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Jade has been some truly bizarre places in her life – most of them in the last week – but finding herself lip-high to a talking wall is right up there with Bavmorda’s house of horrors in terms of surreality. If anyone's making her choose, though, she’s picking this one, hands down. No one is actively trying to kill them here, apart from bloody Kit, giving Jade a heart attack by reaching her whole arm into an opening in the rock from which Allagash has just pulled a whole arm.
Kit's only saving grace is that smile, a picture of assurance: I was never going to get hurt, Jade, I knew exactly what I was doing, Jade. Jade smacks her on her (totally unharmed) forearm and gives her a sharp you absolute muppet look. Unquelled, Kit’s smile just deepens, as if what Jade really means is you’re my hero, Kit and she's basking in the praise.
It’s not a miscommunication; they both know exactly what the other is saying, and the moment steadies Jade as much as the desperate, not-long-enough not-tight-enough hug had. It means Kit’s back. It means the muppet is okay.
Then the wall starts talking, and with a short sigh and a skyward glance Jade takes back what she thought about at least no one was trying to kill them. Cheerful death threats; brilliant, quest’s getting back to normal, then.
The riddle, though— that digs into Jade’s heart with more force than she’s expecting (not that she’s had any experience with giant animated magical heads of dead Nelwyn sorcerors speaking to her from beyond their grave before, so perhaps it digs into her heart exactly as forcefully as Wiggleheim intended it to.) Passed from sire to heir… it’s funny he asks this, Jade thinks, because it was only hours ago that she discovered the truth about herself; the truth about the one thing passed from her sire to her… the mark seared onto her neck.
Can stone eyes single you out? Jade feels like he’s speaking to her and her alone, and she very almost raises her hand. Kael’s mark. Scorpia's. Is there an answer, here?
Jade’s relationship with her mark has been on-again-off-again all through her remembered life. In her early childhood, the stables where she worked and the streets where she played and the kitchen where she ate with the other rescued orphans between lessons, well, none of those places were exactly overrun with mirrors. She could tell there was something strange about the skin just beneath her hairline but… scars weren’t uncommon among the children of Tir Asleen, nor on any of the adults who’d lived through the Dread, and there’d been no reason to think much about it at all till one of the stable hands told her it looked like a pattern. Till he drew it for her in the dust. Till one of the apprentices who’d been raised on a farm said it was like what they did to their sheep.
Jade fought to grow her hair a little longer, after that, to keep it hidden. Not out of shame, but out of fury. A sheep. That wasn’t right. She’d been caught more than once sneaking from the hectic communal sleeping area to curl up in the quieter hay in the stables, preferring the soft sounds of the horses to the unpredictability of other lost children, but she was no animal. It meant more than that, it had to, and when Jade was alone she would smoothe her fingers over the back of her neck, tracing each curve. For a while she dreamed that it might mean she was… special? The mark (the wiggles in the dust from the stable hand’s approximation, anyway) looked like it had some magic to it… or some mystery, which was sort of the same thing. It meant something, she felt that was true, and not anything like what we did to our sheeps.
But, there was no one she could ask. The women who looked after the gaggle of children treated them well, taught them letters and history, made sure they were fed and clean and patched up any torn skin or clothing, but they brooked no nonsense, and Jade had some sense that nonsense was what they’d call it if she asked.
Eventually – moons and moons later, after Ballantine started training her and was helping her fit her first gambeson (I didn’t even know they could make ‘em that small, Merrick chuckled) she’d asked him about it. Casually. Offhand. Had he ever seen anything like it before?
He’d been gruff, not unkind but not all that interested, not as interested as a person should be (Jade believed) if there was a real mystery involved. “S’just a birthmark, probably,” he’d said, and told her to twist and bend, to make sure the gambeson moved when she did but not too much, and because his attention was starting to mean more to her than anything else, Jade set the question of the mark aside.
If he wasn't interested, neither was she.
