Acylius/Aelia: First Meeting (lover100 Prompt #006)
TITLE: First Meeting
FANDOM: Insektors
PAIRING: Acylius/Aelia
RATING: G
SUMMARY: When Acylius first tells Aelia that he's a Yuk, she doesn't believe him. Then she gets angry. And then she starts to notice what doesn't fit...
WARNINGS: Mild purple prose in parts.
NOTES: A minor AU of The Eskape. Some of the imagery that Aelia uses was inspired by Ilan Stavans’ translation of Pablo Neruda’s ‘Ode to the Rose’.
As the early dawn light peeked through the window of her room, Aelia flipped through her notebook, skimming over delicately-coloured sketches and scrawled lists of potential experiments. Usually, it brought her excitement-the thrill of possibilities just waiting to be turned into reality. This morning, the first since the salvage of the destroyed daffodils had been completed, she just felt dull and heavy. None of the ideas that had been scribbled down in an inspired frenzy were bringing with them the least spark of excitement-and just when she really needed that spark, too.
“It figures,” she muttered, then flipped to the start of the notebook and began to read more carefully. The pressing issue was that with the daffodil field cleared, they needed to replace them with something-or they risked losing the ground to the swamp thorns or some other noxious weed. Aelia wasn’t about to let that happen; the Joyces needed that ground. If the Yuks kept up with their current rate of destruction, the yield of pollen would fall, risking their ability to grow new flowers. If they lost enough of that, the Great Prism would soon be at risk of going out. And if that happened…
Well, she wasn’t going to let it. Their seed stores could only take a few more emergency plantings before they started to run dangerously low. If Aelia could relieve some of the pressure on the existing plants by creating a new cultivar with cuttings… And if she had anything to say about it, the cultivar would be something difficult for the Yuks to harvest. Bluebells and flowers like it dropped their pollen easily if the stems were shaken, which would at least slow the Yuks down, but flowers like that were all bulbous. She could prepare something new, but it would take at least a year before they would be ready to plant. Then there were flowers with very fleshy stems that were little use for burning-or at least needed much longer to dry out before they would be useable-but they tended to require shade, which these fields no longer possessed. That left plants with more traditional defences.
“Roses,” said Aelia decisively, snapping her notebook shut. “If those fields are going to be covered with thorns, they’ll at least be the right kind of thorns.” Aelia had plenty of roses that she could take cuttings from, and perhaps she could crossbreed them with one of her faster-growing varieties to create something that would cover a wide area in a short space of time. That would be tricky, since none of them were even in the same family as roses, but it was possible to use the kolor energy of the Prism to encourage rapid growth or hybridisation, depending on how it was applied. So long as she got the initial pollen mixture right, there was no reason for it to be impossible.
The thought did not bring the joy that it should have.
“You know, just once I’d like to create a new cultivar just because I wanted to try something new,” said Aelia aloud. “Not because we need something to replace another ruined field.”
She picked up her collection bottle and made her way out to the Great Flower’s landing platform, joining the stream of bees and butterflies that were taking advantage of the early morning cool. Most of them began a slow descent as soon as they reached the edge, dropping towards the tulips and asters at the base of the Great Flower, but Aelia flew straight on. She’d have to go out to the furthest fields to avoid getting in anyone’s way, but that might be a good thing. While she was out there, she would check to see if there were any species that were at particular risk-there were a few flowers that struggled in drier soil, and they were often the Yuks’ first targets when they came looking for easy flower wood.
Below her, she heard a familiar honking, and slowed to a hover as Gallopus rose up to meet her.
“Good morning, Gallopus,” she said, patting the robot’s nose affectionately. “How are you today?”
Gallopus honked cheerfully at her, then made an enquiring sound. Aelia lifted her collection bottle for the robot’s inspection.
“I’m going out to the edge of the fields. I want to check on the swamp-growing plants, and I also need to collect some pollen for a new cultivar I want to make, to help replace what we’ve lost in the last month.”
The robot squeaked anxiously.
“No, don’t try to wake him! You know that he’s a menace when we have to do that.” Aelia fought the urge to fly off in a huff. She didn’t need Fulgor as a bodyguard; she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself. Besides, he’d get bored, and start messing around, and he’d probably ruin whatever she tried to collect. It had happened before.
Gallopus acknowledged this with a sad honk, and Aelia immediately felt guilty. Her family just wanted her to be safe, after all. She patted Gallopus again.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I promise that if I see any Yuks, I’ll find Fulgor and tell him about them. Alright?”
Gallopus made a much happier squeak, pressed his nose against Aelia’s hand for one final pat-which she gave him, laughing-and then slowly descended again. Aelia watched him go. Maybe she should have asked Gallopus to come with her to the edge of the swamp. The robot was far more patient than Fulgor, and she could collect a lot more with his help. But if Fulgor woke up and Gallopus wasn’t there, he’d be sure to come looking, and when he found them he would insist on staying, and that would be just the situation that she was trying to avoid. No, it was better that she go by herself.
