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Barbatos isn't even gone a day before the wind starts acting up.
It always does a little, whipping at her hair as she heads to the Ordo, tugging at her cape on the way back home. If she follows it, she can reliably find Barbatos upwind. He swears it's not on purpose.
This has to be, though. Jean is, she'll admit, up late--something Barbatos has more grace for than any previous lover, though she is fairly certain that when he calls lingering in taverns to the same hour granting her grace that he's joking. Still, he does tend to show up and serenade her into a break if he thinks she's too tired. With him gone, she had thought herself able to catch up on paperwork without any risk of that happening.
Instead, just as she's starting to rub her bleary eyes and contemplate a third cup of coffee, a gust of wind whips through the window she'd left open to the cool night air. It seizes the papers from her desk, scatters them wide, and dashes them to the ground.
Jean glances outside as she stands. The wind has settled down into a light breeze again. She closes the window before she gathers up her papers, all the same.
The next gust slams the window open and scatters the papers again, further across the room this time. Jean bites back a word she knows she shouldn't as she shoots to her feet, annoyed now. As if sensing her annoyance, the wind immediately softens, becoming a gentle breeze that brushes against her cheek and just barely stirs her hair.
"I know what you're doing," Jean says. She looks at the now-broken latch at the window and sighs. "If that's the will of the Anemo Archon...."
She would swear that the breeze follows her home, cool and gentle against the nape of her neck.
***
It's playful as always the next few days, though Jean is careful not to stay too late at the Ordo. In return, it never blows more than gently through the broken window. Which she really should repair, she contemplates on the morning that the Millelith delegation arrives, but there's no time to do so now. She'll be receiving them in the Ordo's conference room, anyway.
This is, in theory, a simple negotiation about the sharing of responsibilities at the Stone Gate. Jean knows, though, that it's as much about the balance of power, and who controls the flow of trade. She'll be signing a contract at the end of this, one that, though they call it just a formality, will be sealed with Rex Lapis' stamp. And Jean does not wish to malign Grand Master Varka, but the contract of six years ago was miserably imbalanced in the favor of the Millelith.
She's read all the reports, lined up all her arguments, and brought the legal documents with her to back them up. Jean is most of the way up the stairs when wind swirls around her. A window opened above, she presumes, perhaps one Noelle had opened to air the upper floors out. It is a beautiful summer day, and fine weather for it. She pauses on the step, though, as she hears voices. Not distant murmurs from behind a closed door, but loud enough to almost be whispered in her ear.
"Remember, the Tianquan says she'll see through the speech we gave the Grand Master last time, and she'll have the Stone Gate reports lined up," someone is saying. A familiar voice, Unit Leader Yijian, who had bowed in greeting to her at the doors merely an hour ago before she sent him and his troops off with Noelle for refreshments before they left. "They've done their jobs a bit too well there. We have to lean on the Dornman Port incident, and how their captain needed a Liyuean to help. Remind her that she doesn't have the legal expertise we do to handle customs and tariffs herself."
Jean smiles ruefully. She can't blame the Liyue Qixing for mercantile ruthlessness, but she can be grateful not to be caught unawares. "Thank you," she whispers to the air, and turns back to collect Eula's clear and precise report of that whole incident, her own and her knights' contributions spelled out just as clearly as the helpful lawyer's, and the book of trade law that Yanfei had sent the Reconnaissance Captain afterwards as a gift.
A breeze curls around her as she goes, rustling the papers in her arms without tugging them free and then running like cool fingers through her hair.
***
A week later the window is repaired, though Jean leaves it ajar, to avoid having to replace it again and as a concession to the way the wind rattles it when she tries to keep it closed. She does close and latch it the morning that duty calls her out into the field, and feels faintly foolish when she stands beside it and says, aloud, "Please leave it be this time."
Faintly foolish, yet she does it all the same. She doesn't wish to return from her mission to find that the wind has decided she needs the rest of the day off, and swept her papers off into the lake instead of all over the floor.
The problem is hilichurls in Drunkard's Gorge, again. This she has enough knights for, these days, as typically any of the rank-and-file could handle hilichurls--except that there's an Abyss Mage among them, and Jean makes it her policy never to pit Visionless knights against mages.
She mounts the hill north of Springvale and walks along the edge of the canyon first; she has no fear of another merchant being taken while she examines the situation, for what her Visionless knights can do is stop traffic at either end and redirect it the long way around. The hilichurl encampment is clear below, with nothing but half-built towers as additional outposts, easily cleared after she's defeated the main camp. Her only misgiving is that she doesn't see the reported mage.