For a long time, Jade almost forgot about it. The important parts of her body were the muscles she was training, were her feet, fast and light, was her back, strong and steady. Earning her keep, and Ballantine’s pride, both were more important than solving an old childhood mystery. It was almost too easy to forget.
Almost, that is, till one day along the riverbank, an offshoot of the Freen where Jade and Kit had never sparred before. Every time they ventured beyond the castle Kit insisted they ride a little further out, urging them closer to the canyon maze in search of new and more interesting terrain. They hadn’t made it all the way to the cliffs, yet. Jade was wary, putting the feeling down to worry that if they rode too far Sorsha would put an end to these outings. She watched the cliffs grow taller as they rode closer, something about the way they rose against the sky tingling down the back of her neck.
She didn’t know what it meant, but it was more than just Sorsha. Perhaps the cliffs represented a wildness, some sort of dangerous freedom; Jade didn’t like to think about it in the same way she didn’t like to think about— about other impossible things. She’d been the one who insisted they spar at the river that day, to stop them riding any closer.
The tingling (a warning? A message? Or nothing at all) vanished the moment Kit rushed her, a war cry loosened from her throat, and Jade refocused her mind on her defense. She let Kit advance (to give herself some parrying practice, just the practice, and not because she wanted to see that victorious grin that lit up Kit’s face) until a patch of mud surprised her, the hungry sudden marsh sucking down on her boot. Surprised her, but she still deflected Kit's blow with enough power that she created an opening, one wide enough to lunge into, catch Kit’s wrist, and pull her into the muddy handicap too.
The mud only slowed Kit down physically; emotionally she was living for it. As the match went on both girls became decorated in splatters of brown and gray till Jade wore the mud across her chest like medals of honor, till Kit’s face was as freckled as Jade’s. And alight - Kit’s face was alight, and for a dangerous second Jade was almost mesmerised because she’d never seen Kit looking so filthy or so completely happy about it. Sparring Kit was athletic and fierce and proud, but this was Kit at play, and Kit at play was so beautiful Jade felt stupid with it.
Kit saw her opening, threw her practice sword aside, and tackled Jade right round her middle.
They'd both needed to upend themselves in the river, after that.
In the late afternoon sun, Jade twisted as much water as she could from her hair, kneeling on a flat rock on the river’s edge. Kit shook her own hair out like a pup (all over Jade, absolutely on purpose) then paused… and crouched down at her side. “Hold still,” she said. “You’ve got something.”
Jade threw her a warning look. Just yesterday Kit had pulled this exact ploy on Airk. Hold still, Airk, you’ve got a spider! She’d reached as if to brush one from his shoulder, but instead pulled his embroidered collar away from his neck and dropped a fat, leggy spider right down his back. (What? She’d laughed, when he’d chased her down after rapidly removing both shirt and spider. I told you! I literally told you!)
But there on the riverbank, Kit did pull a small piece of riverweed from Jade’s hair, gently untangling it from one of her coils so no trace of weed remained. As Kit's careful hands worked, the pink tip of her tongue just pressing against the corner of her mouth in concentration, Jade stayed very still. So still, apart from her chest, which seemed to be swelling far too conspicuously beneath her soaked linen shirt. So still, apart from her heart, racing faster than it had been during their fight.
“There,” Kit said with a smile, flicking the weed back into the river. “Can’t believe you don’t trust me.”
“Endless apologies,” Jade said, recovering enough to give the princess a wry smile. “Whatever was I thinking.”
“Right?” Kit agreed with a laugh, the luminous (stop thinking that, Jade cautioned herself) expression changing to a softer curiosity as Kit tilted her head, reaching out to run her fingertips over the back of Jade’s neck. “Hey so, what’s this?”
They had been training together for many moons, but only four or five had passed since Jade started to understand she was, well, in trouble. Kit’s fingers, so bold on the sensitive skin at her hairline and Kit’s bright, seeking eyes watching her own fingers, these things just confirmed it; she was getting herself very deep in trouble. Jade went very still again, cleared her throat.
“Just a birthmark.”