Aelia flew on.
To her relief, none of the plants at the edge of the swamp were in any real danger. She made a mental note about two or three iris cultivars that might need to be replenished if the Yuks chose to make their next incursion in that area, but it was a low priority-more caution than necessity. Fulgor would have said that she worried too much, but he wasn’t the one that had to assess the damage every time that the Yuks came through, and see all too clearly how much they lost with every attack. Aelia scowled at the thought, and gripped the neck of her bottle until she felt like it might crack under her hand. Then she shook herself. Just hovering here and steaming about what the Yuks had done wasn’t going to fix things.
Instead, she made her way over to a few stray tulips and began examining them. Creating a pollen mixture for a particular purpose was an exacting task. Kolor energy did influence the resulting hue of the flowers, but it also altered physical properties as well. If the balance was wrong, then the plant could be very different from the desired result. “Red…pink…blue,” she muttered. The loss of the daffodils was still too fresh for her to contemplate including any yellow. That was a shame, because she did love yellow-bright and cheerful and shining. Yellow could be stately or frivolous, bold when it was rich or shy when it was just separating itself from cream. Golden flowers gave light to rainy or cloudy days, like miniature suns come to earth to remind them that warmth and blue skies would come again.
But when Aelia tried to picture yellow flowers at the moment, all that she could see was the hacked and bruised daffodils that the Yuks had left behind, trodden into the mud and all their light extinguished. No, it would be some time before she could think of yellow flowers as sunlight again.
“Pink…blue…red,” she murmured again. “Purple?” She’d never made a purple rose before. For the first time since she had decided to begin this project, she felt a spark of excitement. She looked at the flowers with fresh eyes. Blue was the colour of the Prism, and plants that required kolor energy to grow often had a strong blue hue-like the Exuberansis supervelosis that Fulgor had used to cover the desert with flowers. If Aelia wanted to cross that with her new rose to speed up its growth, then it would be a good idea to use some blue pollen as a connection between the generations. Pink, of course, was a traditional colour for roses. And red was often used to mix secondary colours.
Feeling lighter of heart than she had in a week, Aelia fluttered over to the tulips. “A few grains of blue pollen,” she said aloud, reaching into the plant, “for the Great Prism and its eternal crystal.” Blue was all-encompassing, the colour of water and the sky-the colour of things necessary for life and growth. And yet blue was also a secretive colour, hiding distant things behind its blurry shroud, as though they were wishes that could not be articulated. “Blue,” she said, “like a secret dream.”
She fluttered over to the next flower. “The heart of the crimson chalice, to fuse all the colours together.” Red was the colour of passion, leaping into the foreground and commanding the attention of everyone around. Perfect to balance the mysterious serenity of blue; red warmed and illuminated, a fire to soften and meld different elements into something new and amazing. “Red, like a fabulous flame.” She sprinkled the pollen into her bottle, and moved to the next flower. This was the last one that she would need-and perhaps the most important of the three.
“Some pink petals to help the cycle of the rose fulfil its destiny.” True, Aelia had chosen the rose because of its natural thorny defence, but it was still one of the most beautiful flowers in Joyceland. Watching roses unfurl, petal by petal, growing more and more lovely as they opened themselves to the sky, was a wonderful reason for impatience. And even their eventual death was elegant-the flower hanging its head as gracefully as any bluebell, petals gradually dropping away until only the golden centre was left. Their gradual blossoming and decay, as well as their beauty in form and scent, made the rose a symbol of love in Flower City. Pink roses, in particular, always made Aelia think of the first blush of love, like the sky just before the sun rose.
Not that she’d ever experienced that kind of emotion; no one in Flower City had ever captured her attention that way. Sometimes, Aelia wondered if she would ever find it, or even if she would recognise it when she did. She pushed those thoughts away. There were other kinds of love than romantic, and if the roses she intended to create weren’t for love of someone special, they were for love of her people and her home. “The rose-flower of love-” She broke off. Someone had stepped through the fronds of the surrounding flowers-someone that she had never seen before. “Oh!”
Her first thought was, He’s beautiful. He was more slender than Fulgor, with a smooth upward sweep to his shoulders and a curiously ridged nose. But his kolors were what really caught her eye-he was primarily a golden yellow, shading smoothly along his limbs from pink to blue. He looked like a sunrise.
Aelia’s heart gave a great thump.
As she stared, he raised a hand in greeting. “Hello. What’s your name?” He had a nice voice, too-smooth and pleasant, tinged with an accent she hadn’t heard before.
Aelia’s heart gave another thump.
“Aelia,” she said, fighting not to stammer. “And yours?”
“Acylius.”
He even has a lovely name. Oh, that just isn’t fair. “Where are you from?” she blurted. “I haven’t seen you in Joyceland.” She was sure that he couldn’t be from around here; she certainly would have noticed someone as distinctive as him fluttering around. But if he wasn’t from Flower City, where could he have come from? Was there another colony of insects out there, somewhere beyond the desert?
