Twas an awkward moment in Lady Arinel's carriage, when Coris emerged from his shocked stupor to find himself sprawled across Meya's lap, a bottle of pungent salmiac hovering before his nostrils, and three women keeping an unblinking vigil from the opposite bench.

The instant Coris's silvery eyes found Agnes's ocean-blue one, and the young lord picked himself upright, Meya took it as her cue to covertly slither away.

Before she had even edged an inch towards the door, Coris's hand landed softly on her shoulder.

"Do stay, Meya. Please."

Meya gawked back at him in desperate protest. Yet, Coris's gaze was pleading as well as unrelenting. In the end, Meya was compelled to settle back down in her corner, sulking in private and sneaking wary glances as Coris struck up an equally nervous conversation with Lady Agnes.

Despite Meya's fears, Coris and Agnes were entirely business-like throughout their exchange. Agnes had started off with a recap of her tale (No surprises there). After apologizing to Coris for her father's sabotage of Hadrian, she plunged straight into the pressing matter of finding Persephia and Klythe. And that was where she handed the baton to Meya.

Much to her bashfulness, Meya had no choice but to lay out her half-formed plans to uncover the lost Greeneye Lady.

At the end of her ramble, she held her breath and clenched her hands, shooting shifty glances at the surrounding nobles. Though admittedly, she should've taken it as a bolstering sign that they had let her finish uninterrupted, at least.

Arinel was nodding slowly, the finger-pinch of contemplation on her chin and her elbow propped on her knee. Agnes was frowning and biting her lip, looking understandably conflicted; this could very well be her sister who was being lured into Meya's trap, after all.

Coris's eyes were downcast. His long, pale fingers twiddled idly with the tiny salt vial. He seemed to be making rapid calculations. Finally, he nodded to himself one last time, and glanced up at the faint-looking Meya with a smile.

"You could be more confident, Meya. It's a good plan." His smile vanished as he straightened up and pocketed the salt vial. Glancing at each of the four women in turn, he instructed,

"Let's go over the details tonight. I have to meet with Lady Jaise this afternoon. You all go take a tour of the town, then come to the castle for dinner. I'll find a way to keep our target occupied."

"Can't I go with you?" Meya bargained. She hated not being included. She'd had sixteen years of that, being underage, a girl, a peasant and a Greeneye and all. Coris turned around, blinked once, then swiftly backtracked to a reassuring grin.

"Oh, you'd better go walk around. It's a valuable experience." He deterred her with a placating hand over hers, yet, his expression betrayed a fleeting moment of apprehension. Meya did not let it go unchallenged.

"More valuable than the business you're gonna discuss with Lady Jaise?" She pressed, eyes narrowed, then tasted triumph when Coris visibly grimaced. She leaned forth, looming over the flustered young man, "What's going on, Coris? Why can't I join you?"

"Because you're not the real Arinel, Meya."

Meya whirled around. It was Agnes who had replied. Fixing Meya with her single working eye, she explained with a note of equal dread and awe in her voice,

"Jaisians grow up not being able to see other people's expressions and mannerisms. Naturally, they've come to recognize people by their voices alone. Despite our best efforts, lies more or less leak out through our face, body language and voice. And Jaisians are good at hearing them. Especially Lady Winterwen. One word from you, and she'd know."

Agnes's fear had transferred in its entirety from her words to Meya, and the fake Lady Arinel found herself shivering. It was a mental pickle, alright. She wanted to be in that meeting, but there was no telling what would ensue should her cover ever be blown. Again.

"But what if the Lady invites Meya for dinner, my Lady?" Gretella pointed out the worst case scenario, sending both Coris and Agnes tensing up, "After all, it would be against etiquette to not extend the wife of a guest an invitation to dine. Not to mention she's a woman ruler herself."

Coris's eyes dipped to the wooden floorboards as he wracked his brain. He resurfaced with a soft sigh.

"In that case, we might have to switch back to the real Arinel for the time being—But let's leave the worrying for when that happens." He added hastily at the horrified reactions of both Real- and Fake-Arinel, squeezing the latter's sweaty hand, which had somehow cooled to normal human temperature.

Meya met Coris's gaze and studied his careworn expression. She had never seen him mired in such a quandary before. In the face of trouble, Coris was usually armed with a solution. Though it galled her to have to stand down while others get to do all the important work, again, Meya conceded that it might be best not to push her luck with the enigmatic Lady Jaise.

Sighing, she slithered her hand out from under Coris's and clasped hers over his instead. Clinging to the windowsill with her free hand, she poked her head out the window.

