mind racing as she saw that it wasn’t a letter for Mateo.

The name Naomi Turner stared up at her from the front.

It was an envelope, tightly sealed and addressed to her.

Her breath caught, and she glanced at the door at the top of the stairs. The commotion outside had died down to murmured conversation that she couldn’t make out, save for Gabe’s chastising tone. She hadn’t even opened the letter and she still felt like she was doing something wrong just by holding it, the guilty thrill crawling up her spine like she used to feel as a kid when she snuck out to borrow her parents’ ship. It was addressed to her. That meant it was hers, right? She could totally open it without a crisis of conscience.

It had occurred to her briefly while she was digging through the desk that she might stumble across something meant for Mateo’s eyes only. Something personal. She wasn’t actively looking for anything like that, and she’d figured if she ran into it by mistake, she could put it aside as quickly as possible and plead forgiveness when Mateo came back downstairs. Opening this letter would be a direct invasion of his privacy—he’d never sent it, for whatever reason, and that meant it wasn’t her business.

But it was addressed to her, and she had never been more curious in her life. Biting her lip and steeling her resolve, she cast one last look to the stairs before sliding her thumb under the flap and carefully prying it open. Hands shaking from a small surge of adrenaline, she took out the letter and began to read.

Naomi,

If you’re reading this, then I’m in trouble. Big trouble. I-might-not-be-in-the-country-anymore kind of trouble, in one way or another. But don’t worry too much! It might not be as bad as it sounds. Well, maybe you weren’t worried. I don’t know if you’ve even noticed that I haven’t been around lately.

Either way, I know it sounds like I’m about to ask for your help, but I promise that I’m not. I’m not even sure what you could do about this. I know we don’t know each other that well, but I just want someone to know why I’m gone.

I’m actually a wizard.

Naomi sucked in a breath, and then let it out just as quickly, her shoulders dropping. Why was she gasping? She already knew that. The first two paragraphs had wound a tight coil of equal parts fear and hurt in her chest: fear for Mateo and whatever unsolvable disaster he was expecting that could cause him to flee the country; hurt that he thought so little of their friendship he didn’t think she’d notice if he disappeared. I know we don’t know each other that well had burned like acid after years of confiding things in him she’d never told to anyone else. But the announcement of the obvious had her skimming the rest of the letter, confused.

There were a lot of apologies and explanations that went nowhere—even in writing, he tended to ramble—but Naomi got the gist as she pored through. It was a tell-all, describing his secret research and explaining his grandfather’s legacy and insisting that Shuriki couldn’t be trusted under any circumstances, obviously written well before Elena had returned. It got more frantic and disorganized as it went, and between the clumsy reassurances and backtracking was a heartbreaking plea that she look after his mother. Assuming they didn’t get her too, he’d written. I know I said I wouldn’t ask for your help but I’m all the family she has left.

And he’d chosen to say all this to her.

Footsteps creaking on the stairs yanked her back to the present and she jumped, wondering if she had time to hide the evidence of her snooping.

“Okay! It’s all good!” Mateo said as he bounded down. “No broken boxes, no broken bones.” Humming a simple tune to himself, he scanned the room like he was deciding what to do next. His eyes settled on Naomi, still clutching the letter and standing by the desk like a startled deer. “You okay? What’s up?”

She debated lying, and saying that he had surprised her, but reading something personal and pretending that she didn’t seemed more cruel than being upfront. And besides that, she had to know. “Mateo, what’s the deal with this letter?”

He raised an eyebrow, confused, but not offended. “What, you’re going through my mail, now? And you used to call me nosey.”

“You wrote it to me,” Naomi explained, feeling defensive anyway.

Mateo’s confusion only seemed to deepen, his mouth twitching up into a lopsided, baffled smile. “Why would I write you a letter? I see you almost every day.” He accepted the page from her, and his eyes only flickered across the first few lines before his eyebrows shot up, recognition flooding his face. A choked sound wheezed out of him, and he flushed deeply. “Oh! Ohhhh. This is, uh. Wow, fifteen-year-old me was dramatic.” Quickly folding it up, he made like he was going to throw it out in the waste bin near the desk, but Naomi caught his wrist as he tried and pulled the letter back, smoothing it out between her fingers.

“You were gonna tell me,” she said, her voice soft.

Mateo paused in his attempt to grab the letter again. The mortification on his face dampened into a more general discomfort, and he rubbed at the back of his neck, avoiding her eyes. “I almost told you a couple of times, actually,” he admitted. “Remember the night of the storm?”

Can you keep a secret? he’d asked, and she still sometimes wondered how different their lives might have been if he’d been able to follow through.

“Yeah, but I thought that was a spur of the moment decision. This…” She panned a hand down the letter. “You were actually planning this. How long were you—why were you planning this?”

“I think it says right there, doesn’t it? I wanted someone to know what had really happened to me if I ever got caught. And I just thought that maybe you would…” He trailed off with a shrug, still not looking at her, and he let out another dismissive, uncomfortable laugh. “Anyway, sorry you had to see that. It’s probably super weird.”

She shook her head emphatically. “That’s not why I’m—Mateo, I’m not bothered by this, I just don’t understand why—” Why her? Her memory skipped through their rocky first year, incident after incident of her yelling at him, or avoiding him, or playing along with her classmates’ mockery of him. “I was awful to you when we were in school! The fact that you wanted to tell me and not literally any other friend…”

It was weirdly flattering, that he’d trusted her so much despite it all, above anyone else he might have known longer.

His blunt response smothered that kernel of warmth. “I didn’t have any other friends. I thought you knew that.” He swung an arm out to gesture at the piles of magical equipment littering the floor. “I couldn’t exactly make any when I was spending all my time down here, doing things I wasn’t allowed to talk about.”

Naomi didn’t know how to respond, and just cast her eyes back down at the paper clenched in her hands. The image of young Mateo, alone and dutifully practicing his Maruvian, flashed through her mind again. Where it had been charming before, in the way kids were when they tried to act serious and grown-up, it seemed impossibly lonely now. Naomi wasn’t sure she could’ve taken it.

Mateo heaved out a sigh, and when Naomi looked back up, he was gripping his arms like he was hugging himself, looking around at the disarray of the room. Years of repeated moves had trained her to identify the dazed look on his face—no matter how much a move was for the better, there was still an acute sense of loss that came with uprooting a part of your life so thoroughly. Each time his eyes caught on some of the barren furniture, he was no doubt digging up a slurry of memories of his time down there, complicated by a blend of wonder and solitude.

“I didn’t actually think I’d ever get out of here,” he said suddenly. “Back then, I mean. I thought I’d have to lock myself down here for the rest of my life to keep my magic secret. I don’t know how many more years of this I could’ve done without being able to talk to anyone about it.” He let out a breathless, shaky sound that might have been a laugh. “I’m really glad Elena came back when she did. I’m not sure what I would’ve done otherwise.”

“If it was that hard for you, why not just… stop doing magic?” Naomi asked. It was the obvious solution, and also the incorrect one. His own interest in the subject aside, if he’d given it up before Elena’s amulet had landed in his lap, the country might have still been under Shuriki’s rule. As much as she sympathized with the dread of isolation, it was a thoughtless question, and she braced for Mateo to get upset.

Rather than take offense, though, Mateo let out a huff of laughter, his expression turning wistful. “I’m not sure I could have. The first time I held a tamborita, I thought I was going to explode from how excited I was. Practicing magic felt right in a way that nothing else did, and as time passed, I couldn’t even imagine doing anything else with my life. I won’t pretend it wasn’t… difficult, sometimes, but if I didn’t even have this to come home to…” Something strained at the edges of his smile, and he held his arms a bit tighter. “I don’t know. I think it would’ve been worse.”

The statement hung ominously in the air before Mateo shook his head to clear it away, fixing her with a wry smile. “Besides,” he went on, forced humor in his tone, “it’s not like I stopped being weird once I could start talking about this stuff. I’m not sure it would’ve made a difference.” His awkward air returned, and he softened his voice, squirming. “So, um, about that letter—”

Naomi cringed and glanced down at it again, having almost forgotten what had started the whole conversation. “Yeah, I’m really sorry about that. I shouldn’t have read it without asking.” His choice to write it to her seemed less personal now—not a confession to a friend, but an act of desperation to anyone that would listen—and she felt ashamed for having pushed the issue.

“Well, it is technically yours. You can do what you want with it.” He scratched at his head again and hesitated. Glancing up at the door with a wary expression, like he was worried he’d be interrupted by the others, he carefully went on. “I know we weren’t really that close back then, so I hope this doesn’t sound too clingy, but I was really happy that you kept trying. I know I wasn’t the easiest to get along with—and I’m still not, sometimes—but you were nice to me anyway. I really did feel like I could trust you, and I really wanted you to know. And—and even when we met, I’d really hoped that we could be friends someday.” His hand still resting on his neck, he pulled his face into a tentative smile. “I hope that’s not too—”

Naomi didn’t get to hear how that sentence ended. She closed the distance between them and gripped him in a tight hug, and he cut off with a surprised grunt at the sudden contact. She didn’t know what to say—thank you or I’m sorry or I’m glad we’re friends or anything else flimsy and incomplete—but Mateo seemed to understand anyway, returning the gesture after a beat and a quiet laugh.

“You know,” he finally said after they’d been standing like that for a moment, “you can just throw the letter out.”

She squeezed him tighter, squishing out another grunt. “No, shut up, I’m keeping it forever.”

When they broke apart, she retrieved the envelope from where she’d left it on the desk and slipped the letter back inside. She tucked the whole thing into her vest, just in time for chatter at the top of the stairs to announce Gabe and Elena coming back.

“You guys sure took your time,” she said as they headed down, steps creaking.

At the bottom of the steps, Gabe made a show of looking around at the still-messy basement. “Well yeah; some of us were doing actual work. You two didn’t get all this packed up yet?”

Naomi rolled her eyes at how he grinned. “Har, har.”

Gabe just shrugged and took another bite of the empanada he’d brought down with him. Naomi perked up at the sight as her stomach gave a faint rumble. Before she could ask where he’d gotten it, though, Mateo had wheeled on him from where he was bent over a new crate, like the sound of chewing had assaulted him.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

Gabe jerked back at the abruptness of it. “Ea’ing?” he said through a mouthful of empanada. Quickly swallowing, he added, “Your mom made snacks.”

Mateo wasn’t having any of it. “You’re eating in my workshop?”

“It’s not even gonna be your workshop anymore after today!” Gabe protested. “Come on, it’s not like you’re doing magic right this second.”

“Workshop or not, I don’t want to be cleaning your crumbs out of my books when we get them to the palace!” Mateo marched across the room and pushed against Gabe, trying to corral him back up the stairs. “Out! You can finish that outside.”

Gabe half-stumbled up the steps. Mateo wasn’t strong enough to actually push him around, but trying to stand his ground on a staircase could have easily led to disaster. As it was, Elena had to flatten herself against the wall as they passed to keep from tripping anyone. Mateo paused as he reached her, and his eyes flickered to the plate she held in one hand and the empanada she held in the other before settling back on her face, disappointed.

“Really, Elena? You too?”

She took a delicate nibble from the corner of the snack before setting it on the plate, looking contrite. “Well, it seemed rude to refuse…”

“I can’t believe you guys had snacks upstairs this entire time and you didn’t tell us,” Naomi cut in.

Elena grinned. “Consider yourself told!”

Mateo had a hand on her shoulder, gently trying to urge her back upstairs as well. “Okay, fine, we can take a snack break,” he said. “Just not down here, please.”

Gabe and Elena finally retreated back upstairs, and Mateo shook his head dramatically as he watched them go, crossing his arms. For all his fake annoyance, though, he was smiling, something affectionate in his eyes. Naomi started up the stairs herself, bumping against him and giving him a gentle nudge.

“C’mon, you need to get out of here, too,” she said, and Mateo chuckled.

“Yeah, I know.”

The two of them headed outside, and Naomi could feel the outline of the envelope pressing against her chest the whole way up.

Chapter Text

Naomi had no more desire to stay in the sweltering, sulfuric air of Xotep than anyone else, but Elena’s pace was unmatched as she all but sprinted back toward the coach.

“Elena, wait!” Gabe called after her. He hoisted Isabel up over a boulder and then scrambled down after Elena himself.

“Ash and Carla can’t have gotten far.” She clambered up into the driver’s seat and fumbled for the reins one-handed, her right arm hanging limply at her side. “If we hurry, we might still be able to catch them.”

“We’re not going after the Delgados any more today.”

The others were finally catching up with them now, with Naomi helping Isabel down the rest of the way and Mateo slowly bringing up the rear, not trusting his footing on the volcano’s uneven slope.

“And why not? We know they were just here, and if they get away we’ll have to track them all over again. We might not have another chance like this!”

Gabe crossed his arms, raising an eyebrow. “Lift your arm for me.”

Elena rolled her eyes and raised her left arm above her head.

“Your other arm, Elena.”

Biting her lip, she slowly dropped her good arm back into her lap.

They’d all heard the pop. Isabel’s flip-trip might have saved Elena’s life, but the sharp stop at the bottom of the crater had done her body no favors. The state of her arm hadn’t been anyone’s first concern over ‘get Elena out of the volcano’, but a dislocated shoulder, no matter how fair a price for survival, was not good to have while chasing down villains.

Gabe’s face softened. “We’re all injured and exhausted, and even if we weren’t, we only packed supplies for four.”

Behind him, Isabel squirmed, dragging her shoe against the loose gravel.

“We have to go back to the palace to regroup,” he finished.

Muscles clenched in Elena’s jaw, and Naomi could see the gears turning behind her eyes as she tried to think of another argument. “But they were right here,” she repeated, something desperate creeping into her tone, and she turned in the seat, away from Gabe. “Mateo, what do you think?”

Gabe threw his hands up, only to wince as the motion pulled at his ribs. He wrapped an arm around his midsection with a low hiss through his teeth, and shot Elena one last disapproving look as he headed toward the back of the carriage.

Mateo straightened up against the outcropping he’d been leaning against while examining his tamborita. “Actually, I agree with Gabe.”

Gabe poked his head up from where he’d begun sorting through the supplies. “Can I get that in writing?”

Mateo rolled his eyes but spared the remark no further comment, instead meeting Elena’s stare with his own serious expression.

“My tamborita is broken, and I can’t fix it without getting back to my workshop. Which means that right now, we don’t have any magic between the five of us. And even with the numbers, going up against two malvagos without magic of our own…” He grimaced, making an uncomfortable sound. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Elena’s mouth was pulled in a taut line, her brow furrowed. “Naomi?” she tried, her voice pleading.

Naomi shook her head. “Sorry Elena, I’m with the guys on this one.”

Her entire body still ached, with the worst of the pain pulsing at the back of her skull, and her heartbeat had only just dropped back to normal after its frantic racing through the fight. She would’ve thought she’d be used to life-threatening danger by now, but she just wasn’t feeling up to charging ahead with a headache and no plan.

Isabel glanced around at the rest of the party and suddenly shot her hand up. “I’ll vote with Elena!” she chimed in.

Sighing, Elena gave her a gentle smile. “Thanks, Isa, but while I hate to admit it, they’re right. We need to regroup.” Her smile faded into a disappointed frown. “Besides, we need to tell our abuelos where you ran off to.”

Isabel let out a nervous laugh, shuffling against the stone again. “Or… we could not tell them?” she said, putting on her best puppy-dog eyes.

Elena raised an eyebrow. “Mm-hmm,” she uttered, in a way that made clear the conversation wasn’t over. There was a pin in it for the time being, though, and she began to carefully climb back down from the carriage. “I’m sorry I’ve been so pushy, it’s just that we’re so close to being done with all this.”

“We’ll get them next time,” Gabe said. He’d finally retrieved the first aid kit while everyone was talking, and he popped it open on top of a nearby boulder. “For now, let’s just get everyone patched up.”

Nodding, Elena reached out and cupped her sister’s cheek. “Isa, are you hurt at all?”

“Just some scrapes, I think.” She turned her arms over, showing off a skinned elbow and lines of dimples and bruises where stones had dug into her forearms. Elena looked at Gabe over her head and raised her eyebrows with a tiny nod, and he nodded back.

“Should be an easy fix, then,” he said to Isabel. “Come here, let me take a look. Then you can help me with the others.” He began wiping over her scrapes with a cloth soaked in disinfectant, and without looking up, added, “I’m gonna take a look at your arm next, Elena. I want to get it in a sling before you go trying to climb anything else.”

“You can’t just pop it back into place?”

“Trust me, you want an actual doctor to be the one that does that.”

The low murmur of their conversation faded into the background as Naomi felt the weight of the fight settle in around her. The last traces of her adrenaline had worn out, leaving her shaky and tired, and her head was still throbbing. Even the jagged terrain was starting to look like a decent bed.

Gravel crunched beside her as Mateo finally sank to the ground, sitting with his back pressed up against the stone he’d been leaning on. Honestly, he had the right idea. She settled in next to him, immediately relieved with the weight off her legs, and basked in the relative quiet. Finally, she could catch her breath.

Looking over at Mateo, she saw him using the lull to re-examine his wand, carefully running his thumb along the edge of the instrument’s new scar. Burnt leather curled away from itself, and charred wood flaked off at his touch, making Mateo scowl at it like he was trying to sear another hole into it with his eyes. His head didn’t look much better—singed hair was matted with drying blood against his temple, and a darkening bruise bloomed from beneath it, stretching toward the corner of his eye and down across his cheek.

The fight had happened so fast—Naomi hadn’t gotten a good look at what was happening with everyone else. She’d spent half of it lying down, the wind knocked out of her by a blast that had rung in her ears long after she’d gotten herself upright. She still wasn’t exactly sure how Elena had ended up on the other end of the chamber, dangling over a pit of lava, but she did sit up in time to see the flash of light that put Mateo on the ground. It hadn’t been the biggest concern at the time—he’d gotten back up right away, and the lava pit was a more immediate hazard—but considering the matching wounds on his head and his wand, it wasn’t hard to piece together what had happened.