“It’s cool,” Kit said, and the odd, almost earnest way she’d said it drew Jade’s eyes up to stare at her, and for a long second neither of them moved. Something shifted deep in Jade’s belly, something like a realisation that even though she was in trouble, she had absolutely no desire to get out, and oh Mothers help her, that was so deeply stupid—
And then Kit grinned like the devil she was, and shoved her right back into the river.
(Jade never allowed herself to think, not even once, that of course Kit had seen her mark before, and that Kit had, in all probability, waited until they were alone to ask her about it, to touch her about it. She couldn’t think that way, there was too much hope if she thought that way, and Kit was the princess, there was nothing there to hope for! She was supposed to be smarter than this. She had to be smarter than this.)
But she’d started passing her fingertips over her scar again, after that. Wondering. Trying not to replay Kit’s touch in her head. Failing too many times to count. But this new attention to her scar never dredged up any real memories, no history. Its only connection was to Kit, and Kit's wonder.
Now Jade’s mind feels like it’s swimming in memories. The Wildwood did something to her, Boorman was (—ugh, yes, she is going to think this) Boorman was right. It’s seductive, being told she belongs, and it’s strange that she doesn't doubt it this time. In Tir Asleen she’d carried with her the constant understanding that she had to prove herself but now, after the acceptance that yes, she belongs with these people, little memories start creeping back.
She doesn’t know if it’s a trick of the mind, some magic of the Wildwood, or the scent of Scorpia’s neck that she swears her soul knows, but Jade remembers, now, counting the stars. Jade remembers stories of the patterns and pictures they make. She remembers being held by a warmth and a strength that might be her mother, and since leaving the wood, there’s an undercurrent of instruction from somewhere deep, deep in her mind. Listen, Jade—
It starts as Boorman and Scorpia lead them toward the mines, a tug of something grasping her attention away from its panicked (but useless) litany of Kit, Kit, they have Kit, the trolls have Kit, my Kit.
Of I should have told her sooner—
Of I should have grabbed her faster—
Of I should have held on tighter—
(She may belong with the Bone Reavers, but they’re not the only people she belongs with.)
These thoughts, the punishing regret and the terror of what she might find in those mines (of what she might lose in those mines) are not helpful. Jade tries to focus her mind on things that are helpful. Jade will focus her mind on things that are helpful. It means she can’t even speak Kit’s name as they’re standing on the outcrop, looking at the towering face of the mountain, but the focus has stopped her panicking.
Then, as she’s looking up at the sheer rock face that’s blocking out so much of the sky, as the last rays of sunlight touch her shoulder, the shoulder that Scorpia’s standing at close enough to touch, a tingle runs through the back of Jade’s neck and her mother’s voice comes rushing back to her. It’s urgent. It’s a voice that’s been echoing in her mind since she heard it in Nockmaar (Jade RUN!) but now the whole lesson hits her at once. Jade, listen—
See our stars, shaped like the bird? Our stars rise when the sun sets, remember that. Watch for that, wherever you are. If you can’t see them just after sundown, if there’s mountains in the way, that means you are too far south. Put the rising sun on your right shoulder, this shoulder, and you'll find your way home. This shoulder, Jade—
There is absolutely no way Jade can process this right now. No. No. She has to focus on Willow and Kit and the mountain crawling with trolls. She must not spare a thought for the bone-chilling horror of the idea that her mother knew. Her mother knew she could be taken, and tried to give her a way home, and Jade… Jade forgot. Memory is cruel, and till this moment, when the knowledge is useless, her mind never offered her a single scrap of her own history.
Memories, like magic, fade if they're not nurtured.
Jade shoves the thought back. Shoves it right back, as hard as she can, and pushes forward into the mines with the others. They sneak, they fight, they lose the wand and find Kit and throughout Jade does not think about her past, but as she racks her brain for the riddle’s answer, the thoughts just keep swarming back.