Acylius chuckled, which made Aelia’s stomach flutter pleasantly. “That’s no wonder. You see, I’m a-” But before he could complete his sentence, loud thudding shook the ground. Acylius looked around in surprise, but from her higher vantage point, Aelia had already spotted the ugly, blocky shape of a Yuk walking machine. She clapped her hands over her mouth-dropping her collection bottle in the process-and glanced at Acylius. She saw the moment that he spotted the walker too-his eyes widened, and she saw him suck in a breath.
She gestured to a nearby mushroom. “Quickly!” With Acylius beside her-he sprinted rather than take the extra moment to launch himself into the air, which Aelia thought was sensible-she arrowed towards it. They threw themselves around the other side and huddled together behind the stalk. They weren’t a moment too soon. The walking machine crashed through the flowers, shaking the ground with every step. Accompanying it was the sound of-sneezing?
Aelia peeked around the mushroom. She recognised Lord Krabo, the Yuk Prime Minister, immediately, though not the Yuk that stood beside him. One of their soldiers, probably. In between sneezes, Krabo managed to gasp, “Accursed flowers! Where’s that kid?”
Kid? Did he mean Acylius? Aelia might have spared her companion a glance, but her gaze was caught by a spot of something pale lying in the dirt. Her collection bottle! She had dropped it when she flew for cover! And it was right in the path of the machine! Aelia clutched at the stalk of the mushroom, her fingers digging in. The machine had long strides. Maybe it would miss the bottle? Please, don’t let them destroy this, too! I’ve barely started!
Her prayers went unanswered. The machine’s flat foot came down squarely on the top of the pale ceramic. The crunch of shattering pottery wasn’t even audible above the walker’s footsteps, and the two Yuks went blithely on. Krabo was still sneezing, and Aelia hoped rather viciously that it would give him a headache. She could feel her hands shaking with the strength of her anger.
“Dirty Yuks!” she burst out. “All they ever do is destroy! I hate all Yuks!” If I could get my hands on them! She controlled herself with an effort, and looked at her companion. Acylius was staring at the ground, looking guilty. It seemed as though the Yuks really had been looking for him. She put a hand on his shoulder. “Is it you they’re looking for?” she asked, keeping her voice gentle. She didn’t want him to think that she blamed him for the Yuks and their destruction.
“Um, well…”
It was all the answer that she needed. “It’s alright, they’re gone.” Hopefully, they wouldn’t be back. And if they were very lucky, the Yuks would give up and go away before they did further damage to the flowers. At least they were limiting themselves to bruised stems and torn leaves, rather than felling entire plants. It was much easier to trim away anything too badly hurt than it was to replant an entire field.
And while they were on that subject… Swallowing, Aelia steeled herself and fluttered over to the small circle of crushed pottery and pollen. She’d known that there really wasn’t any chance of salvaging the work she’d done, but she still felt her stomach sink and her throat clench when she saw the way that the pollen had been muddied beyond use. She dropped to her knees in front of it, her anger momentarily replaced by an exhausted despair. “All that I gather, ruined,” she lamented.
Acylius came up beside her. “Is it really so important?”
Aelia glanced up at him. What a strange thing to ask-of course it was important! Then understanding came. He meant was it really so important that this particular mixture was destroyed, when she could always gather more pollen. For a moment, she considered explaining that her grieving was not just for this mixture, but for every one of her flowers that the Yuks had destroyed. For every one of her projects that she had seen reduced to something to burn, crushed into the mud, or just hacked to pieces for the love of destruction. But somehow, she didn’t want to explain that to Acylius. The feeling of excitement and wonder that had accompanied their first few moments together had vanished entirely at the appearance of the Yuks, but she didn’t want to spoil the mood any further by pouring all of that bitterness into Acylius’s ear.
“It’s kolors and pollen, that give life to our city,” she said, choosing a more general explanation. “And with them, we create new flowers.”
“New flowers,” repeated Acylius. “And new kolors as well? Why, that’s marvellous! It must be the most beautiful country in the world. I want to go there and smell all of the perfumes!”
His excitement had an electric effect on Aelia. Maybe the mood hadn’t been so spoiled after all; maybe they could recapture that magical atmosphere. She sprang into the air. “Well, then, come on! I’ll show you everything.” She waited, but Acylius didn’t follow her up. “Acylius? Won’t you come?”
“But-I don’t know how to fly,” he said, his excitement visibly fading.
Now that was strange. “How can that be?”
Acylius looked down. “Well, I guess it’s because I’m a-”
Heart sinking, Aelia cut him off. “It doesn’t matter! You can explain to me later!” She shouldn’t have asked; she should have guessed that there would be a difficult story behind it. Now she’d made Acylius feel ashamed that he’d never been taught what every winged insect should know. Hoping that she could restore his excitement, she hurried on, “I’ll show you how! Spread your wings.”