Looking again at where the chunk had been ripped from the drum, she shuddered. That could’ve been him.

“How’s your head?” she asked, giving him a gentle poke in his side.

“Not too bad,” he answered, though any relief it might have brought her turned into confusion as he went on. “The magic source doesn’t seem to be damaged, and that’s the important part. It just can’t conduct magic properly right now. I won’t say it’s an easy fix, but it’s not the worst I’ve seen, either, and I have all the supplies I need back home.”

She glanced between him and the wand, which he was still squinting at in concentration. “Mateo!” she said, more forcefully, and he looked up, startled. “Your head,” she repeated. “I’m asking about your head. The one on your shoulders?”

He reached up and brushed his fingers against the bruise, like he’d forgotten it was there. “Oh, right! That’s fine too.”

Something about the moment struck an oddly familiar chord. Naomi wasn’t sure if it was the bruise by his eye, or his confusion at the question, or just the way the memory seemed to hit him at the same time, judging by the way his face abruptly brightened from bemused to delighted, but she was suddenly fourteen again, dragging him out of a shrub in the school courtyard. She burst into a full-bodied cackle that Mateo heartily joined in, laughing so hard he had to fold over, holding his stomach. The sound pulsed painfully in her skull and she drew in a lungful of the noxious volcanic air with every breath, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop, as emotionally frayed as her exhaustion had left her.

Their friends watched them, bewildered, from over where Gabe and Isabel were adjusting Elena’s new sling.

“Okay, I don’t get it,” Elena finally said.

“What I’m getting is that they both hit their heads a lot harder than we thought,” Gabe said. He gave a small tug on the sling. “How’s this feel?”

“It’s great, Gabe. Go help them out.”

Mateo couldn’t seem to get any words out, still wheezing with laughter, so it fell to Naomi to explain. “It just reminded us of how we met,” she said between laughs, wiping away a tear. “I guess you had to be there.”

Elena perked up. “Oh, that’s right! I always forget that you two knew each other before the rest of us met.”

“Move apart a little,” Gabe said as he approached. “I need some space to work.” Naomi dutifully scooted aside, and he crouched down between them and balanced the first aid kit on a rock. With a quick look between their heads to assess severity, he turned toward Mateo and started prepping a fresh cloth for cleaning.

“Wait, so how did you guys meet?” Isabel asked in the pause.

Naomi hesitated. That day hadn’t been one of her finer moments. “Well, we went to school together, so—”

“Naomi hit me in the head with an olaball.”

Elena let out a scandalized gasp, raising a hand to cover her smile, and Gabe snorted, shaking his head.

“Yeah, sounds about right. Now try to hold still, Mateo.”

“It was an accident,” Naomi insisted, meeting Elena’s look of amused judgment.

Mateo leaned forward to look at her around Gabe, his mouth curling up into a smug grin. “The first time.”

Gabe hauled him back by his shoulder.

Elena laughed. “Naomi! You hit him twice?”

“It’s—I—” Her voice squeaked out, and her face was burning. Leaning around Gabe, she jabbed a finger toward Mateo. “You swore you wouldn’t tell!”

“Well, that was back when we were still in school, and you could actually get in trouble for it. It’s not like Elena’s going to kick you off the Council or any—aah, ah, ow!” Hissing, he recoiled as Gabe finally got the disinfectant to connect. “Gabe, that stings!”

“Then stop moving.”

Elena propped her good arm against her hip. “I don’t know, Naomi,” she teased, “Hitting poor Mateo is a pretty serious offense.”

“Ow, ow—hear that, Gabe? Hitting ‘poor Mateo’ is serious!”

“I’m not hitting you; I’m treating you. And it wouldn’t hurt as much if you stopped squirming.” Gabe dabbed the cloth against Mateo’s head again. “You didn’t see Isabel complaining.”

“You were gentle with her!”

“Because she knew not to move!”

Naomi crossed her arms, still feeling put out. Two could play at the secret spilling game. “Yeah, well, Mateo’s a nerd that likes fairytales!”

Isabel giggled. “I think we already knew that.”

But Mateo gasped anyway, straightening up (and drawing another annoyed sound from Gabe) and pressing a hand to his chest in mock offense. “Well thanks, Naomi, now I’m going to be exiled!”

“Yep, off to Cordoba with you!” Elena said, waving a dismissive hand. “We can’t have a Royal Wizard that likes magic!”

They all had a good laugh, with even Gabe sparing a second from his work to snicker at his friends. He sobered suddenly, though, as he parted more of Mateo’s hair back from the wound, and he let out a low whistle. “You’re lucky she didn’t take your head off.”

Mateo frowned. “Naomi doesn’t throw that hard.” And then he saw the unamused look on Gabe’s face and blurted, “Ash! You meant Ash! I’m paying attention. I’ll stop talking now.”

He crossed his legs and pressed his lips together, staring at the ground ahead of him and finally waiting patiently for Gabe to finish dressing his wound and move on to Naomi.

Naomi dragged herself a few feet forward so he could reach the back of her head.

“So… are you gonna give us the details?” Elena asked, sitting down on the stone herself.

“There’s not much to tell,” Naomi said, tilting her head forward as Gabe began to gently prod around under her hair. “I was practicing olaball in the school courtyard, I didn’t see him sitting there, and I kicked the ball into his face by mistake.”

Elena smiled. “And it was fast friends after that?”

“Oh no, not even close. We got in a fight, and that’s when I threw the olaball at him on purpose.”

“I thought it was pretty rude in the moment,” Mateo chimed in, “but it’s kind of funny now.”

“It was rude,” Naomi replied, “but yeah, I’m glad we can actually look back on it and laugh.”

From the corner of her eye, she could see him staring at her with a nostalgic smile on his face.

“What?” she prompted.

“Your hair was longer back then.”

She blinked. She supposed it had been. She’d gotten it cut at the end of the school year—Avaloran summers were hot enough without hair plastered to the back of her neck—and had gone back to the bob of her early childhood. It had been so long since she’d had long hair that she’d forgotten what it felt like, and the strange realization occurred to her that Mateo was the only one of her friends who had ever seen her that way.

“I guess it was. Yours was shorter.” She looked up, grinning. “And you were shorter, too.”

“Please don’t move,” Gabe said, still exasperated from his ordeal with Mateo.

“I wasn’t that short,” Mateo scoffed.

“You were shorter than me!” Naomi glanced over at Elena, trying to keep her head steady. “It’s so unfair—he must have sprouted half a foot in a year.”

“Half a foot, huh?” Mateo stretched his legs out in front of him, wiggling the toes of his boots. “Pretty sure I still only have two of those.”

Naomi and Isabel groaned, and Naomi felt Gabe’s hands leave her head as he clapped one of them against his face. Elena, meanwhile, burst into a knee-slapping guffaw that Mateo was quick to echo.

“Two—two of them!” she managed between laughs.

“See what we have to deal with, Isa?” Naomi asked.

“See what I have to live with?” Isabel retorted.

“Ha! Okay, you win.”

Gabe finally stood back up and rounded to her front.

“So what’s the damage, Doctor Gabe?” Naomi asked. “Will I ever waltz again?”

He chuckled. “Your dancing career will probably be fine. Nothing broke skin, but there is a small lump back there. I’m mostly worried about the possibility of a concussion, but that’s something a doctor will have to check to know for sure, so try to take it easy until we get back to the palace.”

“Aye aye, Captain!” she said with a salute, and then accepted the hand that he extended to help her up.

“That goes for you, too, Mateo,” he said more loudly as he helped Elena back up. Mateo gave a thumbs-up from where he’d flopped onto the ground while laughing, and Naomi grabbed his wrist to start pulling him to his feet.

“So how’s your head?” he asked once he was upright.

“Well apparently, it might be concussed.” It still throbbed with every motion, and all the raucous laughter hadn’t helped, but humor had fought off the last dregs of mortal terror and worry. She was still tired, too, but the bone-deep weariness had lightened to something more manageable. “But I think it’s gonna be fine.”

At the coach, Elena had gotten back into the driver’s seat and was already climbing back out, sheepishly admitting that she probably shouldn’t drive. Gabe had packed up the first aid kit, with Isabel fretting at his elbow about whether he needed medical attention as well, and he was quietly reassuring her. Mateo gestured toward the carriage with a dramatic bow and an ‘After you,’ and laughing, Naomi vaulted up into it before turning back to help pull him inside as well. Gabe shot them a look, and to be fair, he had just told them to take it easy, but he didn’t scold them, instead just telling Isabel that she had the job of making sure they didn’t fall asleep on the way back. Everyone clambered back into their seats, and with that, they headed for home.

Chapter Text

Almost sixteen years and Naomi was going back to Norberg. Thankfully not as a threat of a permanent move, but as a visit for a nostalgic tradition. After years of her parents’ stories, she’d be able to see it for herself, with all the names and places she’d grown up hearing about right there in front of her. She’d have mulberry juice fresh, and a proper, traditional Norberg shepherd's pie. She’d see the Norberg lights in person instead of just an artist’s rendition.

And best of all, she’d be sharing it all with her best friends, the way they’d shared their culture with her and welcomed her into their lives. Elena and Isabel would sort out the politics in time to join her for the main celebration, and meanwhile Naomi would spend the day with Gabe and—

She stopped short just outside the library, so quickly that Elena almost crashed into her from behind, clutching her father’s notebook. “Hang on—was Mateo in his workshop?”

Elena blinked, recovering from the sharp stop. “Oh, right! We should invite him, too.” Craning her neck over her shoulder, she looked back into the library. “The painting is shut, though. He might be in his room?”

She had a point. Mateo usually left the door cracked when he was in, though she’d known him to keep it closed if he was working on something particularly disruptive.

“Worth a shot as long as we’re here.” Slipping past Elena, Naomi went back to the painting and knocked on the frame. A telltale, startled yelp answered her from inside, and Naomi found herself smiling, a chuckle escaping her. “Didja get all that, Mateo?” she called.

The painting slid open and Mateo poked his head into the main room, his bewildered gaze flickering between them all. “What?”

“That’s a ‘no,’” Gabe laughed from the doorway.

Mateo’s eyes ran another loop across them all, and his voice grew urgent. “Wait, what did I miss?”

“Relax,” Naomi said. “We’re all taking a trip to Norberg for Family Day. Well, Gabe and I are celebrating Family Day.” She shot a smirk over her shoulder. “Elena has to work.”

“Hey! I won’t be working the entire time,” Elena protested. “I have an excellent work-life balance.” Her proud smile deflated fast at the dubious looks her friends gave her, but all she could manage was an indignant sputter in her own defense.

Footsteps in the hallway announced Armando’s presence as he approached. “Princess Elena! Doña Paloma needs to see you as soon as possible about the next magisterial election!”

Elena’s expression turned stormy. “After what she did yesterday, Doña Paloma can wait.”

“O-oh, okay. Then…” Though Naomi couldn’t see Armando from her angle, she could easily picture him reshuffling the collection of schedules and documents in his arms as he chased down the next most important task. “You’re also needed by the Carnaval committee to approve their initial building permits.”

Elena had been looking smug, like rejecting Doña Paloma had somehow proven her earlier point, but as soon as Armando mentioned Carnaval, she cringed.

“Ooh, I do have to take care of that right now, though. Won’t take long. But I gotta—‘scuse me, Gabe—” She squeezed past him into the hall, and then ducked her head back into the library to tack on, “Anyway, Mateo, you should definitely come! To Norberg, I mean, not to help with the permits. The more the merrier!”

“Ah, right…” he tried, but Elena was already gone.

Gabe chuckled. “I actually gotta get going, too. See you soon!” He disappeared into the hall after Elena, and Naomi heard Isabel’s voice fading into the distance as well.

“So, you coming?” she asked Mateo once they were alone.

He fixed her with a worried look. “Right now?”

“Oh, no, not right this second.” His shoulders dropped in relief. “I think we were talking about sailing out early tomorrow though to make sure we get there in time for Family Day.”

Mateo’s relief evaporated. “Wait, tomorrow?”

“Is that a problem?”

“Well, no, it’s just very soon…” His mouth curled in a discouraged frown, and he looked back into his workshop. Something rattled inside like the lid of a boiling pot, and Naomi caught a whiff of herbal fumes that drifted out through the door’s gap.

“Unless whatever you’ve got going is a multi-day project, you’ll have time to finish it,” Naomi reassured. “Like I said, we’re not shipping out immediately.”

“That’s not really the issue.”

His frown had been pulled even more taut in discomfort, and he drummed his fingers on the frame of the painting. He looked so uneasy, and Naomi found herself thinking back to his closed workshop door, and the other reason he might’ve kept it that way.

“You don’t want to go, do you?” she asked. “You have that ‘I don’t wanna be bothered but I’m too nice to say it’ look.”

“It’s not really that, either. It does sound like fun, in theory. And I would like to go.”

“...But?”

He opened his mouth, presumably to explain, but seemed to think better of it at the last second, instead just swaying in the doorway and looking up at the corner of it.

Naomi sighed. “Seriously, if you don’t want to go, you can just say it. You’re not gonna hurt my feelings.”

“Okay.” He pulled an apologetic smile. “I don’t really want to go.”

And, ow, the bluntness did sting a little more than Naomi had expected. Family Day was one of the few traditions from her parents’ home country that they’d been able to preserve through all their journeys, even if they didn’t physically go back to Norberg for it. She’d been looking forward to sharing it with her friends, and especially with how eager Gabe and Elena had been to participate, hearing Mateo reject it flat out was an awfully abrupt damper on her mood.

Her disappointment must have shown, because Mateo quickly backpedaled. “It’s not that I don’t want to go! It’s just that I don’t want to go.”

“You are making way less sense than usual.”

“I—” He took a harsh breath, closing his eyes to think. “Okay, no, you’re right. I’m not explaining this well. I am interested in seeing Norberg and Family Day, and under normal circumstances, I think it would be fun.” As he opened his eyes again, Naomi noticed a familiar, old self-doubt in them, like he was worried she’d get mad at him. “But after the Feast of Friendship fiasco yesterday, Elena had me stay for the rest of the party in case there were any other issues.”

Naomi’s mind looped through the story Elena had told her earlier that day. Something about Esteban and Doña Paloma teaming up to sabotage the feast by pitting King Hector of Hectoria and Queen Abigail of Norberg against each other. Whatever the issue was had persisted through the night, resulting in Hector going on to sabotage Family Day, which led to Elena’s impromptu diplomatic mission to the North. She’d caught something about shrinking spells and Mateo getting brought in for damage control, but she wasn’t sure what that had to do with him sitting the festival out.

He rubbed at the space between his neck and shoulder, looking ashamed. “The royals Elena invited weren’t really the most,” he pulled a face, “subdued. After spending the day with them, I’m not sure I can handle another big social event so soon. If I’d had a little more warning about this, I maybe could’ve prepared myself better, but tomorrow already…”

Naomi stared. “So, you can’t go to a festival tomorrow… because you went to a party yesterday?” she asked carefully, not sure she understood.

If Mateo noticed her hesitation, he didn’t say anything, instead giving an emphatic nod. “Yes! That’s exactly it.” His smile faltered. “That’s—that’s weird, isn’t it?"

She huffed out a quiet laugh. “Well, you’re a weird guy. I guess it’s one of those things, huh?”

“Ah, yeah. I mean, you’ve seen how I am at parties.”

“Chaos on the dance floor and overzealous with snacks?” she teased. “At least until you disappear halfway—” Her brain skidded to a stop. “Oh. Oh, wait.”

Hiding out at the side of the room during Elena’s accession. Vanishing during his own appointment. Retreating down the docks during the celebration of her family’s not-move. The list went on, a dozen different instances of him keeping himself as far from the social center as he could manage, even when he otherwise seemed like he was having fun.

He grinned, sheepish. “Yeah.”

“I always thought that was just nerves,” Naomi said. “I didn’t realize it was—what, that you get wiped out?”

“Something like that. Sometimes it’s nerves. I don’t really know how to explain it, and I swear it’s nothing personal. It’s just… overwhelming, sometimes.”

The disappointment lingered, but Naomi understood enough. If he wasn’t up to socializing, he’d either spend the entire trip in retreat, hiding away from the rest of them, or making himself miserable trying to be present, and neither option would be any fun for the group, let alone for him.

“Alright,” she finally said, “I’ll let the others know you won’t be coming.”

His relief was palpable. “Thanks for understanding. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it!” She started for the library door, hoping the dissatisfaction didn’t show. She could still spend the day with Elena and Gabe, after all, not to mention her parents. “I’ll bring you back a souvenir."

“Thanks! Have fun!” Leaving the painting cracked open, he returned to his workshop.

At the exit, Naomi paused, her hand on the door handle, looking back over her shoulder. “Hey, Mateo?” she called, waiting for him to poke his head out. “This isn’t exactly a day trip, y’know. Between travel and the festival, we’ll be gone half the week. You sure you’re gonna be okay alone?”

He shrugged. “I spend most of my time alone. I’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, and I kinda thought you hated that.” She furrowed her brow in sympathy. “I just don’t want you to feel like you’re being left out.”

But the look he gave her was unbothered and appreciative. “I don’t.”

“Hey. Brought you something.”

Standing behind the garden bench, Naomi waved the wine bottle in front of Mateo’s eyes. He jumped at the intrusion into his space, but tilted his head back to look up at her without complaint. “Thanks? I think this is the first time someone has offered me a mysterious bottle of blue liquid.”

She snorted. “This one won’t turn you into a toad. It’s just mulberry juice.” Vaulting over the backrest, she dropped down next to him, holding out the bottle again, as well as an engraved glass commemorating the holiday that she retrieved from her bag. “It’s a souvenir from Norberg.”