Ballantine nurtured her spirit and her skill, and Sorsha ensured she had a home and food and work and purpose, every day, but whatever traces of memories Jade brought with her to Tir Asleen? They left those out in the cold. They let them fade; hastened it, even. Ballantine must have known where she’d come from, trusted leader that he was (a birthmark?) but Jade can't bring herself to hate him for it, the grief and the guilt of his death still hanging heavy on her shoulders, a sodden cloak she can’t put down. She can't bring herself to hate Sorsha for her part in it either, the years of gratitude for everything have carved a deep path in her psyche. Besides, you can’t channel a nameless anger into fixing bridles, only learning how to fight had done that, and Jade does love the skill and the power she’s discovered in her own body.
And… an even bigger besides: without Ballantine’s training and Sorsha’s say-so, Jade would not have Kit. Hating them for the loss of her first family means hating them for bringing her to Kit. She can't do it.
Love is the most powerful force in the universe, sure, but it can live alongside complicated, uncomfortable, equally enormous truths. Heads and hearts are big like that, and Jade’s heart’s no exception.
When she was a kid, swarms of emotion used to writhe under her skin, searching for a way out. Nameless pain. Directionless anger. Bottomless loss. Now that she's grown, she's learned how to use everything as fuel, as determination, and the lawless feelings (most of them) are no match for honor and duty. But when she was younger, she felt for sure something was wrong with her. The loss of her family carved a crater in her, one too deep to fill, too wide, it stretched her into the wrong shape, a different shape than anyone else in Tir Asleen. She didn't fit; and in the scariest loneliest part of the night she could almost lose herself to that awful feeling, but instead of asking herself why she didn’t belong, instead of digging through those scraps of ill-nurtured memories, she forced it aside. Pushed herself harder in training. Repeated drill after drill alone in her room till muscle memory was stronger than any other, and if there were ever tears they were indistinguishable from sweat.
That was why Boorman’s words hit so hard, why she (god, she doesn’t want to remember this) why she cried on him so hard; she knew what it was like to ignore pain and power on. He was speaking her unspoken rules of life back at her and at that broken moment of her life Jade… Jade was just so tired of it.
Focus! Could the answer be a scar like hers? Kael’s mark could be a curse, for sure, but it reconnected her with her family, the strangest of blessings. It was a thing passed down to all her siblings, yes, and one day Jade’s going to ask Scorpia about the thirteen sisters and brothers that didn’t make it.
Her lips part a little, but she doesn’t speak. She knows already, it’s not the right answer; this isn't a riddle about broken families. Jade’s no one’s heir.
Her eyes slide to Kit.
Only a moment has passed since Wiggleheim spoke, and Kit is already looking at him with an intensity that suggests she is contemplating solving the riddle by introducing her new friend the mace to his nose. Jade figures, from stories and such, grand riddles are more likely to be about proper families, and as broken as Kit’s might be, it’s still proper.
So, what did Kit’s father pass to her? Well now, there's a question too big for this cavern; the first time Jade met Kit, Kit was little more than a Madmartigan shaped hole. Still is, somedays, though she has armor to cover the pain now that she didn’t have when she was a child. But even after he’d gone, she still had her mother, her brother, her home, her title–
The glimmer of an idea skirts the edge of Jade's mind, and suddenly, she knows.
The first time Jade ever met Kit, she'd been ten years old (ten, that is, as far as she knew. It was Ballantine who gave her a birthday, a day around the turn of the seasons, when the trees started to match her hair; Ballantine could be poetic when the mood struck.) She'd been ten at her last birthday and Kit had been missing her father for eighteen days.
They were both a little feral.
Kit looked worse, her eyes were wild as she hunted for the worst trouble she could find, something so wicked it would force her father back home to sort her out. Two days ago she'd stolen scissors and hacked off her hair; Sorsha had barely intervened in time to save her eyelashes. Only the threat of being bodily locked in the tower for a week had made Kit grudgingly promise she wouldn't cut off her stupid princess eyelashes.