She tilted to one side, fluttering her own for demonstration. But Acylius didn’t mimic her movements. Instead, he kept staring at the ground. After a moment, her heart sinking even further, Aelia dropped back to earth. “What’s wrong, Acylius? Are your wings hurt?” Maybe that was why he’d never learned. If he’d been sick or had some kind of injury, perhaps when he was small, then it might have been safer for him not to learn. That way, he wouldn’t have risked straining them and doing himself even more harm.
“No-at least, I don’t think so,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. His wings were fluttering slightly. They moved smoothly enough, which argued that it wasn’t some kind of problem with the muscle. Maybe with the wing itself? “Blue,” he said, almost to himself. “Like a secret dream…”
“They’re a lovely colour,” said Aelia politely. “May I see them?” If he didn’t know if there was a problem, it would be best that she check them over before she tried to teach him to fly.
Acylius slowly turned around, and Aelia leaned in to peer at his wings. There was no damage to the membrane that she could see, no misshapen veins or anything that would create an obvious weak point. “Hmm,” she said. “I don’t see anything wrong. Does it hurt when you move them?”
“No, but I don’t think I have full control over it,” said Acylius. His wings twitched as he spoke.
“Have you used them before at all?” asked Aelia, hoping that her gentle tone might soften the blow of any unpleasant memories.
“I think I might have-when I was younger,” said Acylius slowly. “But it was…discouraged. I think I’m the only one in my family to have wings-at least, the only one for a long time. I know that my mother doesn’t have any.” He had twisted so that he could watch their fluttering. They continued to twitch as he tried to control their movement.
“It’s easier once you’re in the air,” she offered. “Taking off is hard, at first, but I can help!” Hastily, she added, “If you want to, I mean.”
“I don’t know if you want to help me,” said Acylius, softly. Then he turned back around. “Aelia, the reason that I don’t know how to fly is because I am a Yuk.”
Shock blanked Aelia’s mind for a moment. She forced a giggle. “Very funny,” she said. “You can’t be a Yuk.” But as soon as she said it, she felt doubt creeping over her. Acylius couldn’t fly (something she should have realised when he had approached her on foot rather than by air), she had never seen him before, and he was completely ignorant of how Flower City worked and lived. But there were other explanations for that, surely? There were other things that didn’t match-his kolors, his appreciation of flowers-
“I’m afraid that I am.” He looked terribly solemn. “As I said, my name is Acylius. I am the son of Queen Bakrakra.”
Aelia shook her head. “That isn’t funny.” He had to be lying. The most interesting person that she had met in ages couldn’t possibly be a Yuk. The universe wouldn’t be that cruel. Wasn’t it bad enough that she had to watch part of her home destroyed every few week?
“It isn’t a joke!” said Acylius, beginning to sound a little distressed. “Aelia, I promise that I am telling the truth.”
“But-your kolors-”
“I landed on a flower when I arrived, and I had to jump to several more to reach the ground without hurting myself,” explained Acylius. “It will probably come off if I rub it…”
Aelia went cold. “You mean that you disguised yourself?” Her hands began to shake. So all that talk about the flowers-he must have been pretending so that she wouldn’t have known that he really was a Yuk. He had probably wanted her to show him around Flower City so that he could go back to the Stump and tell them the best way to attack it.
“No, it wasn’t on purpose-”
“You-you horrible spy!” said Aelia, her voice rising as her anger took hold. “You were trying to trick me into helping you! Well, I would never help a Yuk. You just wait until I tell Fulgor about this. He’ll sort you out.” She made to jump into the air, but Acylius lunged forward and grabbed her wrist. She struggled. “Let go of me!”
“Aelia, please! I am a Yuk, but I swear that I didn’t come here to destroy your flowers or anything of the kind! The two Yuks who passed us a few minutes ago? That was Krabo-”
“I know who Krabo is!”
“-and Commander Krabouic, one of the highest-ranking officers in the Yuk army. They came to catch me and send me back to the Stump, because I escaped in one of their machines!”
Aelia snorted, making the sound as derisive as she could manage. “Escape? You just said that you were the son of Queen Bakrakra-that would make you a prince, wouldn’t it? And you expect me to believe that you had to escape from the Stump?” She tugged again against his grip. Acylius’s hand was very strong, and surprisingly rough-she could feel callouses on his palm. He also wasn’t holding her tightly enough to hurt. He probably thought that she wasn’t much of a threat, or he was overconfident and believed that she wouldn’t be able to break free.