Perhaps it will appear once she brings down its minions. Jean leaps from the edge of the cliff and plunges downward into the midst of the cliff, wind whistling in her ears.
Dispatching hilichurls is easy enough that Jean could do it in her sleep, though she's careful, as always, not to let her attention slip. Overconfidence in the battlefield has killed many a knight more skilled and experienced than her. She takes the samachurl down first, able to land behind the others' guard from her plunge to do so, ducks beneath the axe mitachurl's swing to stab upward and run it through, then eliminates the handful of common hilichurls before calling a Gale Blade to hurl the shield mitachurl into the wall and take it in the back.
That done, she turns towards the towers. One, the closer and in sight of the camp, she's able to leap from bluff to bluff to quickly scale, and the two shooters atop it are knocked easily down by another Gale Blade to finish off on the ground below. The second she knows from her reconnaissance won't be so easy to reach from below. It is, though, by good fortune out of sight from both the camp and this tower, and so she can simply scale the cliff to the top to once again plunge upon it from above.
Which seems a good plan until not one but two Abyss Mages appear atop it, cackling at their own cleverness, just as Jean has folded in her glider's wings and twisted into a plunge. She reaches frantically for the pullcord of her glider again, but the two, Cryo and Hydro, are already taking aim. She can see in her head how their attacks will hit, one after another, freezing her in mid-air, and tenses in preparatory instinct at how hard she'll hit the ground. Her glider wings snap back out far too late, too close, with no time to steer clear.
Then the wind comes whistling through the canyon, hard and fast, nearly flinging her through the air. The water and ice go awry, but even had they stayed straight in that wind, Jean would have been blown well out of their way. She spirals up on an updraft, realigning herself as the Mages roll tumbling off the platform, and comes plunging down again, this time to crash successfully between them and knock them apart just as they've begun to recover.
The advantage of Anemo is that the elements they wield doesn't matter; a strong scented Dandelion Breeze is enough to strip away both their shields. Not normally quite so swiftly, but Jean won't complain of the strength of the wind she rouses, only seize the advantage, and carve both the mages into ribbons of Abyssal shadow before they can gather themselves to flee. The shooter that had also been on the platform, she discovers as the wind dies down, has also fallen, and perished in so doing.
Before she sheathes her blade, she raises it in a formal salute. "My thanks," she says to the wind, trusting that it will be carried to the right ears. The wind seems to sigh in answer, gently caressing her shoulders and tugging at her cape as she goes to give the knights standing guard the all-clear.
***
The wind wakes her in the middle of the night, blowing through the bedroom window she's left indulgently half-open for it, redolent with the scent of cecilias. She knows that scent well, and what its presence means; they don't grow down here on the lake.
When she finds Barbatos, he's atop his own statue, sitting in its cupped hands and staring across the lake at the starry sky. The wind caresses her gently as she climbs to join him. His smile is warm, but there's a distance in his eyes. Jean respects that distance enough to simply sit beside him, shoulder-to-shoulder, hand gently wrapped around his own, and breathe in the sweet night air.
Gradually, that distance closes. The next smile he gives her is entirely present and there. He squeezes her hand tight, leaning in against her to kiss her cheek, then rest his head against her shoulder. "Did you miss me?"
"Not at all," Jean tells him, squeezing his hand. "How could I, when you were with me the whole time?"
Barbatos laughs. "They might teach you that at the Cathedral, but you know that isn't really how it works."
"Sending the wind to look after me came close enough."
"Who, me?" He puts his free hand to his chest, looking at her with a wide wounded innocence belied by the laughter sparkling in his eyes. "I would never favor one of my loyal worshippers above another like that."
Heart fluttering as it always does when she dares to tease her archon, Jean asks, "Then you are telling me the wind did all of that of its own accord?"
"Well, I might have been listening out just a little harder than usual for a certain person's prayers." He flashes her a smile, bright and glad. "Do you have any more for me? The sort I can answer in person, since I'm right here."
Jean knows her cue, but she's not quite daring enough to take it. There's teasing her archon and then there's propositioning him, and she still hasn't quite worked out how to do the latter. Besides, that isn't her greatest desire right now. Instead she puts her arm around him, feeling the lightness of him against her, and tells him, "Only the blessing of your presence."
"That's an easy one to grant!"
Laughing again, he reaches to pull her down into a full and earnest kiss. As Jean bows down for it, the wind rises, blowing soft and sweet around them both.