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The bow was dramatic enough that Vidalia could not help the small, breathy laugh that slipped from her.

There was nothing mocking about it; there was too little cruelty in Vidalia for that, and too much memory of courts where men bowed with perfect grace and poisoned smiles. Jaskier’s display had neither the stiff elegance of nobility nor the careful calculation of someone seeking favor. It was theatrical, yes, but brightly so. Earnest in the way only a bard could make a thing earnest, with his crown nearly to the earth and his tail waving behind him.

How strange, she thought, to meet someone who seemed so unashamed of being alive.

A pleasure, Jaskier Tyrael of the Highwayman Howff, Vidalia returned, inclining her head with composed courtesy.

She watched as he drew nearer and then away again, his attention lifting toward Eastborne’s weathered height. The castle loomed above them both, old bones standing against the bright noon sky, its stones broken in places and whole in others. A ruin, some might have called it. A relic. A burden.

Vidalia had called it home before it had fully earned the name.

Yes, she said softly, following his gaze upward. Some places outlive everything that thought itself greater. Kings. Wars. Famine. They remain after all of it, carrying more than any non-living thing should have to carry.

The breeze moved coolly from the sea, stirring the fur along her neck and tugging lightly at the bits of earth still clinging to her pale paws. For a moment, she looked not at Jaskier but at Eastborne itself, as though the old castle might answer if she listened long enough. Perhaps it did, in its way. In the creak of old wood, in the groan of stone settling after rain, in the way empty halls could still seem full of footsteps when the hour grew late.

Her gaze returned to him then, and something in her expression softened. Whatever thought had taken him, it had carried him far beyond the crossing for a moment. She nearly dared not pull him from such a memory. Yet, before she could decide whether silence would be kinder, he seemed to come back to her on his own.

You speak as though you have known such a place, she said quietly, a question propped gently against her statement, one that could be read between the lines should he dare to answer it. But she did not seek to pry and so, just like that, she pivoted and offered an olive branch.

The Howff must be dear to you, she added after a breath, allowing him an easier road should he wish to take it. A tavern made into a home has a soul of its own, I would imagine. Eyes the color of tiny molten suns burned into him, light and gentle despite their intensity. Please, she said, with the quiet grace of one queen inviting a story rather than demanding an answer, you must tell me more of it.

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