“I am a prince, that’s true, but my mother considers me a disappointment,” said Acylius, his voice desperate. “She’s counting on Krabo to educate me to be ‘worthy of the throne’, but I don’t want to be anything like her, or like him. I want to be a Joyce, Aelia. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
The idea was so ridiculous-a Yuk (the prince of the Yuks, no less), wanting to be a Joyce?-that Aelia laughed. It made her feel slightly sick. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “It’s a nice story, but you probably planned this with Krabo. If I thought that they were looking for you, I’d be more inclined to help, after all.” It had nearly worked, too, and Aelia swallowed against the acid taste of guilt. What did it say about her, that she had been willing to show a complete stranger all around her home, just because they were pretty and needed help?
“If I was truly working with them, then why would I tell you all this?” demanded Acylius. “If I was a spy, it would be stupid of me to blow my cover so early, wouldn’t it?”
That made Aelia pause for a moment. He was right; that would be pretty stupid. But what if that was part of the plan, too? If she believed that no spy would be stupid enough to tell their target that they were a spy-the Yuks might count on that to remove any suspicion. That seemed a little too complicated for Krabo, but that didn’t mean that someone else couldn’t have come up with the idea. She couldn’t take that chance.
She shook her head. “I don’t believe you.” Then an idea struck her. “You probably told me because not being able to fly was going to blow your cover anyway,” she said, triumphant. “You couldn’t get me to show you around Flower City if you couldn’t fly! It was stupid of you not to think of that; how else would you get around here?”
Acylius abruptly released his hold on her wrist, and Aelia almost fell over backwards. Panting, she rubbed her wrist, which-sure enough-had smears of pollen on it. Acylius was certainly no Joyce, and she should get out of here, as fast as she could. She had to tell Fulgor about all of this, no matter how reluctant she felt, and then he would be able to drive Krabo and his accomplices out of Flower City. She bent her knees, ready to spring into the air-then stopped.
Acylius had not moved to follow her as she moved backwards. He just stood there, looking…resigned. His antennae drooped, and he couldn’t quite meet her eyes.
“I can see that I am not going to convince you,” he said. “I suppose it was foolish of me to believe that any Joyce would ever like me. I’m sorry to have bothered you, Aelia. And-even if you don’t believe me-it was nice to meet you.” He turned to walk away, and every step was dragging and slow.
Aelia stared after him, still rubbing her wrist. The grains of pollen rolled under her fingers-
Pollen. Kolor.
“Wait!” she called. Acylius stopped and turned around. He looked a little surprised, but he didn’t speak. Frowning and biting her lip, Aelia cautiously approached him. He made no move to grab her again. Reaching out with one hand, she brushed her fingers tentatively along Acylius’s arm. Sure enough, more pollen came away on their tips, leaving a few faded streaks to show the path of her fingers. “You really are covered in pollen,” said Aelia softly. “But-this doesn’t make any sense.”
“What doesn’t?” asked Acylius.
“Any Yuk exposed to kolor starts behaving…oddly,” said Aelia slowly. She’d seen the effect for herself, many times. It struck each Yuk a little bit differently-some started laughing uncontrollably, some started dancing (or trying to dance, anyway), and some started playing silly games with one another-but there was always some element of heightened mood. Acylius hadn’t shown any of those kinds of symptoms. And he had been obviously dejected by Aelia’s refusal to believe his story, something that no kolor-covered Yuk could have managed. “Why aren’t you?” She frowned. “Or…is this odd, for you?”
“Not really,” said Acylius. “The Stump is a terribly depressing place. The oddity was my excitement when you told me about the beauties of Flower City-” He stopped abruptly. During the last sentence, hope had started to rise in his voice. But now his head dropped down to his chest, and his voice sounded resigned again. “Which I suppose only proves your point.”
Aelia bit her lip, then said, “Actually, no, it doesn’t.” When Acylius blinked up at her in surprise, she explained, “I’ve seen kolor-affected Yuks plenty of times. They experienced a heightened mood until the effects of the kolor are neutralised. I’ve never seen any Yuk who could manage to be calm while they were covered in kolor, let alone experience an obviously negative emotion.” She frowned. “And they usually don’t make much sense. But…you haven’t been anything but logical.” She stared at him, thoroughly baffled.
As she stared, she saw hope slowly dawn in Acylius’s eyes. He took half a step forward, and Aelia tensed a little, then stopped himself. “Does this mean that you believe me?” he asked, obviously trying not to sound too eager. He didn’t succeed very well.
Aelia shook her head slowly, but it was more of an attempt to clear her head than a negation. “I’m not sure what to believe,” she said. There was a long silence, and eventually Aelia asked, “Did you really have to steal a machine to escape?”
“Well, first I had to dig a tunnel out of my room and down to the hangar,” said Acylius. “And then I stole the machine.” He pointed. “It’s back that way, if you want proof.”
“No, I-you had to dig a tunnel out of your room?”
“I was locked in,” said Acylius. “It was the only way that I could think to get out without being noticed.”
“And you really like the flowers?”
“They’re the most beautiful things that I’ve ever seen,” said Acylius, with transparent passion. “I’ve spent a lot of time in the observatory lately, but seeing them at a distance is nothing compared to seeing them up close.”