“I have never made a potion to turn someone into a toad,” he said, but he didn’t sound annoyed, and he finally set the book he’d been studying aside to accept the gifts.

“That’s a shame. I can think of a few people a potion like that would be really good for.” Leaning back, she tallied off on her fingers. “Obnoxious royals, rude diplomats, obnoxious royals…”

He raised an amused eyebrow. “Naomi, are you abusing your friendship with the Royal Wizard to enact petty revenge on people?”

“Psh, no, I’m just saying if you need test subjects for your toad potion…”

“My toad potion that I haven’t made.”

“That you should totally make.”

She realized her mistake too late. Mateo’s eyes lit up with the kind of devious energy reserved for his worst jokes. “Toad-ally?”

“No!” Naomi groaned, folding in on herself. “Ugh, I walked right into that one, didn’t I?”

Snickering, Mateo finally set the glass aside and went to pry out the bottle’s cork. “So, how was Norberg? I think I caught something about ‘obnoxious royals?’”

“Elena and Isabel got the worst of it. They spent the day marooned with King Hector.”

The cork slipped out with a pop and Mateo fumbled it in surprise, whipping his head back toward her. “Wh—they what?”

“And Gabe got kidnapped—”

“What?!”

“—so who knows what he was up to all day. I’m sure Princess Chloe is fine, as a person, but—”

“I’m sorry,” Mateo interrupted, “can we go back to ‘Gabe got kidnapped?’”

Naomi shrugged dismissively. “Oh, he’s fine. The Norbergian princess just decided it was more important for him to spend the day with her than with the people he actually came with. That’s all.”

Mateo slid down on the bench, staring wide-eyed into the distance. “What all did I miss?”

“Not much,” Naomi admitted, more sullen than she would’ve liked.

It was hard not to feel bitter. Sure, Gabe had shown up again by the end of the day, in time for the lights and the juice, but that was after she’d already spent the day wandering around with her parents, feeling as much like an outsider in their home as she used to in Avalor. She would’ve felt much less alone if she’d been with someone as new to it as she was.

A hand on her arm pulled her out of her thoughts. “Are you okay? Did something else happen?”

She sighed. “The issue is more that nothing else did. My parents really tried to make the day fun, but they kept asking about if I remembered stuff from the last time I was in Norberg, and that was when I was two. It was all completely new, but I felt like I was supposed to know it already. Like I was letting them down by not knowing.”

Beside her, Mateo nodded in sympathy, the understanding plain on his face.

“I was kinda hoping to have someone as a buffer for that, y’know? Someone that I could tell about the parts that I did know, so that when my parents said their bit it would feel like they were adding on, not just teaching me like I was still a toddler. But Elena and Isabel were gone all day babysitting grown adults, and Gabe got whisked away after we’d barely gotten ashore.”

The ‘and you weren’t there, either’ went unspoken, but Mateo seemed to hear it anyway, judging by the way his posture drooped and his face twisted with guilt.

“I just wanted someone to be there with me,” she finished.

“You should have said something. I would’ve gone along if I’d known about that.”

She shook her head. “You weren’t up to it. I didn’t want to force you. Besides,” she added with a wry look, “considering how the trip went, you might’ve just gotten nabbed by someone else.”

The look of horror on his face drew a laugh from her, and she relaxed by a fraction, looking out into the gardens. Did it actually matter? Avalor was a lot warmer than Norberg, anyway, in climate and in spirit. It had come to feel far more like home than any of her parent’s stories ever had.

But still, it was hard to quell that familiar ache of otherness. As much as Avalor was her home, she still wasn’t Avaloran, not fully, and as her trip had made clear, she wasn’t really Norbergian anymore, either. She had hoped to find another place to anchor in Norberg, but instead, she just felt unmoored from both countries. Maybe her family’s old life of endless wandering really was the better alternative.

“Oh, wow, this is good.”

Looking back at Mateo, Naomi saw that he’d finally poured himself some of the mulberry juice and taken a drink, examining the bottle with renewed interest.

She smiled. “I told you so. You’ll have to try the fresh stuff sometime.”

“I thought this was the fresh stuff?”

“As opposed to tea or something, yeah. But I mean the fresh fresh stuff. The just-pressed-five-minutes-ago stuff.”

“Next year, then.”

Naomi blinked. “Huh?”

“I’ll just have to go with you guys next year. That’s probably enough time for me to figure out an anti-kidnapping spell, too,” he added with a wink. “Oh! And until then…”

He turned away and set down his glass beside him, drawing his tamborita. Naomi leaned forward to peer around him and watch what he was doing, but a flash of light from a spell had her shielding her eyes. When she blinked the spots from them, there were two glasses sitting on the bench, and Mateo was pouring juice into each of them.

“Here,” he said, holding one of them out. “I know it’s not the same, and I know it doesn’t change what happened—I’m sorry it was such a mess. But sharing this with others is an important part of the holiday, right? So, we can at least do that, now.”

Naomi stared at the offered glass, and then shook her head with a laugh. “You know, if you didn’t like it, you can just give it back. You don’t have to pawn it off.”

He drew the glass closer to himself. “What? No. I’m keeping the rest of it. This is the only glass you get.”

She chuckled again. “I guess I better savor it, then, huh?” Finally accepting the drink, she clinked it against Mateo’s and matched his growing smile. “Here’s to next year. Cheers!”

“Salud! I’m looking forward to it.”

And despite the trials and frustration of that year’s trip, as she sipped the juice, Naomi found that she was, too.

Chapter Text

“I never really liked Esteban, anyway.”

It wasn’t entirely true. Naomi couldn’t say that she’d ever been friends with the chancellor—former chancellor—but she’d at least developed an appreciation for his knowledge and expertise. Their relationship was a far cry from the early days on the Grand Council, where he took offense at her mere presence and she saw no value in his uppity standards. She may not have liked him, but she could respect him.

Rather, she thought she could respect him. That sense had been stripped down to nothing in record time the moment she’d learned of his betrayal the week before. The image was burned into her mind: Elena’s eyes filling with livid tears, his name twisting from her mouth in a snarl, the whole room around them shuddering to life in a heavy orange haze. Naomi couldn’t think of anything else to do at the time than to catch her friend in a bone-popping hug, like she could banish the hurt if she just squeezed hard enough, and Elena had screamed into her shoulder until the tidal wave of rage had passed and the world had spun itself to a stop.

That fury had simmered almost visibly under Elena’s skin through the Grand Council meeting that followed, her voice hoarse and raw as she called for her cousin’s exile. What else could Naomi do but agree? Anyone that would put her friend through that was not someone she wanted around, and if she had any doubt, the choked sorrow and anger in Luisa’s voice as she agreed was enough to tip the scales irrevocably.

At least, that’s what she told herself to justify her vote. But all that would have taken too long to explain, so instead, she went on, “He was a jerk from the start. I don’t know why I didn’t see this coming.”

‘Jerk’ was the understatement of the century. It was better suited to someone that cheated at cards, not someone complicit in the assassination of their own family. Gabe seemed to gather what she was going for by the venom in her tone, though, and he nodded sagely beside her on the sofa.

“Yeah, he always seemed like he had an agenda. I wanted to believe that all his bossing Elena around was just concern for her safety, but…” He leaned back, crossing his arms. “I guess his family’s safety wasn’t really that high on his priority list.”

His disgust was audible, and Naomi felt bolstered in her criticism. Guilt went down easier when she knew someone else was on her side. “I know, right? Did you see the look on his grandparents’ faces when he tried to excuse himself? The look on Elena’s face?” She stuck her chin out, wrinkling her nose. “If I could’ve voted twice, I would’ve. I can’t understand how he could’ve just helped Shuriki like that.”

“I don’t understand how anyone could do something like that. I’m not sure I get how Francisco could’ve forgiven him so easily, either. He’s not my grandson, so maybe that makes a difference, but if you ask me, what he did is pretty unforgivable.”

“Awful,” Naomi agreed. “I can’t believe I ever trusted him.”

The thud of a book landing hard on the table startled the two out of their conversation, and Naomi turned her head to find herself looking up at an irate Mateo.

“Sorry to interrupt, but would you two mind taking this conversation literally anywhere else?” he said, his voice climbing in volume so that it echoed across the cavernous ceiling.

Gabe and Naomi shared a look. “Are we in your way?” Gabe asked.

Mateo spread his arms, gesturing incredulously around them. “You’re in my room!”

“And?”

He let out a frustrated sound and turned to Naomi, swinging his arms toward Gabe as if to say ‘can you believe this?’

She shrugged. “This is one of our usual meeting places.”

“I live here! Ugh, forget it!” He stalked away and sat down heavily on the other curved sofa, grabbing another book from the precarious stack he’d built up on the floor. Flipping it open, he made a show of ignoring them, though his bouncing leg betrayed his agitation.

Gabe pinched the bridge of his nose with a sigh. “Look, Esteban’s betrayal affects all of us. Naomi and I thought it would be good for us to talk about it without having to talk over his actual family. Sorry for thinking you would want to be a part of that conversation.”

Mateo snorted, a harsh, sarcastic sound, but didn’t raise his head. “Believe it or not, I have better things to do with my time than gossip about Elena’s family behind her back.”

“Not like we can gossip in front of her back,” Naomi muttered. “Not unless we want her to get all orange and floaty again.”

Mateo snapped his book shut and tossed it aside almost carelessly. “Well, some of us are trying to figure out how to help with the whole ‘orange and floaty’ thing,” he said, making quotes in the air. He reached for a new book, shooting her and Gabe another glare. “So if you don’t mind…”

“Don’t try to act like you’re the only one here that cares about Elena,” Gabe retorted. “We’re all trying to help her.”

“Oh yeah? And what are you planning to do next time she can’t calm down?”

Gabe opened his mouth, and then closed it, turning away with his face twisted in irritation.

There wasn’t much he and Naomi could do. Elena’s new magic was terrifying. A force of nature, untameable and unpredictable, it leached into the air and clung to every surface before spinning into a roulette of effects. It wasn’t so bad when Elena was happy, trailing a carpet of flowers behind her as she walked, but those moments had been few and far between the last week, understandably so. It had to be even worse for Elena herself, to either be barred from her feelings so as to prevent collateral or to watch them spiral out of her control in ways she neither wanted nor helped her stay calm. It was a miracle no one had been hurt yet, with just some close calls on Carnaval.

But hoping for Elena to keep constantly calm was both unsustainable and unfair. They needed a better way to handle the actual magic as it happened.

Mateo huffed out a breath through his nose as neither of them could form a response. “That’s what I thought.” He stood up again to sort through the stack of books, dividing it into haphazard, meaningless piles. He was barely even looking at them as he set them aside, just shuffling around the center of his room like his aggravated energy had nowhere else to go. “Anyway, since talking about Esteban is the fastest way to make Elena’s magic kick in, I was planning on just not talking about Esteban.”

“What, ever? I don’t think Elena’s magic gives her super-hearing,” Naomi said.

“Do you really not have anything to say about this?” Gabe asked. “Esteban actually seemed to like you; I thought you’d have some feelings about it.” He leaned forward so his elbows were resting on his thighs, his face drawn and serious. “How are you not bothered by this?”

“Not bother—do you really think I’m not angry with him?” Mateo snapped, finally looking up. “I’m furious with him! The fact that he hurt Elena is enough of a reason on its own, but in case you forgot, my family was directly affected by what he helped Shuriki do. My abuelo had to leave because of what he did. My mom had to grow up without him—I never even got to meet him.” He faced Naomi, his glare softening into something pained. “And I know at least one of you knows how that last one feels.”

She bit her lip, sinking in on herself. She and Mateo had never directly discussed the similarities in their grandfathers’ stories, but the comparison wasn’t lost on her. When she first heard the tale as a child, she’d shaken her tiny fists and cried for the man she would never meet, her anger at the injustice of it all too big for her body. But sirenas were a faraway thing of fantasy until Nueva Vista, where their mere presence sent a renewed fury slicing through her, as raw and exposed as ripped stitches. How dare anyone ask her to trust them, she’d thought. To think Mateo wouldn't be upset now was an unfair accusation.

Mateo sighed, his anger bleeding out into a quiet bitterness as he continued. “The fact that Esteban had a part in all that, that he knew this entire time…” He crossed his arms over his stomach, squeezing like he was hugging himself. “It’s awful. I feel sick just thinking about it. And it almost makes it worse that he ‘liked’ me—it just makes me wonder if he was only being nice because he felt guilty, or because he was trying to make sure I never suspected him.”

“For what it’s worth,” Naomi said, “I never got that impression.” She’d heard the way Esteban talked about Mateo during council meetings. He spoke with a genuine respect, if not for Mateo, then at least for his skill, that left Naomi feeling jealous and alienated. Esteban was never one to hide when he disapproved. “I know it doesn’t change what he did, but I do think he really did just like you. I don’t think he was trying to get you ‘on his side’ or anything.”

Rather than seem reassured, though, that at least the duplicity didn’t run that deep, Mateo’s face crumpled further, his features riddled with fear and guilt. “Well, he wouldn’t have needed to anyway,” he admitted, his voice actually trembling, “because I kind of am on his side.”

It took a second for the words to process.

“What?” Naomi blurted, sitting bolt upright.

“You can’t be serious,” Gabe said. “After everything we were just talking about?!” There was an edge to his voice, and when he stood sharply, hands clenched, Mateo stumbled backward, almost tripping up the steps with his palms out in front of him and his eyes wide and fearful. The tension dropped from Gabe’s body in an instant. “Mateo, I’m not gonna…” His voice was low, and careful, and hurt. “Just what do you take me for?”

“No, I—I know, I just—” His hands were shaking, and he crossed his arms again to tuck them away, though this did nothing to hide the audible strain as he spoke. “You guys were saying you don’t know how anyone could go along with something like that, and how anyone who would must just be—” He swallowed. “But. I think I—I think I get it.” It came out in a whisper, like a confession.

“I’ve been there. I know what it’s like to feel lonely, and ignored, and desperate to do anything to change it. And I can’t help but think if—what if—what would I have—”

Oh.

“Alright, just stop,” Gabe said, sounding annoyed again, though he kept his posture deliberately loose. “That’s completely different. You wouldn’t have helped Shuriki. None of us think you would’ve done that.”

But Mateo shook his head. “When Sofia showed up at my house, I didn’t question it. I was fully prepared to help her with everything she was saying, and it never occurred to me that she could just be lying.”

“She… wasn’t lying, though,” Naomi pointed out. “I get what you’re saying, but helping Sofia was very much the right thing to do. You can’t really compare helping her to helping Shuriki.”

“I don’t think you do get what I’m saying! We were lucky that Sofia was the good guy!”

“Yeah, because a ten year old girl is really the picture of villainy.”

A frustrated noise crawled out of his throat. “Then what about the Rita thing? I was willing to believe anything she told me just because she was paying attention to me!”

“Carla fooled all of us with that act,” Gabe cut in. “That wasn’t anyone’s fault but hers.”

“Naomi knew something was wrong!”

Naomi flushed, suddenly feeling put on-the-spot. Her goal with investigating “Rita” hadn’t been to make her friends look bad. “That’s still different!” she insisted. “Mateo, we’ve talked about this. We didn’t know for sure that she was doing anything wrong until—”

“I was gonna break her into the treasury!”

Silence hung over the room, broken by Mateo’s heavy breathing and the soft fwump of the couch cushions as Gabe sat back down hard.

A shaky laugh wrung its way out of Mateo’s mouth and he dug his fingers in where he was gripping his arms. “It’s not like I can pretend I didn’t know what I was doing,” he croaked. “Regardless of what I thought of Rita, I knew deep down that doing that for her was wrong, but when she said she wanted to see it, I just—” He squeezed his eyes shut and took another shuddering breath. “I just wanted to feel like—I just…”

Gabe softly cleared his throat beside her, and Naomi turned to look at him. He was drumming his fingers against his thigh, looking uncomfortable, and he tilted his head almost imperceptibly toward Mateo and shrugged, a silent what do we do now? As if Naomi knew. She shrugged back.

“That’s still different,” Gabe finally said. “Breaking into the treasury to impress someone isn’t exactly the same as overthrowing the entire kingdom.”

“We’re not gonna hate you for that,” Naomi added. Count on Mateo to beat himself up over hypotheticals. “You didn’t know she was working for Shuriki.”

“You guys are still missing the point. I’m not looking for reassurance. I know that you guys don’t blame me for anything that happened with Rita. I know that there’s a pretty big difference between Shuriki and Sofia. I don’t need you to tell me that I didn’t do anything wrong; I need to know if you would’ve thought differently of me if I had.”

Naomi and Gabe didn’t answer, just sharing another look, and Mateo continued quietly.

“Because if the answer is ‘yes’, then, well,” he choked on another bitter laugh, “I’m not sure I can believe that you guys don’t blame me for ‘almost’. And if the answer is ‘no’, then…” He glanced between them, something pleading in his eyes. “I don’t understand how we can hate Esteban for doing the same thing.”

Naomi wanted to protest again, but the words died on her tongue, swallowed by a surge of guilt. It was still different, she wanted to insist, but any reasons she could come up with felt shallow. Because Mateo was her friend? The absence of that didn’t justify hatred. Because Esteban was rude? It wasn’t like Mateo didn’t have his moments (or Naomi herself, for that matter). Because of the scale of the offense? If Mateo had actually let Carla into the treasury, Shuriki would’ve come back to power that much earlier.

“Esteban knew what Shuriki was planning to do,” Gabe said, but he sounded much more hesitant than before. Naomi clung to the reason anyway, one last rationale to justify everything she’d said earlier. “He knew that people were going to get hurt if he helped her.”

Mateo frowned. “Do we know that?”