Now that they were approaching it, Meya noticed that the towering black wall was not painted, but tiled with polished stone mosaics, from the lightest shade of gray to the deepest of black, arranged into mesmerizing geometric patterns. As breathtaking as it was unscalable.

A line of sculpted-stone crow heads jutted out along the wall's skirt, steaming water pouring out of their open beaks into the churning moat below, amidst a billowing curtain of vapor. The faint smell of rotten eggs hung in the air. Gum trees still blanketed both sides of the road.

Her hand still on the wooden window-frame, Meya turned back to her beau with a frown.

"What are you discussing with Lady Jaise, anyway?" Coris raised an eyebrow. Meya shrugged. "Why exactly are we stopping here? Doesn't seem to be much for us to refill here in terms of provisions, does there? Apart from gum and water?"

Coris avoided her stare, gazing down at his hand, fondling Meya's fingers. It was obvious he hadn't meant to confide in them at all. And, with his sighing reply, it became clear why.

"There's something wrong with the soil in the west. Almost all nutrients have gone. Crops are withering, all the way from Amplevale to Noxx. I'll negotiate with Winterwen to sell us water from Jaise's springs to enrich the soil, buy us more time to figure out the cause. The springs came all the way from down in Fyr's Lake, so they're chock full of nutrients."

"—Which used to make up the bodies of hundreds of thousands of drowned sinners. Pretty refreshing to hear. I could already see those crops becoming rejuvenated."

Meya interjected dryly. Coris burst out a short laugh, clamped his spider-like hand on her crown, then mussed up her hair, chuckling in weary amusement.

"And there goes the blasphemous dragon lady."

Giggling, Meya swatted playfully at Coris. There was a brief moment of levity as Agnes, Arinel and Gretella met eyes, then wordlessly and smilingly agreed to allow the couple some well-earned downtime. It was with a reluctant heart that Arinel finally steered the discussion back to seriousness.

"Now that you mention it, I did notice trees and plants growing feeble along the way here. But crops are doing fine here."

"I've noticed, too. And I've seen this before." Meya pitched in, a shadow of foreboding over her downcast eyes. As Coris blinked at her, she extricated his immobile hand from the top of her head and plopped it onto her lap,

"Right before the Crosset Famine, crops and trees and grass were growing yellow and feeble." Meya droned, her voice level, seemingly more invested in puppeteering Coris's long, pale, clammy fingers.

"Cattle and sheep and goat were running dry. Chicken and ducks stopped laying. Fruits and flowers were dropping like rain. No matter how hard we mulched the earth, we couldn't save the harvest."

There was a long pause as the audience processed the portentous anecdote in their own way. Coris, in particular, was staring at Meya with a look of dawning realization and horror in his unblinking eyes.

"Will Hadrian pull through this, my Lord?"

Gretella broke the silence, her soft voice leaden with deep-seated fear. Though she had not witnessed the Crosset Famine, it was obvious she had probably survived some other famine—or worse, famines— during her younger years. Waking from his trance, Coris turned and met her gaze steadily, though he still looked paler than usual.

"The bailiff's doing all he could, but I doubt we'd be able to save this harvest." He shook his head with a heaving sigh, then suggested in a brighter note, "We still have the storehouse grain, though. And we caught wind of this early on. Father could order a food ration right away, and switch to hardy crops, like potatoes and turnips."

"What about the livestock? They won't have grass to graze on, and hay doesn't keep for that long." Agnes pressed, her surprising knowledge of agriculture logistics reminding Meya that she used to be a noblewoman, trained in governing as heiress. Coris nodded; a slow, heavy nod.

"We might have to slaughter them early, to preserve their meat and fat." He fell back against the carriage wall, looking drained all of a sudden. He closed his eyes, "And we might have to allow some hog and deer hunting in the Lord's Forest, too."

"Deer? But—they're your family's symbol!" Meya sputtered, aghast. Coris bowed his head, while Arinel let out a quiet sigh of resignation.

"Zier would be heartbroken. He loves deer."

It wasn't just Zier. Meya knew, felt that as profoundly as the other four Latakians in the immediate party. Every manor, every noble clan and its people had their own symbol animal. And the prospect of Hadrian being driven to butchering their own deer for food, would be no less spine-chilling than the sight of Crosset's Snow Gyrfalcon torn to blood-soaked pieces by a Dark Eagle.

Meya's hand shook as she was unwillingly reminded of the famine she had survived. She grasped Coris's hand tight, and he reciprocated. Like wagons of May Fest tourists, it seemed misfortune continued rolling in towards Meya herself and whatever neighborhood she'd set foot into, one after another.

And, though she often did her best to deny and debunk it, for once, Meya couldn't help thinking that it might have actually been down to her rotten Greeneye luck.