It had only been a few moons earlier that Ballantine had put a wooden sword in Jade’s hand and shifted her out of the communal orphans’ sleeping quarters. Not long enough (despite the gift of a birthday along with a home) to convince her she had a true place with him, on the very edge of court life. She was skinny, all elbows and knees and freckles and teeth, none of her new clothes fit right over her wiry frame and there was a horrid fear that wouldn’t shift, deep in the pit of her stomach. The first time she'd lost family, she'd been too young to know it could be lost, but now? She knew now. Even half a year in, however sturdy, however stable whatever this thing she was building with Ballantine seemed, he could be lost like her first family, and Jade had lain awake through some very bad nights since her position changed. Beneath her clean clothes and tidy hair, the fear of it all still made her feel feral.
But Kit still looked worse. Jade had been learning how to hide the raw bits of herself for years but the princess had no practice with it, broadcasting her pain like a beacon on the mountainside
She invaded Ballantine's quarters one evening when the Queen had summoned him away, Kit slid through an open window that was too narrow for a grown man so Jade hadn’t even considered bolting it. With a thump, two feet wrapped in well fitted, beautifully stitched but muddy shoes landed right in front of where Jade was working.
“What are you doing on the floor?” the invader asked, head cocked and one hand on her hip, and Jade just gaped at her. It was perfectly clear what Jade was doing; she had a large map of the known world rolled out on the floor, because there was no desk large enough to flatten it properly, and she’d been studiously copying down the terrain and the names of all the little villages in a very slow but careful hand. She'd watched the skills the squires around the castle had, and while she wasn't a squire, she wanted to be. She wasn't even a page. But she was Ballantine’s charge, and she was very (desperately) determined to make herself useful, to earn her place here.
And right that second, that meant defending this place from uppity strangers. Scrambling to her feet and straight into the basic fighting stance she’d already mastered, she closed her fist around the sharpened goose feather she’d been writing with.
"This is my home," she said. Her voice wobbled, though, on the final word.
"Sure, but it's my castle," Kit said, effectively disarming Jade before either of them even touched a weapon. Jade's eyes went wide, and Kit just stood there with both eyebrows up and waiting to be recognised. Jade had seen the princess before, but… dressed up, with her hair long and shiny. This wasn’t the princess she’d seen from afar, this was whoever the princess was on the inside, and Jade was hooked by the transformation (and for a dumb second, Jade thought she must be Airk, and for years after, Jade was thankful that she'd held her tongue, because accusing Kit of being Airk right then would have ended in disaster.)
“Also,” Kit said, dropping her eyes to the quill in Jade’s hand, and smiling. “I’m really not ticklish.”
“It’s pointy, it could scratch,” Jade defended her choice, but immediately wished she hadn’t because it sounded so pathetic. She let her hand loosen up on the quill too; she didn’t really want to use it in a fight, it’d break, and Jade was so careful about not breaking anything in case– well, just in case. Besides, while map-making was interesting… it was not as interesting as this. She moved on from the topic of the quill as a weapon quickly, before Kit tried to take her on (she had a look in her eyes, like she’d take anything on.) "What are you doing here?"
"Exploring," Kit said, shamelessly peering down at Jade's work. "Commander Ballantine must have some pretty cool stuff. Do you know he's been to the barrier?” She pointed at it, with her muddy toes. “And Galladorn? And the Paladin Circle? I bet he's got treasure from out there."
Please don’t let her drop mud on my map Jade pleaded with the Mothers, pulling her eyes away from it. Damage could be assessed later, once she figured out what was going on. "Don't you have treasure in the palace?"
"Yeah, boring treasure, rings and crowns, but… " Kit's voice dropped into wickedness, "but, there is a jewel encrusted codpiece. I've seen it. It has a pearl on the end. Do you know what a codpiece is?"
"Yes," Jade said firmly, and added, "duh," for good measure, because it was easy to forget Kit was a princess when she was in here, looking like that, talking about gross things.
Kit raised her eyebrows at her, impressed; no one but her brother ever dared to duh her, and Jade made herself stand a little taller; she'd never impressed royalty before. It was an… oddly compelling feeling.