Gabe opened his mouth to reply, but said nothing, just sinking back against the sofa with his arms crossed and his features pulled into a grimace.

The full-bodied shakiness that had gripped Mateo while he was trying to argue had run its course, and his posture wilted, exhaustion seeping into his frame. “Look, I’m not trying to say we need to be okay with what he did—I’m not okay with what he did. I’m angry, and I want answers, and I want Elena to be okay. But I understand why he might have done it, and I just can’t bring myself to hate him for it. Hearing you guys talk like that was the only option, though,” he shook his head with a pained noise, “it just made me really uncomfortable. For a lot of reasons.”

They sat for a moment in the following quiet, processing his words, and Naomi stewed, the discomfort creeping up her spine. Before she could stop herself, she blurted into the dead air, “I don’t actually think Esteban should’ve been exiled.” She met Mateo’s surprised expression, and she could feel Gabe’s eyes on her as well as she went on in a rush, feeling the coil of guilt loosen in her stomach as she did.

“I know how awful it is to not have a home, and I wouldn’t wanna wish that on anybody, but you weren’t there during the trial. You didn’t hear—Elena and Luisa were so upset, and if I’d voted against it, it would’ve been a tie, and I don’t know what would’ve happened then, and—” she swallowed, ashamed of how her voice was starting to wobble, “—and he wasn’t even sorry! He went on and on about how outcast and invisible he felt, and believe me, I know exactly how that feels. He made me feel like that all the time! But it was like he cared more about that than the fact that people were dead because of him!”

She let out a slow breath, clutching at her skirt and staring at her knees. “So it was easier to not think about it, and vote to have him exiled. I don’t really hate him, but in the moment… I didn’t know what to feel.”

Gabe watched her as she trailed off. “I don’t think he should’ve been exiled, either,” he said, speaking with measured caution, “but from the practical standpoint that he’s more of a threat to the kingdom running around out there than he is locked up in here.”

“Gabe—” Mateo started, but Gabe cut him off with a raised hand.

“You got to say your bit. Let me say mine.” Mateo closed his mouth, and Gabe gave him a quick nod of acknowledgement before continuing. “I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t think I can completely agree with you. The stuff with Shuriki isn’t even my biggest concern: it’s everything he was willing to do to escape the consequences of that. It’s wondering how much longer he was planning to lie, or how many people he was prepared to manipulate, or how many malvagos he’d be willing to team up with if it meant keeping that secret. He’s been willing to work with enemies of the kingdom before, and he’s willing to work with enemies of the kingdom now, and that makes it my job to apprehend him.

“Maybe he was just a scared and lonely kid back then that didn’t understand what he was signing up for, and I feel for him if that was the case, but now he doesn’t have any excuse. He’s knowingly working with Ash Delgado, and that makes him a threat to the Crown Princess, her family, and her friends. There’s no telling what he could do if we leave him unchecked. As Captain of the Guard, I have a duty to bring him in. And as Elena’s friend,” he added, more softly, “I don’t think it’s our place to try and forgive him.”

“I wasn’t trying to say that,” Mateo quickly said, and Naomi shook her head in agreement.

“I know that. I just wanted to mention it.”

Ultimately, Esteban’s fate was going to come down to Elena’s choice. The three of them wouldn’t get a say in it. They weren’t his family, and they could barely be called his friends, and though the ripples of his actions had touched them all, it was Elena who had to deal with all their grief and then some.

“What do you guys think is gonna happen now?” Naomi asked as Mateo sat back down.

“I don’t know,” he said, casting his eyes toward his scattered spellbooks. “Helping Elena with her new magic is something tangible that I can do, so I’m going to focus on that. If that means helping her catch Esteban, then… that means helping her catch Esteban.”

“I have the guard tracking him and Ash as closely as we can,” Gabe said. “So we’re just waiting on a better lead, and hoping they don’t make any dangerous moves in the meantime.”

Naomi nodded stiffly. So they all just had to bide their time, then. It felt eerily similar to when Shuriki was at large, leaving everyone jumpy and ready to fight at the slightest provocation, with no idea when or where the next attack would be coming from. And just like when Shuriki was at large, Naomi felt useless, with little she could personally do to help other than encourage her friends not to overdo it and vote in council decisions that flipped her opinion as much as her stomach.

Whatever was coming next, they would just have to hope they were ready.

Chapter Text

Filling out belated requisition forms would have gone a lot faster if the pages didn’t keep flying off while Naomi was trying to sign them. The sheet in front of her was already purple and wriggling, and she’d pressed her entire forearm onto it to hold it steady while she put the pen to it with the other hand. Half her name later, and she caught a flutter out of the corner of her eye as papers began to peel off the top of the unsigned stack beside her. She slapped her palm down on top of it, pinning the stray pages, only for the one she was signing to make its escape and flutter toward the ceiling of the Grand Council chamber, where it joined its half-finished brethren in circling overhead like a flock of vultures.

Naomi leaned back in her chair with a huff. This was getting ridiculous.

Elena had been fidgety and upset all afternoon, and if the way she kept squirming in her chair and drilling her fingers against the table as she worked hadn’t made that obvious, the way her dress had been strobing purple and sending the hapless paperwork skyward certainly had. Her dress pulsed again, and she took a deep, exaggerated breath to bring it back to red, but not before her own stack of incomplete forms suddenly became much thinner, the top half making their quick ascent into the growing cyclone. Elena remained oblivious, as engrossed in her work as she was, and slid the completed form aside and grabbed a new one from her stack, all without looking up.

Naomi watched as the newly-completed form also drifted away. “So, what’s on your mind?” she asked, finally breaking the tense silence.

Elena jolted, the tip of her pen scratching harshly across the paper.

“What?” she blurted, and then let out a quiet sigh. “You startled me. There’s nothing really—I just want to get this all done sooner rather than later.”

“Really? Because you seem kinda…” Elena’s dress flashed again, “...purple, today.”

“I feel fine!”

“Uh-huh. Tell that to Hurricane Elena.”

She blinked, perplexed, and then finally looked up. At the sight of the wayward paperwork, she slumped back against her seat with a groan. “How long has that been up there?”

“How long have we been working?”

Grimacing, Elena crossed her arms. “Okay, I get the picture. The better question is probably what isn’t on my mind? Isa’s having trouble with one of her classmates again, and King Hector keeps pestering me about renegotiating our last trade deal, and we still have to finish all these requisitions, which apparently,” she swept an arm toward the ceiling, “my magic—which I still can’t control, so add that to the list—is making way harder than it needs to be.” She tugged at her hair. “And all this would be so much easier to deal with if someone hadn’t decided to betray the family—”

Her jaw locked, and her dress flared again, a brief flash of vibrant orange that crumpled several of the swirling papers and pitched them to the ground like hailstones. Naomi tensed, prepared to dive under the table if anything heavier started flying around.

But Elena drew another deliberate breath and the glow of her anger magic faded. Naomi let the relative silence rest for a moment to give her a chance to cool back off, listening to her measured breathing and the rustling of spinning papers.

“It’s all just a lot,” she finally continued, “and I don’t have a good way to deal with it all at once.”

Naomi hummed out a sympathetic sound. “Well, ‘all at once’ probably isn’t the way to go. And all by yourself probably isn’t the way either.” She counted the issues off on her fingers. “Your sister’s a smart kid, and even if she can’t fix her issue on her own, she still has your grandparents she can go to for help. You can probably pass King Hector off to Julio, and you and I are handling the paperwork right now.” She thought better of addressing the Esteban Problem, which just left—“And Mateo’s helping you with your magic, right?”

Even with the omission, Elena winced, and Naomi braced for flying furniture. Instead of another burst of orange, though, her dress darkened to hover on the edge between red and violet.

“Actually,” she started again, her voice small, “that’s the other issue. I think Mateo’s mad at me.”

Naomi stared. “He’s Mateo,” she said when Elena didn’t elaborate. “If he was mad at you, you wouldn’t have to think it, you’d know. He’s not subtle.”

“He’s been avoiding me ever since I had you guys try to help me control my emotion magic.”

That had been three days prior. It wasn’t uncommon for Mateo to get so wrapped up in a project that he’d lose an entire day to it, and end up inadvertently dodging his friends in the process, but seventy two hours was a lot, even by his standards.

“Huh. That is pretty weird,” Naomi admitted. “What exactly happened?”

“I asked him to make me feel sad, so he told me a story about a lost puppy, and when I started to cry, my magic made it rain on him.”

So that was how he’d ended up so soaked that day. Naomi had wanted to ask about it, but they’d been hiding behind a sofa and it didn’t seem like the best moment, and he’d taken off to prepare for a lesson with his apprentice shortly afterward. In fairness, she could see why he would want to stay out of Elena’s way the rest of that afternoon—she and Gabe hadn’t been keen on getting within the blast radius of Elena’s volatile new magic either after bearing the brunt of it themselves—but still, three days?

Although now that she was thinking about it, Naomi hadn’t spoken with Mateo at all since then. She figured he’d been busy—the one time she spotted him leaving the library, she’d barely called his name before he’d swiveled around and disappeared back inside, and Naomi had just assumed he’d forgotten something. She had no reason at the time to believe he was deliberately avoiding her, but she also didn’t live at the palace and didn’t usually expect to run into him multiple times a day. If he’d been pulling stunts like that with Elena for almost half a week, then there was something else going on.

Naomi straightened up. “Okay, how about this: I’ll go talk to Mateo and figure out what his problem is. I still don’t think he’s angry with you, but I can at least get the Mateo Mystery off your plate.” She had a pretty decent record with sleuthing, anyway.

Elena sat back up as well, a relieved smile on her face. “I would appreciate that. Thank you.”

The circle of papers shuddered against the ceiling, and then rained down onto the two of them in a flurry of white and ink, finally settled.

Naomi blew a page out of her face. “Sure,” she said, watching Elena clap a hand over her mouth to stifle a giggle. “It’s no problem.”

If the painting was shut, Mateo wasn’t home. At least, that was the heuristic Naomi had been using for over two and a half years, and it had served her pretty well. Still, he hadn’t turned up in any of his other usual haunts when Naomi had passed by his bedroom and looped around the gardens, which left his closed-up workshop as the only obvious place she hadn’t looked yet.

She rapped on the frame of the painting. “Mateo? You in there?”

Silence. Naomi strained her ears to see if she could hear him shuffling around inside, to no avail.

“Are you actually not there or are you just hiding?”

Still nothing. Doubt started to seep into Naomi’s mind. If he wasn’t there, either, she didn’t really know where else to look. Maybe she had just missed him back in his room?

She had just turned and started for the library door, though, when she heard a sharp gasp from behind the painting, followed by a poorly concealed sneeze. Naomi stared.

“Okay,” she tried again, “so you’re either Mateo, and you’re just being a jerk, or you’re not Mateo, in which case I need you to sit tight for a minute while I go and get some guards to break the door down.”

“Wait, wait, don’t do that,” Mateo said, his voice muffled through the door. “It’s just me.”

“And?”

“...and I’m being a jerk.”

Naomi gave a satisfied nod, even though he couldn’t see her. “And now that we’ve established that, can you open up? I wanna talk to you about something.”

Something rustled inside the workshop, but the painting didn’t show any signs of opening. “But we’re talking right now?”

“Face to face, Mateo. I’m not having this conversation with a wall. I can barely hear you as it is.”

Mateo let out an exasperated groan, as if he had any business being the annoyed one, but there was a click and the painting slid open, anyway.

Naomi pushed her way in before he could get any funny ideas about locking her out again. “You look terrible,” she remarked as she squeezed past and took in his disheveled state. He seemed exhausted, with bruise-colored bags under his eyes and his oversized robes looking more rumpled than usual.

“Thanks,” he muttered, shooting her a dirty look as he leaned back against one of the columns. “What was it you needed?”

His voice still sounded off, even without a door between them, and he was squinting against the dim lighting of his workshop, his entire face scrunched up in discomfort. He was shivering, the tremor barely visible in his crossed arms, and the longer Naomi watched, the more it seemed like his casual lean was less about looking nonchalant and more about keeping himself upright.

“Well, I was here to figure out why you’ve been avoiding everyone the last few days, but I think I just got an answer to that. How long have you been sick?”

An uncomfortable-sounding laugh, garbled by congestion, came out of his mouth. “I don’t know what you’re—” And then he twisted away, letting out a series of wet, hacking coughs into his elbow.

Naomi wrinkled her nose at the sound, but finally approached while he caught his breath, reaching for his forehead. He made a tiny, distressed sound and tried to lean away from her touch, closing his eyes, but he was still pressed up against the column, and his head bumped into it with a dull thump. Naomi’s hand made contact, and she cringed at the feeling of damp hair and too-warm skin beneath her palm.

“You’re burning up,” she said. “Why are you still working right now?”

Mateo made another pained noise. “If I took off I’d have to tell Elena why.” He cracked his eyes back open. They looked glassy and tired. “I didn’t want her to worry about it, or think it was her fault.”

Naomi took a step back. “Why would Elena think that you getting sick was somehow her…” She trailed off, the timing of it all mapping out in her head. The emotion magic practice, Mateo getting drenched, him becoming a sudden recluse immediately after—it added up. “Did Elena’s magic get you sick?”

“No!” Mateo’s voice cracked at the volume and he pressed a hand to his mouth to cover another cough. “Olivia was pretty sniffly during our lesson after that. She said there was something going around her school.” He groaned, slumping further against the column. “I must have caught whatever she had.”

The wet clothes probably hadn’t helped, but Naomi held her tongue.

“Look, Elena’s just got a lot going on right now, between her magic, and Esteban, and…” He sighed, letting his eyes slide shut again. “I didn’t want to give her anything else to worry about.”

“A little late for that,” Naomi remarked. “She thinks you’re still mad at her about the waterworks.”

Mateo snapped to attention, his face falling in dismay. “What?”

“You’ve been avoiding her. What was she supposed to think?”

He didn’t respond, instead just sinking in on himself, his expression panged with guilt and fatigue.

Naomi used the lull to take stock of the rest of his workshop. A half-finished project was strewn across the worktable, and a stack of reference books was piled up on the chair in the corner instead of being neatly shelved. Something had boiled over in the potion cauldron and had yet to be cleaned back up, save for a single stripe down the side. A dirty rag lay abandoned on the counter beside it.

“Are you even getting anything done like this?” she asked, and when Mateo didn’t reply, simply turning his face further away, “Alright, so here are your options: you either go lie down in your room and I’ll go get the doctor, or you go straight to the palace infirmary yourself.”

He peeked over at her. “What’s option three?”

“I go get Elena, because you actually listen to her.”

“I listen to you,” Mateo mumbled, but he took one look at Naomi’s frown and raised eyebrow and caved. “I think I’ll go lie down.”

“Good.”

“Right after I clean this up.” He started for his worktable, but Naomi grabbed him by his elbow.

“Will it explode if you leave it?”

Mateo blinked at her, bewildered. “Uh, no? I don’t think so? That shouldn’t be something it can do—”

“Mateo. I’m asking if it has to be cleaned up now, or if it can wait until you’re better.”

“Oh. Well… I guess it can wait—”

That was all the confirmation Naomi needed, and she cut him off with a gentle push toward the door. He let out an indignant squawk as he stumbled forward that quickly turned into another coughing fit, and Naomi watched with a rueful stare. She’d been treading a line between annoyance and concern the entire conversation, unsure if she should be upset with him for hiding his illness and turning it into a whole thing in the process, or upset for him and the fact that he was feeling so awful. Either way, though, he didn’t need her making it worse.

“Can you make it to your room?” she asked as she closed the painting behind them. He’d stopped coughing, but was leaning against the library wall with his eyes closed and his face screwed up, one hand rubbing at his temple.

“Sure,” he managed, his voice coming out raspy. He tried to clear his throat to no avail, the sound turning into another weak cough that he muffled against his arm.

Naomi sighed. “Yeah, alright. C’mere.” She looped an arm around his back and pried him away from the wall, and with his arm across her shoulders, the two finally left the library.

His room wasn’t far, thankfully—with the proximity, Mateo’s condition seemed even worse. Naomi could feel him shivering, as well as the uncomfortable heat radiating off his body, and another surge of equal parts worry and frustration welled up in her.

“How is it that none of my friends know how to take breaks,” she muttered. “You’ll work yourself through a fever, Elena’s constantly adopting everyone else’s problems, and I’m pretty sure Gabe sleeps in his uniform.”

“Sorry.” Mateo shifted beside her. “But there’s a lot of important stuff going on right now, and we’re just trying to do our jobs—”

“Good luck doing that when you can barely stand!” Naomi shot back, incredulous. “Look, I know we all have a duty to the kingdom or whatever but somehow I don’t think ‘getting sick on behalf of the crown’ was part of our terms of employment.” The amount of responsibility on her shoulders as a grand councilor could already be overwhelming. She couldn’t imagine trying to keep up with it when she wasn’t feeling well. “Am I the odd one out here for not wanting to make myself miserable?”

“I’m not miserable; I’m sick.”

“I dunno, you sound pretty miserable right now!” They’d reached his bedroom, and Naomi shoved the door open with more force than necessary. “You know, for such a smart guy, you sure make some stupid decisions.”

Mateo winced. “Sorry,” he said again, sounding small. “I just didn’t want anyone to worry.”

Naomi paused and looked over at his despondent expression, feeling her own softening. “We’re your friends, Mateo. We’re supposed to do that.”

She guided him across his room and up to his bed, cursing whichever architect thought putting it at the top of a flight of curved, handrail-less stairs was a good idea. His legs were shaking the entire way up and he all but collapsed once he reached the bed, flopping face-first into the middle of it.

“I draw the line at helping you change into your pajamas,” she said as he kicked his boots off, letting them drop beside the bed. “You can figure that one out on your own.”

