‘Are you certain this is the right thing to do?’ Bastille hissed to me.
We sat on a wicker bench, waiting as the king and his wife fetched the Communicator’s Glass. Aydee was talking to one of the soldiers, getting news about her family. (Sing, Australia, and their parents had been sent to provide leadership at the other main battlefront in the Mokian war – though I suspect that the king really sent them away to prevent them from being captured when the city fell.) Kaz stood nearby, arms folded as he leaned against the wall, wearing his brown leather jacket and aviator sunglasses.
‘I don’t know if this is right,’ I admitted to Bastille. ‘But we can’t just let them give up.’
‘If they fight, people will get hurt,’ Bastille said, leaning in close to me. ‘Can we really offer them enough hope to justify that? Now that I’ve seen how bad it is, I don’t even know if the full force of the Knights of Crystallia would be enough to turn this war around.’
‘I . . .’ I trailed off, growing befuddled. I did that frequently when Bastille sat really close to me, particularly when I could smell the scent of the shampoo in her hair. Shouldn’t girls smell like flowers or something like that? Bastille just smelled like soap.
It was strangely intoxicating anyway. Obviously she gives off some kind of brain-clouding radiation. That’s the only explanation.
‘Shattering Glass, what am I saying?’ she said, pulling back. ‘Of course it’s better for them to fight! I’m sorry. I’ve just grown so used to contradicting you on principle that I’m shocked when you do something smart.’
‘Duurrr . . .’ I said.
She narrowed her eyes at me. ‘You aren’t still mooning over my sister, are you?’ Her voice was quite threatening.
I shook out of my stupor. ‘What? No. Don’t be stoopid.’
‘Did you just call me stoopid?’
‘No, I told you not to be stoopid. What is it with you and your sister anyway?’
‘Nothing! I love my sister. We’re like two shattering flowers in a field of shattering daisies.’
‘What does that even mean?’
‘I don’t know! It was supposed to sound sisterly or something.’
I snorted in derision.
‘So what’s that supposed to mean?’ Bastille demanded. ‘I’m very affectionate with my sister!’
‘So much so that you’ve never visited her in Mokia?’
‘It’s a long way away, and I was busy training to become a knight. So that I could keep idiots like you out of trouble!’
‘Wait. You get mad when I imply that you might be stoopid, but it’s all right for you to call me an idiot?’
‘Because you’re a Smedry!’
‘That’s always your excuse,’ I said. ‘I don’t buy it. Besides, this time you said you agreed with what I was doing!’
‘So!’
‘So!’
‘So?’
‘So maybe we should, like, go catch a movie together or something,’ I said, standing up. ‘Sometime when we’re not being chased by Librarians or being eaten by dragons or things like that!’
Bastille paused, cocking her head, frowning. ‘Wait. What?’
I found myself blushing. Why had I said that? I mean, I’d been thinking about it for a while, but . . .
Brain-clouding radiation. Obviously.
‘It was nothing,’ I said, panicking. ‘I just, uh, got confused, and—’