"What's your name?" The poking around continued, and Jade chewed on her lip, keeping watch over everything Kit moved so she could move it back after she'd gone.
"Jade."
"Uh huh, Jade what?"
"What?" said Jade, not very impressively, but to be fair, what did she mean, Jade what? Wasn't it obvious that Jade wasn't a – wasn't enough of a – wasn't the sort of kid who had more than one name?
Most people – normal people – got by without, or should there be any pressing need to distinguish one John from another they became John-the-wheelwright or John-the-fool. There was a boy two years younger than Jade known as Erik-not-the-prince, though his mother insisted the spelling was different, no one out on the street knew that. The poor kid would carry a thrice-hyphened name all his life.
But last names were for people of high blood or distinction.
People with families.
Kit, either unaware or unconcerned she'd asked something so weird, was already moving on to more interesting things, straight through the door into the best room of the house. Jade’s stomach flipped and she scurried after.
When Ballantine had first brought Jade home, he’d given her a few ground rules; she wasn’t to sneak out and play on the streets at night, she was to pick up all her clothes at bedtime and make her bed every morning, keep her own space clean. She was to knock before ever entering Ballantine’s room and he would do the same for her. Simple rules, but they’d made Jade feel safer than the bolted front door ever did. She’d kept making up more, in her head, the more rules to help her fit here the better, and one of them was about this room here.
It was– it was pretty much a library. There were only two bookshelves but it was more books than Jade had ever seen in her life; military histories and wonderfully illustrated books on fighting styles from every kingdom in the known world, one or two in languages whose letters Jade was desperate to learn. Ballantine had never said don’t touch these without permission but they radiated importance, Jade was never going to touch anything that special without permission, and Kit was just running her fingers over the stitching of their spines. The tension in Jade’s body made her feel like her bones might snap, and then she stopped breathing entirely when Kit’s finger hooked into the top of the binding and started to pull one from the shelf.
And then it got so much worse. Kit, well versed in knowing when she was getting under someone’s skin, noticed Jade’s intake of breath and turned to grin at her, to invite Jade into the mischief, but before she could speak her eyes drifted up, to what Jade knew was hanging above the doorway.
It was the biggest sword either of them had ever seen.
If Jade’s internal rules told her to never touch the books, there was no way she was ever going to allow herself to touch that sword. But Kit’s eyes were alight with wanting as she grabbed Ballantine’s chair from the narrow wooden desk beneath the window and dragged it toward the doorway so she could reach, ruching up a rug beneath the legs.
“You can’t,” Jade blurted (because this was before Jade realised that to tell Kit she couldn’t do anything was to issue her an irresistible challenge.)
“I can,” Kit corrected, and jerked the chair away from Jade’s grasp as she lunged for it. “I just want to look at it!”
She insisted this even as she planted the chair on the floor and launched herself toward the pommel of the sword, which was almost as big as her fist. Jade panicked, grabbed the chair’s backrest and clambered up, trying to snatch Kit’s arms from the air. Kit fought back, shrieking and protesting and grinning from ear to ear. “You can’t stop me! Don’t you know what that is? That’s a claymore, they’re like, unstoppable! Get off!”
Jade had finally managed to get a grip on one of Kit’s arms, but Kit’s other hand had gripped tight around the hilt and Jade instinctively reverted to a technique Ballantine hadn't trained out of her yet, snapping forward and biting her. Kit yelped, then (to escape Jade's 'vicious teeth' Kit told her later) she jumped off the chair, her entire weight hanging, for a heartstopping moment, from the leather strap supporting the sword.
And then gravity pulled Kit back to earth, and so fell the sword, and faster than either Jade’s stomach dropped, dropped right through the floor, right through the packed dirt beneath the house, right down to the centre of the world. It was a dizzying moment of devastation, cut short as the falling sword thwacked her so hard it knocked her right off the chair.