“Mm. Just gonna sleep in my robe,” he mumbled into his sheets, tugging the hood over his head. “Warmer.”

Naomi watched him curl in on himself, exhausted enough that he’d dropped any pretense of not being unwell. “Don’t get too comfortable—I’m gonna send a doctor here in a few minutes.”

Mateo hummed out a response and wriggled his way under the covers until just a lump of red fabric was poking out at the top.

“Well, sleep well,” she went on, hopping back down to the main floor of his room. “I’ll go get the doctor, fill Elena and everyone in on what’s going on.”

The bed rustled as Mateo pushed himself back out of his cocoon in a rush, looking dazed. “But I thought—”

“Look, I’m not gonna not tell her.”

“I don’t want her to worry…”

“She’s already worried,” Naomi reminded him. “Might as well make sure she’s worried about the right thing.”

Mateo didn’t respond, but Naomi caught the resigned look in his eyes just before he burrowed back under.

She sighed through her nose. “Get some rest,” she said, and made to leave, but she paused by the door. “You know people actually worry less when you tell them about your problems, right?” she asked, to no response, and she couldn’t tell if he was ignoring her or if he’d already fallen asleep. Either way, she gave one last look at the Mateo-shaped lump on the bed, and then pulled the door closed behind her.

“If his cold doesn’t kill him, I will!” Naomi spat, drawing an exaggerated, congested sniffle for emphasis.

Elena gave her arm a sympathetic pat, even as Naomi twisted in her hammock to cough in the other direction.

Of course she had caught Mateo’s cold. Of course she had. She’d woken up the morning after talking to him with a tickle in her throat, and by the end of the Grand Council meeting that day she felt like she’d been run over by a carriage. Her muscles ached and her chest rattled with every cough, and it was all she could do to stumble back home and hide in a blanket nest in her room.

“How is it that you and Gabe haven’t gotten sick?” she demanded, shooting Elena a betrayed look.

“We’ve just gotten lucky, I guess.” She pressed a hand to Naomi’s forehead, smoothing back her hair. “I hope you feel better soon. It’s been weird at the palace with both you and Mateo out.

Naomi let out a grumble, pulling her blanket more tightly around herself. “So how’s he doing, anyway?”

“Still laid up. The doctor said he’ll probably be out for the rest of the week, and he’s supposed to mostly stay in bed until his fever breaks.”

Poor guy. “Hmph. Good. Serves him right.”

Elena gave her a reproachful look before perking back up. “Oh! He asked me to pass a message along to you. He says he’s really sorry that he got you sick—”

Naomi sank further into her blankets, nodding.

“—but that this possibility was part of why he didn’t want to tell anyone in the first place.”

Any of her more charitable feelings toward Mateo evaporated in an instant. “Yeah, well, you can tell him this!” And rather than say anything, she made a rude gesture in the air.

Elena watched her hand with a raised eyebrow. “I’m not doing that. If it makes you feel better, Gabe and I already told him off for hiding it, too.”

Naomi groaned, her brief burst of annoyed energy spent. “Yeah, okay,” she muttered, “can’t do anything but ride it out now, anyway.” She sighed and closed her eyes. Her head was starting to pound from the excitement, but she wasn’t ready to send her company away yet, either. “So how’s everything else going?” she asked, surprised by how thready she sounded.

Even without looking, she could imagine the way Elena’s face softened with sympathy, and she kept her voice low and gentle to avoid aggravating Naomi’s symptoms further. “Well, you were right as usual. About not trying to handle everything myself,” she clarified when Naomi cracked an eye open. “Isa went and talked to her teacher about her classmate and got that all straightened out, and Julio pacified King Hector in half the time it would’ve taken me. There’s still a mountain of paperwork left, but…” Her strained smile was audible. “I know how much you love helping me with that, so I’ve been saving it for the time being.”

Naomi managed a weak chuckle. “You don’t wanna do it, do you?”

“Oh, not at all. I want to be out hunting for Ash and Esteban.” She almost spat his name out.

“Half your team is already dying. Maybe don’t go after them alone right now.”

Elena scoffed. “Um, does that seem like something I’d do?”

Naomi opened her eyes again to fix her with a smirk, and she slumped down, crossing her arms.

“I know. Don’t say it.”

A door opened somewhere downstairs and Naomi could pick out bits of a muffled conversation before someone bounded up the creaky steps and crossed the hall to her bedroom.

“Naomi?” Gabe called, knocking on the door. “You up for another visitor?”

“Sure, let’s make it a party,” she replied through a sniffle, and Gabe stepped into the room, peering around Elena to get a good look at Naomi’s sorry state.

“Aww, you look like the world’s saddest burrito,” he teased.

Naomi scowled. “Never mind. Out.”

“But I brought some of my dad’s marranitos from the bakery.” Gabe held up a tin and gave it a tiny shake. “They’re pretty strong. He says they should clear your sinuses right out.”

Narrowing her eyes, Naomi considered the offering. “Okay, fine. You can stay.”

Elena had taken the only chair in the room, so Gabe opted to just lean against the wall by Naomi’s head. He popped the tin open and set it down on the end table within her reach.

“Elena was just telling me that me and Mateo getting sick was all part of her master plan,” Naomi said, fumbling an arm out of her blanket cocoon so she could grab one of the pig-shaped treats. “It’s all so she can keep us from keeping her from going after the bad guys alone.” She looked up at Gabe, shaking the cookie at him for emphasis. “You better keep an eye out.”

Elena rolled her eyes and let out another scoffing sound, but Gabe just gave a hearty laugh.

“Don’t give her any ideas,” he said. “But I think if I was gonna get sick, I would’ve caught it off Mateo by now. How’re you feeling? Your dad said you were asleep most of the morning.”

“I’ve been better,” she said through a mouthful of gingerbread. She couldn’t taste much, as congested as she was, but she could tell Sr. Núñez had gone heavy on the ginger, because her nose was starting to drip. “But I’ve been worse, too. It’s easier with company,” she admitted, taking another nibble of her marranito.

“What I was actually telling her was just what’s been going on at the palace,” Elena said. “Help me fill her in?”

Gabe nodded. “Sure thing.”

Even with food, Naomi felt her energy flagging, and soon she lacked the strength to participate in the conversation. She settled back in, letting their chatter wash over her. For all her aches and discomfort, being cared for felt cozy, and the sound of her friends just talking helped her to relax. Their voices had become almost unintelligible by the time someone nudged her shoulder, and she dragged her eyes open, unable to recall when she’d closed them.

“We’re gonna head out so you can get some rest,” Elena said, her voice low.

“We can come by another time, if you’re up to having visitors,” Gabe added.

Naomi wasn’t sure how she responded, but it must have been some kind of acknowledgement or affirmation, because when she blinked again their silhouettes had retreated toward the door.

“Get well soon,” the Elena-shape said, and the two slipped out of the room, closing the door behind them.

Naomi had barely crossed the threshold to the Grand Council chamber when she found herself tackled into a tight hug.

“Naomi! You’re back!” Elena gave her another squeeze before springing back and grasping her hands. “How are you feeling?”

“Much better,” Naomi said, smiling. It had been a week since her fever had first spiked, and she’d finally shaken the cough and the worst of the aches. She was still a bit fatigued, but she’d gotten tired of lying around all day and had been itching to get back in the action.

Elena beamed. “I’m glad! You missed so much while you were out. There was Octavio’s feud with Armando, and the rogue jaquin...” She led Naomi into the room as she carried on, but Naomi stopped listening as her eyes fell on its other occupant.

Mateo had pulled a chair up by Elena’s and had evidently been helping her organize some documents before she had catapulted herself across the room at Naomi. He was sitting upright and watching them with a broad smile, and he gave a little wave as Naomi made eye contact.

“Good to see you,” he said.

Naomi’s eyes narrowed. “You.”

“Uh,” the smile stayed fixed on his face, but the mirth vanished from his eyes. He shot an anxious glance at Elena, a silent plea for intervention. “Me?”

“You got me sick!” She marched toward the table, brushing past Elena, and Mateo jumped out of his chair, almost toppling it.

“Okay, so, I did apologize,” he said through a nervous chuckle, his palms out in front of him.

Naomi started rounding the table, and Mateo circled in the same direction, letting out another giggle.

“You sent Elena to apologize for you!”

“I was sick!” He almost tripped over himself as Naomi feinted the other way. “You were the one that—h-hey!”

Naomi chased him in a full loop around the table and then doubled back to make him scramble, stopping when her back was to the window and his was to the door. He was still smiling, the cheeky jerk. Granted, Naomi was struggling to keep her own expression in check, and she could only hope the smile creeping onto her face at least looked menacing. Enough messing around. She lifted a foot up onto the chair and hoisted herself onto the table, stomping across and scattering pens and papers in her wake.

“Naomi!” Elena chided, laughing, and Mateo let out a sound somewhere between a scream and a cackle as he sprinted for the door, running headlong into Gabe as he entered.

“Um,” he started, but Mateo had already grabbed hold and swung himself around, placing Gabe between him and Naomi.

“Gabe! Perfect timing! Do your guard thing!”

Gabe glanced back at Mateo and then met Naomi’s eyes as she jumped down from the table, landed with a thud, and took another few steps toward him. She put her hands on her hips, staring up at him with all the mock severity she could muster.

He stepped aside, his hands up. “Hey, he’s all yours.”

Mateo gasped. “You traitor!” And then he ducked out into the hallway and darted off, his footsteps receding on the stone.

Naomi poked her head out into the hall and spied where he’d stopped by the corner at the far end. He bounced on the spot, still grinning, like he was expecting her to give chase again, but Naomi had already burnt through most of her energy reserve. She shook a fist at him instead.

“I’ll get you yet!”

“Alright, alright, we do still need all four of us here if we’re going to start looking for Ash,” Elena said, finally stepping in.

“Oh, let him run around for a little while,” Naomi replied. “It’ll do him good after a week of bedrest.”

“Actually, he was on his feet a couple days ago already,” Gabe chimed in.

Naomi pulled a face and glared back down the hall. “Of course he was.”

“Sorry!” Mateo called.

Elena poked her own head out. “You can come back now, Mateo.”

“I’ll only take a little revenge!” Naomi promised.

“How about ‘no revenge’?” he asked.

“You get a little.”

“Aw, okay.”

Gabe chuckled and clapped her on the shoulder as they all settled back into the room. “It’s good to have you back,” he said, grinning. “I’ve had to tease him by myself all week.”

“Naomi is funnier,” Mateo said without missing a beat as he slipped back inside, and Gabe swiveled his head toward him with an offended sound.

“We’ll see how funny you think this is,” Naomi said, and before Mateo could duck away, she grabbed his hood and yanked it up and over his eyes. “There. Consider yourself revenged.”

Mateo just snickered again.

Papers rustled on the table behind them, and Naomi turned to see Elena gathering pages up that had been scattered by Naomi’s rampage.

“Sorry about that,” Naomi said, sobering. “I guess we should get planning, huh?”

Elena smiled. “I’d like to, yes. But I am glad that everyone’s doing well again.”

A sudden sneeze ripped through the room, and all eyes snapped to Gabe, who still stood by the door, looking startled. He wiped his nose, mumbling a quiet, “‘scuse me.”

“...Or not,” Elena amended, dropping her papers to the table. “We can try again in a week.”

“Wh—seriously?” Gabe said, looking around at his friends’ stares. “It was just one sneeze!”

“That’s exactly how I started,” Mateo said ominously.

“Okay, that settles it,” Naomi said, taking the initiative to usher Gabe back into the hall. “It’s your turn to take a break, now.”

“But I feel fine! Come on, it was just one—” He froze suddenly, face contorting as he tried to hold back another sneeze to no avail.

“Two,” Mateo corrected. Gabe shot him a dirty look, and then sneezed again. “Three.”

“Bless you,” Naomi said.

Mateo joined her in pushing against Gabe’s back. “We’ll take care of Gabe, Elena,” he called over his shoulder.

“Yeah, maybe we can at least keep you from getting sick,” Naomi added.

Elena seemed equal parts concerned and confused by this turn of events. “O-oh. Okay. Feel better soon, Gabe! I’ll be sure to check in!”

He made a frustrated sound. “We don’t even know for sure that I’m si…” He trailed off into another sneeze.

“Four,” Mateo said.

“Will you stop counting?!”

“Look at it this way,” Naomi said, steering him down the hall. “If you’re not sick, then you can jump right back into your work tomorrow, and the worst thing that happened is that you got a day off. You’re probably way overdue for one of those, anyway.”

“And if you are sick, then by resting now, you’re getting ahead of it!” Mateo added.

“You’re the absolute last person that should be lecturing me about that,” Gabe muttered. But he glanced behind him at his friends’ resolute expressions and caved with a sigh. “Okay, okay, you two win. I’ll go get some rest.”

Victory achieved, Naomi and Mateo shared a grin, and continued their mission.

Chapter Text

Something was wrong.

It was heavy in the air the moment Naomi stepped into the Grand Council chamber, palpable and chilling in a way that made her neck prickle. Her eyes zipped to Elena’s dress by default. No, still red, with the swirls of glitter just harmless decoration instead of glowing beacons of emotion. So this aura of discomfort was mundane, then; that almost made it worse.

Luisa and Francisco were already seated, wearing identical expressions of confusion and concern, both directed at their granddaughter between them. Magical or not, Elena was the source, but she offered no explanation for the oppressive atmosphere as Naomi approached her own seat. She just shook her head instead at Naomi’s inquisitive expression, her ponytail swishing behind her.

“I’ll explain once everyone’s here,” she said. “It’s not a happy story, so I only want to tell it once. Just in case.” She swept her hand down her dress. Somehow, Naomi didn’t think sitting around anticipating whatever it was would make it easier to bear, but she held her tongue. Luisa offered her a shrug from the left, as if to say that’s all we got, too, and Naomi settled in beside her, apprehension seeping into her skull.

Gabe was next to arrive, handing off one last order to another guard in the hall before stepping in and recoiling at the disquiet. His eyes tracked the same path as Naomi’s—Elena’s dress first, then across everyone’s faces—before settling on Naomi with something desperately confused behind them. She could only shrug helplessly. Still looking wary, Gabe made his way over to the map at the edge of the room, standing in silent sentry.

If Gabe had been brought in for a Grand Council meeting, then whatever it was that had everyone so on edge had to do with Ash and Esteban. Maybe they’d been spotted again, although that alone didn’t explain the dread crawling across Naomi’s skin. If anyone else already knew what was going on, it would be Mateo, but he was conspicuously absent. Whenever Gabe was called in, Mateo would usually tag along if Elena hadn’t fetched him first herself, so Gabe standing by the map alone looked more empty than if he hadn’t shown up at all. As if reading her thoughts, Gabe glanced at the vacant space beside him, looking unsure.

Something was very wrong.

Doña Paloma finally burst into the room a moment later, her usual boisterous attitude quickly dissipating into the fog of anxiety spreading around the room. She fluttered her fan like she could simply blow the discomfort away.

“Well, it’s awfully dour in here,” she said, almost sounding offended. The remark did nothing to alleviate the tension, still stretched taut like an over-tightened guitar string, and she made her way to her seat, looking ruffled.

Once she was sitting, Elena took a deep, steadying breath and rose from her own chair. “Now that everyone’s here, we can call this meeting to order. To start, I have some news about Ash and Esteban’s whereabouts.”

That couldn’t be the whole picture. Naomi watched, hands folded on the table, as Elena walked over to the map and began pulling the apparatus around. The circle came to rest on a spot deep in the jungle as she continued. “Mateo and I were ambushed by them yesterday at some temple ruins about a two hour’s walk from here. Esteban has a much better handle on his teleportation magic now, so that doesn’t mean they’re currently anywhere close, but they could have a hideout nearby. Gabe, I want you to take a squad of guards out there today to investigate the area, and see if you can find any clues on where they were or where they might be going.”

“Of course, Your Highness.” Shoulders squared, hands clasped behind his back—Gabe was the picture of professionalism as he answered. Even still, Naomi could see the worried crease of his brow and the way he dug one of his thumbs into his wrist. He was nervous, no doubt dwelling on the same obvious question that haunted her: if Mateo was there during the ambush, then why wasn’t he here now?

“What were you doing so deep in the jungle, Elena?” Francisco asked. “If you were trying to track them, why would you not bring some guards with you? Ash is dangerous!”

Elena didn’t comment on the omission of her cousin’s name, though her mouth hardened into a line for a split second before she replied. “That’s the complicated part. We weren’t out looking for them. We were out there because we found a way to restore Alacazar from the book he sealed himself in.”

Astonishment rippled through the room, and both of Elena’s grandparents suddenly sat bolt upright.

“Alacazar is alive?” Luisa asked. “After all this time?”

“I thought he passed away sometime during Shuriki’s reign,” Francisco added. “So he’s here? In Avalor?”

Elena opened her mouth, then closed it, pressing her lips together in visible discomfort.

Doña Paloma cut in before she could answer. “I’m sorry, but who is this ‘Alacazar’?”

“He’s Mateo’s grandfather,” Naomi answered.

“He’s the former Royal Wizard,” Elena replied in the same moment. Ah, right. That was probably more important as far as the Kingdom was concerned. Naomi sat back, ears tingling and mouth snapped shut. It was hard for her to imagine anyone else in the job other than Mateo, even though she knew logically that others came before him.

“And he’s an old friend,” Luisa added warmly. “Where is he now, mija? Is he back in the palace?”

Elena’s grim face answered well before she found the right words. The hopeful smile slipped off Luisa’s face as the awful energy returned to the air, sickening and cold.

“Alacazar is dead,” she finally said, blunt for once that meeting. “Mateo and I were able to free him, but the ambush caught us by surprise. Ash and Esteban had a third malvago with them—an old rival of Alacazar’s—and he dealt him a mortal blow during the fight.”