“Oh.” This still didn’t make much sense, and so much of it depended on whether or not Acylius was telling the truth. He sounded like he was-she wanted to believe that he was-but she wasn’t sure that she could. “I’m not sure what to think of you, Acylius. But, I have to admit that you aren’t like any other Yuk I’ve ever seen. So…I guess it would be okay if I showed you around, at least a little.” It wasn’t as though he would learn much simply from looking at the flowers. If he started to get curious about anything else, then that would be the time to fly to Fulgor as fast as she could. Aelia took a deep breath. “Do you want to learn to fly?”
It didn’t take long for Acylius to learn to keep himself aloft.
“Just let me know if you get tired,” said Aelia. “And I’ll help you land so that you can rest. Since this is your first major flight, you shouldn’t try to push yourself too hard, or you might strain a muscle. Then it would be days, maybe weeks, before you could fly again.” Acylius nodded solemnly, and Aelia went on, “Okay. See if you can follow me.” She traced a wavy line across the sky, keeping the curves wide and shallow so that Acylius wouldn’t send himself into a spin by mistake. When she thought that she had enough distance, she paused to watch him.
There wasn’t much doubt that he’d never flown before-even if the occasionally stuttering rhythm of his wings hadn’t been a dead giveaway, the way that he used his arms to balance himself would have been.
“That’s good!” she told him, when he caught up to her. “Try to keep your arms still. It’s okay to use them for extra balance, since you’re just a beginner, but if you flail around too much, you might send yourself into a corkscrew.”
“It’s harder than I thought it would be to keep my balance,” he admitted. He didn’t sound at all downcast by that-if anything, he sounded excited. “It reminds me a little of swimming, except in the air rather than in water.”
Aelia blinked. “I guess so,” she said. “I never thought of it quite like that.”
Acylius glanced at her wings. “I suppose that you don’t often go swimming.”
She nodded. “My wings would drag me down. They’re more fragile than yours.”
“But much more beautiful,” he said earnestly.
Aelia felt her face heat a little. It was sweet of Acylius to say that, especially with such transparent sincerity. And somehow, she didn’t feel like explaining that by butterfly standards, her wings weren’t exactly plain, but they weren’t anything exciting, either. She cleared her throat. “Thanks,” she said, and turned away. “Alright, let’s try this…”
After another ten minutes of practice-which took Acylius through the basics of climbing, descent, and changing direction-she could see that he was starting to flag, and she led him down to a broad leaf where they could both sit and rest.
“You did very well,” she told him.
Acylius was breathing a little hard. “How in the name of the great King Karbon do you manage to do that all day?” he asked. “It’s exhilarating, but it’s also exhausting.”
Aelia shrugged. “It takes time to build up the strength in your wings. But it’s almost always how we get around, so we get used to it. And, to be fair, we don’t usually fly all day.”
“Just most of it?” asked Acylius wryly.
Aelia couldn’t suppress a giggle. “The hard part is taking off, and you can make that easier by using a high place as a launch. When we move on from here, you can practice.” She stretched her wings out and fluttered them slightly. “Different kinds of wings find different things easier. Mine will let me glide for long distances if I hold them still, but I’m not as agile as someone with wings like yours. Closely-grown places are hard for me to navigate without running into anything.” She smiled. “But if I take off from the Great Flower, I can glide halfway across the fields before I need to flap my wings again.”
“It must be breathtaking from up there,” said Acylius. Shielding his eyes, he looked up to where the Great Flower rose above all others. “You must be able to see the whole of Joyceland.”
“You can,” confirmed Aelia. She didn’t offer to take him up there-not yet. Partially, it was because making it up to the Great Flower would be a difficult for an inexperienced flier like Acylius-he would almost certainly strain something if he tried at the moment. The other problem was that she still wasn’t sure whether she should trust him. He hadn’t said or done anything yet that contradicted what he had told her, but there was still a chance that he was just a very good actor.
She cast a sidelong look at Acylius. His gaze had moved from the Great Flower to the smaller blooms around them. His eyes were wide with wonder, one hand partially extended as though he wanted to reach out and touch them. She wondered what kolor he was, underneath all that pollen.
“What kind of flowers are these?” he asked. “They’re very different to the ones by the edge of the swamp.”
“Different plants grow in different kinds of soil,” said Aelia, shaking off her thoughts. “The land edging the swamp is mainly silt, and it’s best for things like irises and roses.”
“The flower of love,” said Acylius, and Aelia felt her face heat again for no good reason. He was, after all, just repeating what he had overheard her say during her pollen gathering. She coughed, hoping that the sound would excuse any resulting oddness in her voice.