Unlike her stomach, Jade’s body stopped at the floor, and the folds of the woven, Kit-wrinkled rug barely softened the landing. She screamed as the sword came down across her legs, she couldn’t help it, any more than she could help the string of stable-hand curse words that followed. Kit, who’d screamed too (partially in excitement that she was going to see someone’s legs get chopped off) stopped screaming abruptly, staring at Jade with great admiration. Not only had no one ever duhed her before, no one had ever put words together like that in her hearing before either, and she was quickly memorising every single one of them.
Also, the sword hadn’t chopped Jade’s legs off, because the edges of the historic blade had been rounded carefully smooth, but it was still a great weight of falling metal, and the deep bruise it left across both her thighs lasted for weeks. Jade sat up shakily, staring at the sword, half convinced she had lost her legs and absolutely convinced she had lost her place in this household, panting in the pain and the shock of it. Kit – the little demon – crouched over her with a grin Jade would come to describe as rapacious, and said, “see, it’s not even sharp. Need some help?”
“No,” Jade insisted, but Kit grabbed the hilt in both her hands anyway, heaving the sword off her with a grunt of exertion. With a look of fierce determination, Kit tried to raise it vaingloriously above her head, but it was so heavy her little arms were trembling and Jade, with a sensible fear, crab-walked straight backward.
Straight backward, into Ballantine’s legs. Jade yelped again, and so did Kit, dropping the sword with a thunk and putting her hands behind her back as though those hands had never ruined anyone’s life.
Ballantine regarded the scene from the doorway in silence, one leather strap that had held the sword on the wall still swinging gently overhead. The moment seemed to last forever, Jade thought, betting that the swing of an executioner's axe lasted just as long, and then Ballantine reached down to grab her beneath her arms and haul her up to her feet. “Alright, Jade?”
Jade said nothing, could say nothing.
“It was my fault,” Kit piped up, remembering that she was not supposed to be innocent and good. “I broke in. She was trying to stop me.”
“I don’t see anything broken,” said Ballantine, evenly. Kit, offended, pointed up at the hanging strap. Ballantine just shook his head. “That dog won’t hunt, your highness.” He gave Jade a pat on her stunned shoulder, then stepped around the girls to pick the sword off the floor, one-handed. “You better get back to your own quarters before Sorsha sends Tilla out to find you.”
Kit’s nose wrinkled at the thought of her least favourite governess, and tried to stare Ballantine down, but he was unmovable, untroubled. It was deeply annoying. “Ugh, Tilla,” she said with disgust. “Next time I’m breaking your windows.”
“Goodnight, Kit.”
“All your windows,” Kit said, giving him a dark look, but starting to stomp her way across the floor. She paused when she reached the door, looking back over her shoulder at Jade, unreadable for a moment. Jade stared back, lips pinned together but breath heaving through her nose; Kit could still ruin her, she bit her, she bit the princess! The only daughter of the woman who'd given her refuge from the beasts outside the barrier all these years. If Kit tattled to Ballantine, or told her mother, Jade had no doubt they'd kick her out the Mother's Gate and back to those monsters in a heartbeat.
But Kit grinned, swishing both her hands in an arc like she was wielding a sword through the air, stopping with the point aimed directly at Jade’s heart.
“Later, Claymore,” Kit said, and with a wink disappeared through the door.
Jade's relationship with her name has always been simpler than her relationship with her scar. She likes it, it's pretty badass. After Claymore, after others started using it, first Ballantine then Merrick and finally, one wonderful day, Sorsha, Jade began to grow out of the fear that she was going to be ousted, and standing on that more solid foundation her training really started to take off. Her journey from that child to the first woman chosen for the Shining Legion to the person she was now, that had all begun with a ragged princess pointing an invisible sword at her chest and winking; in a childish way, Kit knighted her the first day they met.
"A name," Jade says, to Wiggleheim's huge stone face. It doesn’t matter that her naming story doesn’t line up with his riddle, Jade's starting to realise the truth faster, these days, finally starting to believe it: she’s been an exception all her life.