Her grandparents erupted, peppering her with demands for details and expressions of concern and horror. Between the how could they-s and you could have been hurt-s, though, Naomi’s mind reeled with the one question still left glaringly unaddressed.

“Is Mateo okay?” She gripped the edge of the table, watching Elena’s face with bated breath.

And Elena hesitated, averting her eyes and knotting her fingers together.

No. No, no, no, he couldn’t be. Elena wouldn’t have tortured them like that, letting them wonder this entire time. She would have been more obvious, she would have told them sooner, he couldn’t be—

Her eyes met Gabe’s across the room, as wide and terrified as hers felt. Still gripping the table in a white-knuckled vice, she stood sharply, barely registering the sound of her chair toppling behind her over the blood roaring in her ears. Where is he, she wanted to ask, praying at least for ‘infirmary’ over ‘morgue’, but her paralyzed lungs were only able to push out a frantic “Where—?” instead.

“He’s not hurt!” Elena quickly said, waving her hands in front of her, and relief crashed through the screaming panic, leaving Naomi exhausted all at once.

She sank partway to the floor, arms trembling where they held her up on the table. “Lead with that next time!” she gasped. She pressed her forehead against the surface, hoping that the cool wood would calm her racing heart. “I ask if he’s okay and you look at me like that—”

“I’m so sorry, that’s not at all—” Elena took a deep breath. “Physically, he’s fine. But he’s having a hard time dealing with it. He took today off so he could visit his mother and explain everything to her.”

“The poor thing,” Luisa said. Her voice was sympathetic and gentle, but Naomi could hear a scowl twist onto her face as she continued, “I swear, if I ever get my hands on Ash and Esteban—how many families do they plan on tearing apart? Was hurting their own not enough?”

“Mi amor… We will deal with them appropriately once we can,” Francisco said. “For now, the best we can do is offer proper condolences to the de Alvas.” He addressed Elena again. “Do they plan on having a funeral? I assume they would have had one some time ago.”

“I don’t know. Mateo didn’t say anything about that when I saw him this morning…”

The conversation moved on to logistics and remembrance, fuzzy and meaningless at the edge of Naomi’s perception. It wasn’t that she didn’t care that a good man was dead, but she’d never known him in a context other than ‘Mateo’s grandfather’. She cared insofar as it affected him, or any of her friends. She cared in that she knew how gut-achingly terrible it could feel to miss someone you’d never met, and she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have that chance granted for a few short hours before having it ripped away. But she had nothing to contribute, so she took the time to slowly recompose herself after her surge of adrenaline had left her shaky and kneeling.

Peeling her head off the table, she met Doña Paloma’s eyes across the room in a rare moment of kinship; the woman looked as out of place and uncomfortable as Naomi often felt. Gabe was standing far less rigidly, his posture having slumped from relief after Elena’s clarification. His head was tilted slightly back and his eyes were closed, and he let out a visible, steadying sigh through his nose before looking at her. He tried for a reassuring smile that was betrayed by the lingering horror in his eyes. Naomi weakly returned it, and then moved to right her chair.

The meeting continued as she settled back in, and though no worse news was presented for the rest of its duration, she still couldn’t help but feel off-balance and strange.

Naomi didn’t hear whether Mateo was back at the palace until the Grand Council meeting two days later. She’d tapped her foot throughout the rest of the meeting and launched herself from her chair the second it adjourned, beelining to his room with the tread of someone on a mission. Her feet wore a familiar path along the runners in the halls, all the way to the riveted double doors of his quarters. With a plan to check his workshop next if he wasn’t there, then the gardens, Naomi pushed the door open.

She hadn’t needed to plan ahead. Mateo was there, slumped down on one of the seats in the recessed center of the room, with a book open in his lap and his head tilted against the column beside him. He was wearing his day clothes, his necktie loose and his robe draped across the sofa back. With how still he was, Naomi almost thought he was asleep, but his eyes were open, trained vacantly on the orrery above him.

Any of his usual exuberance had drained away. Even when Naomi had walked in on him in the past, deep in silent concentration on his work, there was an energy to his intensity. Mateo didn’t stop for anything, especially where magic was concerned. This blankness was uncharted waters. Chest tight, Naomi stepped into the room.

“Mateo?” she called when he didn’t react to the door closing. She kept her voice soft, but it sounded thunderous in the dead silence, and Mateo flinched, sitting up so suddenly he almost flung the book from his lap. He stared wide-eyed at her, face flickering through panic and confusion before he pushed a fake smile onto it and stood to greet her, setting the book aside.

“Naomi, hi,” he tried, his voice shaking with fake levity. “What brings you here?”

“Oh, don’t even start with that.”

Her legs were moving before she realized, and she caged him into a tight hug, squeezing him hard enough to elicit a surprised grunt. Mateo hesitated before returning the gesture, but closed his arms around her with a shaky breath.

“Elena told me what happened,” Naomi said. “Mateo, I’m so, so sorry.”

His chest hitched. “Yeah. Thanks.” He lifted an arm from her back to wipe at his face, and when he pulled away from her, she could see his eyes had been watering. He tried to arrange his face back into a cheery facade. “Is there something you needed?”

There was an edge to his tone—not cruel, but definitely harried—like he was in a rush for her to leave. Naomi ignored this. “I just wanted to check in, see how you were holding up.”

Mateo scoffed and waved her off, returning to the sofa and reaching for his book. “Ah, I’ll be alright. I’m just a little tired.” He certainly looked exhausted—had Naomi not seen the candid misery on his face before she’d announced her presence, she might have bought in to the whole ‘just tired’ charade. Like he could sense her eyes on him, steady and expectant, he eventually caved anyway, his posture wilting and face falling. “It’s been a weird few days,” he admitted. “And I’m very tired.”

Naomi sat beside him and rested a palm on the crook of his elbow. “Did you want to talk about it?”

Another dry scoffing sound. “Everyone’s been asking me to talk about it. I want to get some uninterrupted research done.”

His snippy tone struck a nerve, and before she could think better of it, Naomi asked, “What, like you were when I got here?” He flinched at the accusation and she immediately tried to backpedal. This was not the time to sass him. “God, no, that’s not what I meant.”

The look he gave her from the corner of his eye spoke volumes. Wasn’t it? But he just sighed. “Sorry. I know you guys are trying to help, but…” He thumbed the edge of the bookmark jutting out between the pages of his book, rolling it back and forth under his fingertips. “I can handle this myself.”

“You want me to leave?” Naomi offered. Her face burned from her tactless slip-up. It wasn’t that she wanted to ditch him, but if he wanted to be left alone anyway then she wouldn’t mind taking the out.

“I—I don’t know. Maybe? Not really.” He sighed again, eyes locked on the bookmark. “What would you do if this happened with your grandfather?”

She’d been pondering that exact question for the last two days. They’d never talked before about the similarities in their grandfathers’ stories, at least not directly, but the comparison wasn’t lost on her. She’d grown up with stories about his dauntless adventures, hearing him in her mother’s jaunty fiddle tunes, seeing his shining face staring back at her in old family portraits. She’d wished she could have met him, and she’d held onto his death as something momentous for her, though it had been well before her time.

But if she could have met him, what exactly would have changed? Surely there were things he could have taught her or stories he could have told that her parents couldn’t, but she’d never been lacking in mentors. Or father figures, she grimly noted. Mateo had lost more than just a chance to know a childhood hero.

Maybe their situations weren’t as similar as she’d originally thought.

“I don’t know,” she finally admitted. “It’d probably be really upsetting. It was only a couple of hours, right?”

He hummed, and then fell back into the quiet. His next words were hesitant, like he was confessing to a crime. “I feel like I should feel worse.”

Naomi wasn’t sure that was possible; he’d looked pretty distraught when she walked in on him.

“Every once in a while I catch myself thinking that things aren’t really any different than before I met him. And I miss him, I do, but I keep thinking about how much better it would be for me if he was still here.” He gave a dry, humorless laugh. “Isn’t that selfish? I’m not sad enough, and when I am, it’s for the wrong reasons.” He sank further into the cushion, his voice hollow. “I’m a terrible grandson.”

“You think he would’ve believed that?” He turned to her, quizzical, but Naomi just shook her head. “Hey, don’t look at me. I’m not the one that met him.”

A tired smile crept onto his face, tiny, but genuine. “He wouldn’t. I know.” His face fell again though. “Did Elena tell you how he—how it happened?”

“Kinda. There was an ambush, Esteban and Ash had another malvago, and he’s the one that…”

His expression turned brittle as he let out another half-puff of a laugh, like he expected that answer.

“I guess she didn’t. He was—” His eyes had welled up again, and he pressed a shaking hand to his mouth, barely whispering past his fingers. “He was protecting me. H-he took a spell that was meant for me.”

I’m glad he did, was Naomi’s first thought, and she bit down on her tongue hard enough to taste iron to keep from saying it aloud. Even she knew that was objectively the wrong response, but in a morbid way, it was true. Those few chilling seconds two days prior where she’d thought that Mateo was dead were among the worst of her life, and she didn’t want to think of what she would have done if she’d been right. She tried to think of their last conversation before the ambush and came up horrifically blank. It had been something trivial. Something meaningless. Something about lunch, or a joke that didn’t land. Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough, nothing she could’ve borne as a goodbye.

She wasn’t glad that Alacazar was dead, but she was glad he’d kept her friend alive.

“I’m sorry,” was what she ended up saying instead. “I can’t imagine how that feels.”

That was a lie. She could, easily, if she stopped to think of what it would be like to see one of her parents or friends throw themselves between her and danger. But she didn’t want to imagine it, didn’t want to feel the guilt, sticky and vile, digging under every stretch of skin, for something that had never happened and hopefully never would.

“I hope you’re not blaming yourself for it,” she added gently.

Another humorless laugh bubbled up in his throat and he fixed her with a sardonic smile. “Come on, when have I ever done that?”

So he was, then. “That bad, huh?”

He winced. “...Yeah. It’s pretty awful. It’s hard not to think like that, like if I’d been a little faster, or a little smarter, then maybe everything would’ve worked out.” He sighed, closing his eyes. His lower lip wobbled, and his voice along with it. “I just wish he was still here.”

Naomi reached out to comfort him again, resting a hand on his shoulder. He sucked in a wet, shuddering breath and turned his head pointedly away as he tried to recompose himself. She sighed through her nose. She wasn’t about to move her hand, but she stopped staring at him to give him some semblance of privacy, and looked around instead to take stock of the state of the rest of his room.

As disorganized as his head often seemed to be, Mateo was normally fastidious with his belongings. Any other time Naomi had been in his room, the place had looked impeccable, almost like it wasn’t even lived in, with at most a couple books or a small personal project out of alignment for immediate use. The state of it then could hardly be considered messy by a normal person’s standards, let alone Naomi’s—she knew she was hardly a bastion of cleanliness—but for Mateo, it was just disorganized enough to feel off.

A stack of books had spilled over further down the sofa, with one having fallen open on the floor, and the potions he normally kept neatly shelved looked rifled through and left in disarray. The sleeve of a dirty shirt poked out from under the unmade bed. Naomi frowned; hopefully the latter meant that Mateo was at least getting some sleep, but judging by the aura of exhaustion that hung in the air around him and the way the sheets were haphazardly bunched at the foot of the bed, it seemed like any sleep he was getting wasn’t especially restful.

When her eyes fell on his robe, she realized that while it was a similar color, it wasn’t actually the old, oversized one she was used to seeing him in. Even folded over the sofa back, she could see that it was much more fitted, and instead of the extensive gold embroidery of the old robe, this one had splashes of both gold and green around the collar, belt, and ends of the sleeves. There wasn’t a trace of his old robe anywhere, and the fabric of the new one looked stiff and mostly unworn.

“Is the robe new?” she asked. “It looks pretty cool.” Anything to help keep his mind off the blame and self-doubt.

“Hm? Oh, um,” he swiped at his eyes again and looked over at where the article was draped. “Yeah. The old one was pretty beaten up during the fight, and this one was in the secret library downstairs, so…”

“Wait, since when did you have a secret library?”

The corner of his mouth quirked upward. “Since always, apparently. There’s a switch in here to open the staircase.”

Naomi shook her head with a soft snort. “You know, one of these days we need to just go around the palace and check every wall for secret wizard hidey-holes. Watch it turn out that your grandfather installed a direct route to the kitchen somewhere in here.”

Mateo’s laugh was weak, but it was still a laugh. “I’d settle for a passage to my workshop,” he remarked, and Naomi snickered. Sitting up a bit straighter, he offered her a tentative smile. “Did you want to see it? The library, I mean.”

“Sure!” She hauled herself to her feet and held a hand out for Mateo, pulling him up. He reached for the robe briefly as she left the center of the room, but then withdrew his hand, just letting his fingers curl by his chest. Naomi paused. “You’re not gonna wear it?”

“I actually haven’t worn it since I first found it,” he admitted quietly. “It fits just fine, it just… it doesn’t feel right quite yet.”

Naomi hummed. “Well, whenever it does, I wanna see it. And you can always talk to me about whatever until then.”

The look he gave her was almost sly, and things felt normal for a brief second. “What, and afterward I can’t talk to you about anything?”

“Oh, come on, I’m trying to be supportive, here. You know what I mean.”

He gave a dry laugh. “I know, I know.” His face softened. “And thanks.” Naomi shrugged, smiling, and he took her elbow to lead her toward one of the columns, kicking a stray pillow out of sight as he went. “Come on, you’re going to love this,” he said, and he pushed a hidden button on the side of the column.

Naomi watched, fascinated, as a spiral staircase ground itself open at their feet, but when she turned back to Mateo to comment on it, she paused at the melancholy on his face. Silently, she slipped her hand into his and gave it a squeeze. He didn’t respond, save for a glance and another half-smile, but he didn’t break her grip, keeping their hands joined as he led her down below.

Chapter Text

Naomi’s hand hovered by Mateo’s door, unable to knock. The palace was quiet that evening, a far cry from the day’s adventure of sailing, magic, and laughing curses, and disturbing it felt both wrong and necessary. Wrong as an intrusion, an act of being where she shouldn’t. Necessary because far from being peaceful, the silence weighed on her, giving her nothing to drown out the ‘what ifs’ plaguing her mind. What if she was rushing into things? What if she regretted her decision? What if she wasn’t ready to leave?

She couldn’t have these doubts harassing her if she wanted to make it through the upcoming conversation. Maybe she should avoid talking to Mateo altogether. But she had some time to kill while Elena was preparing the ship title, and the alternative was to wait it out with her thoughts in the silence.

So instead, she knocked.

A muffled ‘come in!’ came from inside, and Naomi entered the room, closing the door behind her. Mateo was on one of the curved, central sofas, a heavy reference book open on the table in front of him and a teapot beside it. He was engrossed in his reading, pausing neither to look up as she approached nor to sip from the teacup steaming in his hand. As Naomi got closer, two things caught her eye. One: the book was open to a drawing of a creature that looked an awful lot like the Chiki-Chiki from that afternoon, surrounded by similarly shaped creatures in different colors and patterns, all with the same unassuming faces. Retroactive research, then. Hopefully he wasn’t being too hard on himself for not being able to catch the odd gnome alone.

Two: there were no tea bags on the table, used or otherwise, with just a bowl of sugar sitting out next to the pot.

Raising an eyebrow, Naomi tried to stealthily peer into his cup and caught a glimpse of liquid the color of tar, followed by a whiff of roasted beans. She let out a laugh at the sight. “Oh, good! It’s just coffee.”

Mateo jolted and finally looked up at her, his drink sloshing dangerously close to the rim. He seemed bewildered as Naomi sat down next to him, and he glanced between her and the cup like it might tell him what she found so funny.

“I didn’t see any tea bags,” she explained between giggles, unsure herself why she’d found it so amusing. Perhaps just the nerves. “So I thought you were maybe…”

“What, drinking hot sugar water?” He shook his head at her, a wry smile on his face. “Come on, not even I’m that weird.” Letting out a chuckle of his own, he set his cup down and grabbed his wand. “Did you want some?”

She managed a nod, not trusting herself to speak without snickering again. Mateo twisted around in the seat and pointed the wand somewhere behind them. He’d gotten a lot more confident in his magic; he neither needed to say the spell out loud as he hit the drum, nor watch the bespelled cup as he guided it to the table, turning back to Naomi instead with a smile.

“So, what brings you here? I’m assuming it wasn’t just to make fun of my beverage choices.” He tapped the drum again and there was another pulse of orange light. It wove around the pot and lifted it up alongside the new cup, pouring a stream of coffee into it as the two continued to slowly spin in the air. Okay, now he was just showing off. Naomi plucked the cup from the air as it rotated past her, and Mateo did a proud little shimmy as the teapot settled back down, its mission complete.

“You mean lighthearted teasing isn’t a good enough reason to stop by?” Naomi asked. “That’s a shame.” And then she took a sip of the coffee and gagged, nearly choking on how overwhelmingly bitter it was.

Mateo winced. “Oh, yeah, sorry. The sugar helps.” He spared her the theatrics as he handed over the sugar bowl, and Naomi snatched up several cubes, still working her mouth like it would get the taste out faster.

She took another tentative sip, the sugar added. “Jeez, that’s strong,” she muttered. “I’m beginning to understand why you don’t sleep.”

“I sleep,” he protested, and then, “Well, I was planning on staying up late tonight, though.” Naomi snorted and glanced up at him with a knowing expression before taking yet another sip, trying to acclimate to the taste while he spoke. “I want to do some more research on that gnome from today. Apparently it’s part of a class of creatures known for being small, agile, and dangerous despite their looks, with each one having a specific, singular power it’s been imbued with. What’s really interesting, though, is that they’re technically all artificial.