“Yes, that’s right. Since we’re further away from the swamp, we start to get more sand mixed in, but most of the soil is clay. It doesn’t drain well and it can be hard for the roots of the plants to break it up. But there are still a few kinds of flower that thrive here.” She pointed. “The purple ones with lots of small petals around the centre are asters-you might see more of them around as we go on. They come in whites and pinks as well. And over there are daylilies.” The plants were in full bloom, throwing out sprays of golden, trumpet-like flowers in all directions. “They can come in all kinds of colours as well. The flowers only last one day, but they put out a lot of buds, so the plant blooms for a long time.” She continued to name the different flowers, trying to keep her explanations simple. Fulgor always complained that she got too technical when it came to plants. But even when she gave the full botanical names by mistake-Coreopsis grandiflora slipped out accidentally-on-purpose, she hated calling it ‘tickweed’-Acylius didn’t so much as blink. She wondered what kind of things he was expected to know, that the precise botanical names (which Fulgor considered to be needlessly long and complicated) didn’t bother him at all.
When she came to the end of the list, Acylius stayed silent for long enough that she started to worry that she might have overwhelmed him. But just as she was wondering whether to apologise, Acylius turned to her and asked, “How many kinds of flowers are there?”
Aelia blinked. “Different species, or different cultivars?”
“…I don’t know what a cultivar is,” said Acylius, sounding a little sheepish. Aelia could have smacked herself. Of course he wouldn’t know what a cultivar was. Why would a Yuk ever need to know such a thing?
“Sorry. A cultivar is a different variety of the same plant. Like a purple aster would be a different cultivar to a white aster, but they’re still the same species.” It was a little more complicated than that, but it was enough for now. She tipped her head to one side. “The number of cultivars is theoretically endless,” she said. “We create new ones all the time-different colours and different shapes, or varieties that will grow better in different places. I know that we have at least one hundred kinds of tulip on record, and that’s just one species.”
“That’s incredible,” said Acylius, his eyes wide with awe. “You record them?”
“Yes, it’s important to know what’s already been done. Otherwise we might waste a lot of time repeating experiments that have already been carried out.” She shook her head. “Anyway, I’m not sure exactly how many species of flowers grow here. I’d have to check the records; some of them aren’t very common.” And some of them weren’t possible to grow within the borders of Flower City; the golden-orange desert flower, for example. “Are you ready to go on?” Something made her tease, “You might not be able to see all of the flowers we grow here today, but I can show you more than just these.”
Acylius stood up eagerly, his wings already fluttering against his back. “Yes, please!”
Aelia couldn’t help laughing.
She wasn’t able to spare a lot of thought, in between helping Acylius with the basics of flight and the lessons in basic botany that accompanied their rests, but even so, it took her less than an hour to conclude that she liked Acylius entirely too much. It was almost impossible not to: he was clearly intelligent and eager to learn, he was effusive and unselfconscious in his praise of the beauty around him, and he was politely charming. It was the last-a complete lack of any arrogance or superiority-that she found particularly attractive. It made such a nice change from Fulgor, who delighted in stating misinformation with complete confidence, just to drive her crazy.
So, yes-she liked Acylius far too much for the length of their acquaintance. The question was what she was going to do about it. The longer she spent with him, the more she wanted to invite Acylius to stay with them permanently, but she still didn’t dare to trust him that much. But if he really had escaped from the Stump, and if Krabo and that Commander Krabouic were looking for him to drag him back, then it wouldn’t be right to leave him by himself, either.
Maybe she could find some way for Papa to meet Acylius. He was a good judge of character; everyone said so. He would know if Acylius wasn’t as trustworthy as he appeared. And if anyone would be prepared to accept the idea of a Yuk wanting to live as a Joyce, it was Papa. Papa would befriend Queen Bakrakra herself if he could.
She paused a moment to look back at Acylius. His attention was focused on the flowers below, and she could just hear him murmuring to himself, naming what he recognised. It was almost unbearably cute, and Aelia looked away. She had to make a logical decision about this; she couldn’t take in a Yuk just because he was cute.
Acylius gasped. Puzzled, Aelia turned back towards him, just in time for him to crash into her.
As she tumbled head over heels, knocked breathless by the impact, Aelia’s first thought was that Acylius had lost control of his flight. He was learning fast, but there were some things that you could only learn through practice, and a few spectacular crashes were only to be expected. Her second thought, hard on the heels of the first, was that Acylius really was a spy, that he had lulled her into a false sense of security before making his move. Before she had time to decide which one it had been, she heard Acylius cry out.
She spread her wings as wide as she could to slow her spin and her fall. It seemed to take a long time, and she was hyperaware of the need to hurry, to see what had happened to Acylius. Wobbling dizzily, Aelia got herself upright again and scanned the landscape below her. She couldn’t see him. If this had been an attack, it had been a miscalculated one.
Or this might be another trick.
“Acylius?” she called. Her carapace was one solid prickle, anxiety for an innocent Acylius who had lost control alternating with anxiety for a ruthless Acylius just waiting to attack her again. It did nothing to settle her stomach, still roiling from her unexpected fall.
Then she heard him shout, panicked, “Get away!”