“They were created by a sorceress called ‘Chatana’ back before the fall of Maru, but they were all supposed to have been sealed away a long time ago. Elena said she fought the Anchimon last year,” he tapped on a red-orange illustration of a monkey-like creature with flames on its head and then moved his hand to the teal-colored image of the laughing gnome from that afternoon, “and the Chiki-Chiki was unsealed today. I mean, I know they’re unrelated—Vestia and Cruz released the Anchimon, and technically I released the Chiki-Chiki—but we still don't know what set off the warning that led us to it in the first place. And if Chatana’s creatures are going to be a recurring problem…”

“How big of a problem are we talking?”

“Big. She’s made more than just these tricky little guys. Giants, and monsters, and I’m not sure I want to fight any of them. The Chiki-Chiki was bad enough.”

“Aw, but you sounded like you were having so much fun,” Naomi teased, trying to lighten the mood.

Mateo rolled his head toward her, his face deathly serious. “I may never laugh again.” Naomi snickered, and he could only hold the expression a few seconds longer before bursting into giggles himself. His smile quickly faded into a grimace, though, as he moved a hand to his stomach. “Ah, ow, seriously, that really did hurt today.”

She let out a sympathetic hum as her eyes wandered back to the drawings. The shadows of sunset fell across the page in a way that made their harmless smiles look menacing. She swallowed, the bitter drink burning on the way down.

“I wouldn’t worry too much,” he went on, taking note of her furrowed brow. “There might be a lot of her creatures sealed out there, but there’s been nothing to suggest a pattern in them getting released, and it’s not like Chatana herself is still around. Besides,” he held up a hand like he was swearing before the Grand Council, “I’ve learned my lesson about not reading spells out loud directly off of mysterious stone temples in the jungle.”

“I think the real lesson of the day is that you need to brush up on your Old Maruvian.”

He let out a high-pitched whine that quickly turned into an uncomfortable laugh, and then into a scoffing sound. He fumbled his way through a few other attempts at dismissal before snatching his cup off the table, downing its contents in one go. Even he shuddered at the taste, setting the cup back down with his face twisted in disgust.

“Well,” he started, “if I want to study Old Maruvian, I have to get resources from Professor Mendoza, and she… doesn’t like me very much. For some reason.”

“The reason is that you keep wandering off with artifacts from the museum without telling her.”

“I only did that once or twice! M-maybe a few times. And the time with the cursed sword doesn’t count, because it was Gabe that took it, not me!”

“But you kept it for…” Naomi prompted, cueing him.

He opened his mouth, closed it again, and slouched on the seat, crossing his arms. “Six months,” he sighed. “Which I didn’t mean to do. But then Shuriki came back and I started doing all that research on the Scepter of Night, and the sword just fell through the cracks.” Glancing back at her, his mouth curled into a mischievous smile. “Anyway, I figure I don’t have to rush on the Old Maruvian as long as we have you around, right?”

Just like that, Naomi’s good humor vanished. The already bitter coffee turned to sludge in her mouth, and she set her cup down hard, wringing her fingers in her lap. “So, about that.”

Mateo straightened up. “Naomi? Are you okay?”

No, she wasn’t. The caffeine had done her nerves no good, leaving her jittery and tense, and she regretted stalling. “I actually came to tell you something about that.” She took one last, deep breath. Now or never. “I’m leaving Avalor.”

Mateo tilted his head. “Oh. As in, for the weekend?”

“As in, indefinitely.”

“Huh. Okay.” He scratched his ear. “So, did your mom get a new job again, or…?”

“No. This is my choice.”

Why wasn’t he reacting? He still looked more confused than upset and he politely nodded as she answered him. It felt like he was just humoring her. Or maybe he was just trying to put on as even-tempered of a front as possible, after how he’d reacted the last time she told him something like this.

“You’re taking this really well,” she said carefully, not quite keeping the anxiety out of her voice. She’d been braced for anger or distress, but somehow, this was worse. It wasn’t that she wanted him to be upset, but the idea that he might not care if she left stung.

Awfully enough, he actually laughed, the sound burying itself in her chest. But then he explained, “Well, the last time you said you were leaving Avalor,” he made a sweeping gesture up and down her body, “you obviously didn’t.” He leaned sideways against the sofa’s backrest, propping himself up on his elbow and grinning. “I’m guessing you’ll change your mind at the going away party again.”

Oh. It wasn’t that he didn’t care; he outright didn’t believe her. This was going to be painful, wasn’t it?

“Maybe I would,” she said. “Which is part of why there isn’t going to be a going away party. I’m leaving tonight, pretty much right after we’re done talking. Elena’s giving me a ship, and she’s getting the paperwork ready for it right now.”

Watching his face as she spoke hurt. His easy smile turned disbelieving, and then dropped off entirely. By the time she was done he was sitting up again, properly alarmed. He searched her face frantically, his eyes flickering around to try and spot any trace of irony or deceit.

“You’re serious?” he finally asked, sounding stunned. It was all Naomi could do to nod stiffly. “But… why? Did something happen?”

“The reason I was out today happened. I went sailing again for the first time in ages, and I realized how much I’d missed that, and how much I wanted to be back out there.” She continued to knit and unknit her fingers, unable to look him in the eye. “Actually, I was hoping you could do me one last favor.”

Despite his apprehension, Mateo nodded immediately. “Of course. What do you need?”

“Can you tell Gabe what’s going on for me?” As she’d expected, Mateo balked at the request, already looking like he regretted asking. Naomi quickly explained, “I wanted to say goodbye, but I don’t know where he is right now, and I didn’t want to ask Elena to tell everyone because she’s already doing so much for me. And I—I’d look for him again, but this is already really difficult, and I’m so scared of how everyone else is going to react.” She took a deep breath through her nose, staring at her half empty coffee cup. “I can just tell that the more people I have to talk to, the harder it’s gonna be for me to actually leave.”

A warm hand fell on her shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. She met Mateo’s eyes, wide and sad. “Maybe that means you shouldn’t go.”

She put her hand over his. “I have to. It’s—do you remember when we were helping you move, and I asked why you even bothered studying magic?” Mateo nodded, confused again, and Naomi continued, “You said it felt right in a way nothing else did, like you couldn’t imagine doing anything else with your life. Being out on the sea today…”

She could still feel it. Salt and sea spray in her nose, the wind tousling her hair, every second of freedom like her first real breath in years.

“That’s what it was like. It felt like magic to me.”

Comprehension finally dawned in his eyes, but it did nothing to banish the sadness in them.

“I don’t know,” she went on. “Maybe this isn’t what I want. Maybe I’ll get so homesick I’ll turn around and come back after just a week. But if I don’t leave now I might never do it at all, and I can’t spend the rest of my life not knowing. I have to go.”

He didn’t reply at first. His newfound understanding settled in around him like a physical weight, pushing him back against the sofa. Lips pressed together, he searched the empty space between them like it held a counterargument, anything that could convince her to stay. “This is really important to you,” he finally said, not quite a question, and Naomi nodded. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, like something final, and when he opened them again, he could only offer her a sad smile. “Then I wish you the best.”

Standing, he reached down to help her up, a clear enough signal that the conversation was over. Something tightened behind Naomi’s ribs. For all her talk of needing to go, for how much she knew she had to be back on the water, ripping off the bandage and actually leaving still managed to be daunting, like she might tear a line of stitches back open with it. Back to being an outsider, after all this time. She took Mateo’s hand and stood.

“I’ll talk to Gabe for you,” he said as he walked her to the door, “and anyone else you need. And…”

He’d opened his arms for her.

Naomi didn’t wait for a second invitation. She threw her arms around him, squeezing like she might never get another chance. His arms came up to circle her back, warm and careful, and Naomi buried her face against his shoulder.

“I’ll miss you,” he mumbled.

“Yeah. Take care of yourself, you big nerd, or else—” she swallowed, her voice thick, “—or else I’ll just have to come back to Avalor and drag you out of your workshop myself.”

She felt his laugh more than she heard it, a shallow stutter in his chest as he held her a little tighter. “I guess we wouldn’t want that, huh?” He leaned back just enough to look at her, his hands coming to rest at her elbows. “Don’t be a stranger, okay?”

“I can’t be any stranger than you.”

Mateo blinked, and then he wheezed, twisting away from her to double over. He laughed in earnest, slapping at his knee.

“Well, it wasn’t that funny,” Naomi said, but she was smiling again herself, almost able to pretend the tears gathering in her eyes were from mirth instead of misery.

“You’re turning puns against me?” Mateo blurted, rounding back on her. “That’s not allowed!”

“Consider it revenge for the last several years' worth.”

“Pfft, get out of here! You’ve got a whole ocean of people to tease!”

“I didn’t realize you were in such a hurry to get rid of me.” The laughter having died down, her face softened again into something more somber. “So, I’ll be seeing you.”

She didn’t bother with a ‘soon’ or a ‘later’. She didn’t know. She couldn’t know.

But Mateo still mirrored her expression. “Yeah. Be seeing you.”

And she stepped out into the hallway. The sea called.

Chapter Text

Naomi hadn’t been looking for Mateo in the wake of the trip to La Isla de Yalcatura, but stumbling across him in the halls after everyone had parted ways in the courtyard was a welcome distraction from the complications of her own personal mission. He was leaning against a windowsill, overlooking the garden with a pensive expression and so engrossed in whatever he was watching that he didn’t notice her approaching. Tucking the application she’d been examining into her vest, she stepped off the runner and onto the tile.

“Fancy meeting you here,” she said, sidling up to him. He jumped, but quickly relaxed as he realized who his visitor was. “I know what I’m doing loitering in the halls, but this is a kinda weird place to find you.”

He chuckled quietly. “Oh, you know. I was just thinking about some stuff.” He turned back to the window.

Naomi followed his gaze. “Oh yeah? What ab—oh.”

Down below, Victor and Carla Delgado danced together in front of the obliterated remains of the fountain. The dust had begun to scatter through the gardens, whether from the wind or the Delgados’ footsteps, and they trailed tracks in the fine layer of powder as they twirled around, reveling in their newfound freedom. Naomi frowned. She still wasn’t sure what to make of their sudden change of heart. They’d seemed alright during the voyage, but a whispered warning at the back of her mind insisted they could just be playing the long con. At least she knew there were guards nearby outside in case anything happened.

“Pretty crazy, huh?” she prompted. She was willing to tolerate their presence for now, but seeing them as tried and true allies was something else entirely. If she still had her reservations, even after spending the day with them, then she could only imagine how weird it must have been for Mateo.

“Mm. Hey…” He met her eyes, and she was taken aback by how deathly serious he looked. His brows were knit together, his mouth set in a hard line.

She took a bracing breath. “Yeah?”

“Do you think Ixlan would let me borrow her gloves?”

Naomi blinked. And then she burst into a belly-deep laugh, not even trying to muffle it.

Mateo spluttered. “What? What’s so funny?”

“That’s what you were thinking about?”

“I—yes?” He swung his arms toward the window, gesturing helplessly outside. “She blew up a fountain! By punching it!” Fingertips resting on the glass, he leaned forward with a wistful sigh. “I’ve never seen magic like that before.”

Naomi shook her head, still smirking. “I don’t know why I’m surprised. I thought you were thinking about the Delgados.”

“Huh?” He glanced between her and the former dark wizards below. “Oh, yeah. I guess they’re here, too.” Pausing, he drummed his fingers on the sill, his lips pressed together, and then, like he couldn’t hold it in anymore, “So anyway, about those gloves—”

“Pfft, Mateo!”

“No, no, I’m serious! You actually spent time with her today, right? Did she seem like the sharing type?”

She wasn’t sure Ixlan’s gloves would even fit Mateo, but she summoned up the mental image anyway. Would he have to somehow tuck the flares of his robe’s sleeves into them, or slide the gloves on under his robe? Either way, they’d easily go up to his elbows, and either way, he’d look absurd. The image of Mateo pleading with an unimpressed Ixlan was no less silly, and Naomi smirked as she answered.

“I dunno, it seemed like the gloves were kind of a big deal to her. I’m pretty sure the only way you’re getting to touch them is if you’re on the receiving end of a punch.”

Mateo rubbed his chin. “Well, if that’s what it takes…”

Naomi let out an undignified snort. “Mateo, no—”

“Do you think I could just ask her to do it or would I need something to convince her?”

“She would break you in half.”

He scoffed and crossed his arms, straightening up with a proud smile. “Please, I could take it. I’m unbreakable!”

Naomi gave him a playful jab in the side, not enough to hurt, but enough to surprise him, and Mateo leapt away with a squawk.

He rubbed at the spot, pouting. “Okay, fine, you made your point. I won't ask Ixlan to hit me. Yet.”

He rejoined her by the window, watching as Octavio arrived at the scene below with a dustpan and broom to begin the painstaking task of cleaning up the rubble. The Delgados stepped back from the edge of the dust field to give him room to work, standing off by a hedgerow.

“How was she today?” Mateo asked, his voice serious again.

“Who, Ixlan?”

“Carla.”

“Oh.” Down below, Carla was saying something to her father, the both of them watching Octavio with rapt attention. She was leaning over with her hand half covering her mouth, like she was telling him something secret, and Naomi felt her shoulders tense at the sight. “She was fine? I guess?”

“And Victor?”

“Sure. Him, too.”

If she hadn’t known they were malvagos, she might not have guessed it. They’d been nothing but courteous to her, and had followed her directions dutifully on the return trip, busying themselves with tasks about the sailboat to help. And they weren’t bad chefs, either; the bowl of moqueca Carla had handed her had tasted divine, save for there being a bit too much pepper. If nothing else, they’d spared her ship’s galley from going up in flames, if the smoke pouring from below while Elena was trying to cook alone was any indication.

But then, Rita had been nice, too.

Long con, the little voice whispered, and Naomi shook it away. Their behavior today didn’t have that same sinister edge to it that Rita’s had. She had known right away that something was wrong back then, and now she had no major alarm bells going off other than precedent.

“I dunno,” she went on. “They didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just weird having them around here like nothing ever happened at all.” She glanced over at Mateo. He was curling and uncurling his fingers against the window sill and had his eyes narrowed like he was trying to make out what Carla was saying, even from the distance. “What do you think about it?”

“Well, they gave up dark magic. But Rita didn’t have dark magic, either.” He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, letting it come to rest on the back of his neck. “I don’t know. Maybe they’ll be okay. But if they’re going to be learning good magic now,” his face twisted up, looking doubtful, “then I think that technically makes them my responsibility?”

“Did Elena tell you that?”

“Not directly. But it’s kind of implied, isn’t it? There’s only so many people here that could keep teaching them magic.”

“I’m saying you might not have to do that, though,” Naomi clarified. “I mean sure, they’re good guys now, whatever. But that doesn’t mean they have to learn magic, y’know? You could just choose not to teach them.” She tried to meet his eyes. “You get a say in who you apprentice, right? Maybe they’re just not up to your wizardly standards.”

Mateo didn’t seem to be listening anymore. He’d gone rigid against the window, his palm flat on the pane, and Naomi caught the reflection of his eyes in the glass as they frantically tracked something outside. “Uh oh,” he breathed.

The Delgados had drawn their tamboritas. They were gesturing in Octavio’s direction, still whispering to each other, and then they suddenly leveled their wands across the dust field, one hand raised to cast.

“Uh oh,” Naomi agreed.

“I gotta get down there!” Mateo’s tamborita was already in his hand, and he took off down the hall in a dead sprint. Naomi was close on his heels. She glanced sidelong out the windows as she passed by, catching glimpses of the scene in bursts like a series of pictures: the Delgados, hands raised and ready to cast; the Delgados, palms flush with the drums and violet and indigo light spiraling from their centers; twin cyclones of magic careening across the yard, with Octavio on the ground with his hands on the back of his neck; the twisters parting harmlessly around him—

“Mateo, wait a second!” Naomi grabbed his sleeve and skidded to a stop. He lurched at the end of her grip, shooting her an affronted look before she gave the fabric a tug, pulling him back to the window. “Look.”

She pointed down below where the tornadoes of magic had converged behind Octavio, bands of light wisping off the top like colored smoke. They flickered, and then dissolved into the air, leaving behind a small mound of dust and fountain shards. The courtyard had been swept in a single spell, consolidating the rubble into a convenient pile. Octavio slowly sat back up, blinking at it in disbelief. Carla gave him a dramatic thumbs-up, and Victor gave a flourished little bow, and then the two turned and walked deeper into the gardens and out of sight.

“Oh,” Mateo started. His shoulders sank in something that didn’t quite look like relief. “That was. Nice of them?” He rolled his wand in his hands like he wasn’t sure what to do with it, staring at the fountain remains with a confused frown.

“Maybe they really are gonna be okay,” Naomi said.

“Maybe.” He sighed, finally stashing his tamborita again. “I should go down anyway, just to check on things.” His fingers brushed the back of her hand where she was still holding his robe. “Walk with me?”

“Sure. I was on my way out anyway.”

She fell in step beside him and the two began their much less frantic walk toward the nearest stairs. The panic had faded, but an aura of uncertainty still hung in the silent halls, seeping under Naomi’s skin like ice water. Was it wise to leave the Delgados so unsupervised? They still hadn’t done anything wrong, per se, but letting them have free reign of the palace seemed ill-advised. Maybe Elena had established some more robust ground-rules for them.

Mateo’s voice snapped her out of her thoughts. “So, what were you doing loitering in the halls? I thought you went home after the gloves thing happened.”

She whiplashed right back into her other set of worries with a grimace, hand flying to the spot on her vest where she’d tucked her paperwork earlier. He must have picked up on her hesitation, because he waved a hand, his polite curiosity turning to concern.

“You don’t actually have to say. I just figured I’d ask.”

“No, it’s okay.” She tugged the paper from her vest and unfolded it, handing it over. “I was talking to Armando about this.”

He skimmed the page, brow furrowed. “This is an application for a job on the palace staff.” He looked at her. “You’re still looking for work?”

“Well, I’m not on the council anymore.” Taking the page back, she withheld a frustrated huff as her eyes grazed it again. “I’m a little old to start an apprenticeship, and I can’t go to the university without having finished upper secondary. I’ve been doing odd jobs around town instead. Something here wouldn’t be the most glamorous, but at least it’d be consistent, and I’d get to be around the palace.”

She could live with dusting furniture every day, right?

“I’m sure Elena could get you something if you asked,” Mateo started, but Naomi shook her head.

“I know she could, but I don’t want to rely on that. I want to be here as an Avaloran citizen, not just Elena’s friend.”

They reached the corner, starting down the main staircase. Mateo turned away to watch his feet as they descended, and Naomi watched the froot doors of the palace slowly getting closer.

“I considered asking Gabe if his parents need any help at the bakery, but I think he’s still kinda mad at me for not telling him when I left,” she went on. Mateo let out a pained noise, his face twisting up.

“Yeah, explaining that to him didn’t go too well…”

He didn’t sound accusatory, but Naomi winced anyway, guilt briefly drowning out the rest of her worries. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have put that on you. That wasn’t your responsibility.”

“It was a little uncomfortable,” he confirmed.

“Sorry,” she repeated. They’d reached the front doors—Mateo tugged one open and waved her through with a flourish of his hand before following after, grinning. Naomi decided to consider this forgiveness. “Anyway,” she said, trying to keep her tone light, “I don’t suppose you’re looking for an assistant or anything?”

“I think I technically have two of those now.” He shot her a sidelong glance, his mouth curling upward. “Unless you want the job of Delgado wrangling?”

“Mm. Tempting, but I might pass on that one. Wouldn’t want to spoil your fun.”

He rolled his eyes, but he was smiling, at least until they reached the edge of the garden and paused. Naomi had no reason to go wandering any further; afternoon was rapidly turning to evening, and she had to get home eventually. Rather than seeing her off, though, Mateo stared deeper into the rows of shrubs, working his jaw like he wanted to say something. He seemed anxious, his shoulders tight and his fists clenched like he was gearing up for a fight.

“I can help you with them if you want,” Naomi offered as his hesitation dragged on. “Not as a job, but just as a friend. I totally get if you’re not comfortable being alone with them right now.”

“You don’t have to,” he answered quietly. “You’re sure they were okay today?”

“They seemed fine. Best behavior.”

He turned to her, something urgent in his eyes. “And it didn’t seem at all like they were faking? Like they were just trying to get you to go along with it?”

“Not that I noticed.” They’d done nothing alarming. There’d been no red flags that sent unease twisting through her insides, insisting that something was wrong. “I am still a little worried, but a good friend of mine once told me that sometimes you just have to be willing to give someone another chance anyway.”

Surprise wiped out the concern on his face and he snorted, averting his eyes. “Your friend sounds pretty gullible.”

“I dunno, I think he’s pretty smart.”

His body had loosened with a tiny sigh of relief, and he looked back at her. “Okay. I’m still not sure I can trust them just yet. But I do trust you. So if you’re willing to believe this, then…” He took a deep breath and smiled. “I think I can, too.”

Chapter Text

Despite everything, they’d made it through the coronation alive.

They’d actually made it. Elena had been thrown bodily into the Spirit World, Gabe and Mateo had been turned to stone, the kingdom had been ravaged, and they’d still all made it to the end of the day. Elena had never looked more radiant than when the crown was lowered onto her head, her smile wistful and excited and proud all at once, and Naomi couldn’t be happier for her friend. She joined in the singing as loud as anyone when the chorus praising Elena’s name swelled up, and she joined in the dancing with a feverish glee, gripping Gabe’s hands beside her and pulling him into a twirl.

She’d been right all those years ago, she noted smugly. Where Elena’s accession had been grand, her coronation was spectacular. There were guests from every corner of the EverRealm, food and drink for every palate, and extravagant floral decorations that filled the ballroom with their sweet fragrances and delicate petals. The band was livelier than ever, especially with the royal family routinely jumping in with their guitars, and with everyone laughing and dancing and celebrating together, everything felt warm and bright. Naomi tipped her head back as she and Gabe twirled around again, watching the lights turn overhead until the whole room felt like it was spinning. Dragging her neck back upright, her vision tilted on a dizzying axis and she lurched sideways, caught by Gabe’s steady arm.

“Careful,” he chided, but there was a playful humor to his tone. “You haven’t even had anything to drink, yet.”

“That you know of,” she countered, though he was right.

Gabe chuckled. “I just don’t want the new chancellor to knock herself out within ten minutes of getting appointed.”

“I’ll make sure I last at least twenty, then.” She laughed, flashing a grin. “Seriously though, I think we’re all entitled to a nap after today.”

“Yeah, I guess not getting turned to stone took a lot out of you, huh?”

His voice was light and teasing, but a pulse of fear shuddered in Naomi’s lungs at the memory all the same. She forced another laugh, shoving against Gabe’s chest a little harder than she meant to. “Worrying does! You guys scared me half to death with that!”

The image was carved into her mind’s eye, sharp as the stone relief that Gabe and Mateo had been trapped in. She’d seen petrification magic before, but the Shade’s powers were different, less predictable. Naomi had fled the scene with Isabel, feeling like a coward, useless and scared, and hadn’t dared to go back until she saw the smudge of purple streak across the skyline toward the palace. When the stone had melted away from her friends, crumbling to dust and sending them sprawling across the ground, she’d barely made sure they were okay before she’d broken down in tears against Mateo’s shoulder.

It had surprised her as much as him, like the panic and relief had been folded up inside like a jack-in-the-box, springing out all at once. Gabe had joined the hug, with Isabel half dangling from his shoulders, and Naomi had crushed them all against her as tight as she could manage until she felt her tether to the ground return.

“Hey.” Gabe brushed a knuckle against her cheek, pulling her back to the present. Loud music, heavy perfumes, Gabe’s shoulders under her palms. “We’re okay.”

She scoffed, like her face wasn’t going blotchy with distress. “You’d better be.”

He watched her with a warm smile, leaning into another turn, and the expression only grew impossibly more fond as he caught sight of something over her head. Following his gaze, Naomi spotted Elena and Mateo dancing together near one of the balcony doors, both beaming. Gabe almost looked amused when she turned back to him, which was surprising considering how hard he’d been vying for a dance with Elena earlier.

“Hey, I didn’t make you lose a bet or something, did I?” she teased, poking him.

He laughed it off. “Nah, Mateo and I were just being dumb. I figured we were all gonna get a chance to dance with each other tonight.”

“Oh, good, we were thinking the same thing, then.” She glanced over her shoulder again at her other friends, and met Gabe’s eyes with a mischievous grin. “Think they’re having too much fun?”

“No reason we can’t check,” he answered, returning the look, and the two wove across the room toward the others. They dodged around spinning dancers, taking a meandering path between foreign nobles and frolicking jaquins, breathless again by the time they reached their friends.

Elena took notice of them as they got closer and brightened, twirling to Mateo’s side, their hands still joined. “Naomi! Gabe! Are you enjoying the party?”

“Absolutely,” Naomi replied. “Actually, I was hoping I could cut in.” Her eyes slid over to Mateo, expecting him to join her, but he took a step back instead.

“Of course!” he said, holding Elena’s hand toward her like an offering before Naomi could clarify. Elena shot him a puzzled look.

“Um,” Gabe started, his own hand already extended, and it was only then that Mateo seemed to realize he might have misinterpreted.

“Wait, which of us were you…?”

“This works, too!” Elena quickly cut in, clearing the air, and dropped Mateo’s hand into Gabe’s waiting palm before grabbing hold of Naomi herself and tugging her back toward the center of the room.

“But—” Gabe tried.

“Have fun!” And then they were gone, deep in the sea of people. Elena and Naomi shared a look and then burst into giggles, finally taking both of each other’s hands and settling into the music.

“Poor Gabe,” Naomi said, not quite able to mask another snicker.

Elena clicked her tongue. “Oh, he knows he’ll get a dance. It’s not like I was gonna leave anyone out. But you two seemed busy, and I figured someone should probably rescue Mateo before he and Carla ended up with concussions.”

They’d danced through the end of the song and halfway through the next one when Elena slowed their pace, suddenly looking more serious.

“Hey, I actually wanted to check with you about something,” she said, watching Naomi’s face apprehensively. “About the chancellor thing.”

“You’re not putting me to work right away, are you?” Naomi joked.

“Oh, goodness, no! Not tonight already!” Her expression softened. “I just wanted to make sure that you’re really okay with being appointed. I… might have realized that I put you a bit on the spot.”

That was putting it mildly. Offering her a job she hadn’t considered for herself, at least not seriously, in front of the entire kingdom, without any kind of heads up that it might be happening was less of a spotlight and more of a beacon, shining brighter than Elena’s magic. It had definitely caught her off-guard. But if there was one thing that could be predicted about Elena, it was that she would always be a little bit unpredictable. The initial shock had worn off, as well as the initial glee, leaving Naomi in a limbo of knowing it was a bigger deal than ‘grand councilor’ had ever been without understanding just how big of a deal it really was.

But she’d figure it out.

“I’m glad to do it,” she said. “But you can bet I’ll be making changes to how we handle the paperwork!”

Elena’s shoulders slumped in relief. “Okay, good.” And then she choked on a very un-queenlike snort of laughter, her eyes catching on something over Naomi’s shoulder. “Oh no. Neither of them knows the dance, and they’re both trying to lead.”

Naomi didn’t have to look to know who she was talking about, but she craned her neck to see anyway, and Elena led her into a twirl to give her a better view. Sure enough, Gabe and Mateo were spinning around at the edge of the ballroom, hands joined, looking less like they were dancing together and more like they were trying to hurl each other into the refreshments table. They seemed like they were having fun, though, with matching grins stretched across their faces, and Mateo let out a whoop as he swung around again that was audible across the room.

Both laughing, Naomi and Elena picked up the pace of their own dance, losing themselves to the music. It wasn’t until they saw that the guys had stopped dancing entirely, sitting at one of the tables with matching glasses of punch, that they decided to head back over.

“You guys are just sitting around?” Elena asked. “Come on, this is a party!”

“We were a little partied out,” Gabe said. “Just taking a breather.” With how they’d been dancing, it was hardly any wonder they’d needed one.

“Well, hopefully you’re not too tired, General Núñez, because I believe you still owe me a dance.”

Gabe set his glass aside and stood, folding an arm across his chest as he bowed. “It would be my honor, Your Majesty.”

She playfully rolled her eyes as he looked back up, his face alight. “Oh, you,” she said, and then grabbed both his hands and tugged him toward the dance floor so hard he stumbled forward, laughing. “Now, c’mon, ¡vamos!”

Naomi chuckled as she watched them go and turned her attention to Mateo, still sitting at the table. “Well? Are you gonna join me or are you gonna leave me the only person that doesn’t get to dance with everyone tonight?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, and finally pulled himself to his feet. He offered an arm. “So, shall we?”

Naomi hooked her arm through his. “We shall!”

They stepped back out to the dance floor. It was a bit awkward at first—Mateo still wasn’t the most impressive on his feet—but they eventually found a rhythm for the music, careful and even, where they weren’t treading on each others’ toes.

“So, chancellor, huh? That’s big.”

Naomi couldn’t hold back an amused snort as she met his eyes. He looked mischievous, waggling his eyebrows at the inside joke.

“I know, I can hardly believe it,” she said, playing along. “Me, the chancellor!” And then she prodded him in the shoulder, matching his teasing lilt. “So, master wizard, huh?”

He chuckled. “Yeah, apparently.” Leaning in closer, he lowered his voice, like he was sharing a secret. “To be perfectly honest, I thought I already was one. I’ve been casting master level spells for almost a year. But,” he leaned back again, shrugging, “I guess now it’s official, so.” He still sounded excited rather than put out.

After a moment of dancing, Naomi spoke up again. “It really is kinda surreal,” she said. “Did you ever think we’d end up here?”

“Well, I might have dreamed it a couple times.” He cast his gaze around the room and Naomi followed it, taking in the myriad of people she’d met ever since coming to Avalor. Foreign nobles, magical creatures, adventurers and wizards; even rooted to one place, it felt like she’d seen and done as much as a person could in that time. Comparing it to a dream was apt—there were almost too many people crammed into the ballroom, many that she couldn’t imagine sharing space. It didn’t feel real. She bit the inside of her cheek to be sure.

“When we met, though,” he went on, “I don’t think I could’ve imagined it.”

“Me, either,” Naomi agreed.

From the perpetual new girl to the queen’s right hand. From the local weird kid to the kingdom’s greatest mage. From secrecy and strangers under the reign of a dictator to Elena’s best friends, the future just as uncertain but far more hopeful. Their awkward conversation on the school courtyard wall felt like a lifetime ago. It barely even felt like it had been between the same people.

“I’m really glad we ended up friends,” she said suddenly, looking back up at him.

“I think it would’ve been even weirder if we didn’t. Can you imagine if we’d both just been hanging around Elena like ‘oh, there’s that person again? Wonder what their deal is?’”

Snickering, Naomi went on, “Even without Elena, though. I’m glad I know you.”

His smile was warm and soft. “Yeah. Me, too.”

The song faded out and the band began to prepare for the next one, shuffling their sheet music around and re-tuning their instruments. Naomi and Mateo paused in their dance, her hand still on his shoulder, warm under her palm.

“Hey, can I tell you a secret?” Naomi asked.

He nodded, his expression immediately serious. “Always.”

She took a deep breath. “I’m… not actually sure if chancellor is a good fit for me.”

“You’ll be great at it,” Mateo said without a moment’s hesitation. “I know it. You’re observant and organized, and you don’t put up with people’s nonsense. You, ah, run a tight ship.”

He’d always been sincere, and it never failed to assuage her doubts, but that hadn’t really been what she was getting at. Mateo continued before she could explain, though.

“Actually, now that you’ve been appointed, there’s a secret I can tell you. Elena was planning to make you the new chancellor as far back as last year’s Carnaval.”

“Wait, really? That long?”

He nodded, eager. “Uh-huh! Everything was too chaotic to make it official right away, but she told me about it when she was getting ready to go through with it. Except, well…” he rubbed at the back of his head, “that ended up being about a week before you left, so…”

Naomi wheezed. “Oh, wow, that’s—what terrible timing!”

“Yeah. We can laugh about it now, though!”

The music started up again, a lively tune that got the whole room moving. Sporadic laughter and applause rose up alongside it, centered on a cluster of people watching Esteban dance. Mateo was up on his toes, trying to see what was going on.

“Should we go check that out?” he asked, but his smile wavered with concern as he met her eyes again. “Or… was there something else on your mind?”

She hadn’t realized her face was so obvious. “About how I left—that’s why I’m not sure about being chancellor, at least not long term. I know I’ll be good at it, but I don’t know if I can promise that I won’t leave again.”

“Were you, um. Were you planning on it?”

“Well, not right now. I can’t begin to describe how much I missed you guys while I was away, and I do love being here. It’s just that while I’m here…” She gripped her own arms, pressing her fingers into her skin. “I miss the sea, too.”

“Your magic,” Mateo said.

Naomi offered a weak smile. “Yeah.”

After years and years of desperately wanting stability, of wanting her family to be together, of wanting a place to put down roots, to belong, she finally had it all, and she was still unsatisfied. It all seemed awfully unfair.

“Maybe Elena can work something out with your job where you can have both,” Mateo suggested. “I don’t remember Esteban doing a lot of traveling, but I’m sure something could be arranged.”

“Yeah, that’s the ideal. I’m planning on talking with her later this week. I didn’t want to make a big deal during, y’know, her literal coronation, but rest assured we will actually be talking about my job responsibilities this time.”

“Well, if you do decide to leave again, just know that we’ll always be here.” He took her hands again, and gave them a squeeze. “Whenever you’re ready to come back home.”

Naomi’s breath caught at the conviction in his tone. Maybe that was what she’d needed: not a place to be nailed down, but a place to come back to. A place she’d always belong, no matter how far away she went. Her smile had grown watery before she realized.

“How are you so good at that?” she asked, hastily wiping her eyes against her sleeve.

“At—at what? Making you cry?”

“Pfft, no. You’re a good friend, Mateo.”

His mouth quirked back upward into something fond. “So,” he started after a moment, “did you want to go find the others again, or—” He perked up suddenly, snapping his head toward the band as they began to play a new song. “Oh! Wait! Do you know what song this is?”

“An… Avaloran one?”

“It’s a sambarosa!” He beamed at her. “I promised I’d teach you someday, remember?”

“Wait, when did we agree to that?” Naomi asked, laughing as he pulled her hands to him again, urgent in his movements.

“The night of the storm! I told you I would, and then I never followed through.”

She wanted to protest at first. Surely they’d gotten around to it in the last few years, between all the parties and adventures and day-to-day exchanges, but as she followed Mateo to a more open area of the dance floor, sifting through her memories all the while, nothing came to the surface. His offer had simply fallen through the cracks, forgotten in the rush of doing their new jobs and meeting new people and learning new things. As she ruminated, Mateo paused, his smile faltering.

“Unless… you’re not actually interested. We don’t have to.”

It wouldn’t have the same implications now that it would have back then. As kids, under Shuriki, the gesture was something transgressive, an act of bravery that Naomi had never really appreciated. Perhaps just as importantly, it was an invitation to participate in a culture she’d felt she had no place in, a chance to connect with someone and let Avalor start to feel like home. Now, there was nothing stopping them, and Naomi didn’t need an excuse to join in.

And yet.

“Are you kidding?” she laughed, gripping his hands more tightly. “Show me.” Lighting up again, Mateo began.

It didn’t need to be something profound. It could just be a moment to share like the countless ones they’d had before, and the ones that were sure to come. It could just be a moment between friends.