Aelia hesitated. Then, swallowing hard, she dove in the direction of his voice. One way or another, she had to see.
She broke through the canopy of flowers and stopped short, her hands flying to her mouth. Below her was the Yuk walking machine. Krabo was still in the cockpit, but the Yuk pilot had dismounted. In one hand, he held a karbon gun. In the other, he held the arm of a struggling Acylius.
Karbon juice had turned the Yuk prince an ugly brown-black, and with a sinking stomach Aelia realised that the prickling of her carapace had not just been because of anxiety. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the scene in front of her, but now that she knew they were there, she could feel the flecks of karbon that dotted her skin.
“Stop that struggling at once,” Krabo was saying. There was a sickening sweetness to his voice that made Aelia shudder. “Dear prince, it is only us, you are quite safe now. You have my personal assurance that Commander Krabouic will be severely disciplined for daring to fire upon Your Highness…”
Commander Krabuoic shuddered, but didn’t release his grip. “Terribly sorry, prince,” he said. “Thought you were a Joyce, all kolored-up like that. Not to worry, we can put you through the Dark Box as soon as we get back to the City, get you all cleaned up.”
“I am not going back to the Stump,” said Acylius fiercely. His wings were buzzing, trying to propel him out of the pilot’s grip, but Aelia could see the dark film coating his wings. Koal juice didn’t make it impossible to fly, but it did make it much harder, and Acylius was only a beginner. He hadn’t had the time to build up the strength in his wings that might have let him tear free.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” snapped Krabo, the honey leaving his voice. “You are coming home with us immediately. Do you know how long we’ve had to spend wandering around in this land of nauseating flowers, looking for you? If your mother the queen realises that you left the Stump without an escort-” He cut himself off, but Acylius was already scoffing.
“You only care about saving your own carapace,” he said. His free hand was prying at Krabouic’s, trying to loosen the Commander’s fingers. “I tell you, I am not coming back to the Stump. I don’t care what you say, or what my mother says!”
Krabo’s yellow eyes gleamed with rage, but before he could start shouting, the Commander looked up at him. “Must be some kind of Joyce witchcraft,” he said. “Twisting the prince’s mind, turning him against all that’s dark and true, Your Unreasonableness.”
Krabo deflated very slightly, and he assumed a lofty posture. “Right. Yes, of course. Joyce mind-control, explains everything. Bring the prince up to the cockpit, Commander Krabouic, we shall return to the Stump at once and have Teknocratus-” Krabo’s eyes had left the prince as he made his declaration, and now they fixed on Aelia, hovering frozen at the edge of the clearing. “Joyce!” he shrieked, clutching at the rim of the cockpit with knobbly hands.
It broke Aelia’s paralysis. “You let Acylius go, right now!” she shouted. She might not have Fulgor’s guitar or one of the dragonflies’ kolor bombs, but with all the flowers of Joyceland around her, she wasn’t exactly defenceless. There was a fringe of bluebells hanging just above Krabo’s head that would do very nicely. She dived for it.
“Shoot it!” shouted Krabo. “Commander Krabouic, get that Joyce!”
“Aelia, get away!” cried Acylius at almost the same moment. As Krabouic released Acylius and brought up his gun, the prince tackled the pilot. Bolts of koal juice shot into the sky as Krabouic tipped over backwards. Aelia, meanwhile, had seized the stem of the bluebells and yanked it down hard. Blue pollen showered from the flower heads, coating the machine’s cockpit. Krabo began to sneeze.
“Achoo! Achoo! Blasted blue butterfly, you’ll pay for that! Hatchoo!” One flailing hand seized Aelia’s ankle as she tried to get clear of the machine. She cried out, and Krabo screeched again as her frantic wingbeats lifted them both into the air.
“Let go!” she shouted.
“Put me down!” Krabo hollered. “Achoo! Achoo!” Each sneeze shook Aelia, sending her careening into the flowers that bordered the clearing. Pollen rained over them both every time that they hit another one-and every fresh shower made Krabo sneeze even harder. Aelia covered her mouth with her hands, but she could feel her throat tickling from all the pollen in the air. I have to get above the flowers, or we’ll both choke to death! She beat her wings harder, knocking a fresh spray of pink pollen onto the Yuk clinging to her leg.
“You-achoo!-wretched thing! Achoo! You kolored-achoo!-clown! You-achoo!-brainless jester! Put me down this instant!”
Aelia risked taking her hands away from her mouth. “You’re the one holding onto me!”
“Aelia!”
She spun towards the voice. A bright, strong chord sounded, and suddenly Krabo was no longer clutching her leg. He shrieked as he plummeted towards the ground-a shriek that was cut off by fresh sneezes as he bounced from flower to flower. At last he hit the dirt and lay there, still sneezing. Aelia panted, her heart pounding fit to burst, as a loud honk sounded and Fulgor grabbed her wrist.
“Are you okay?” he asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Get on Gallopus, you’re too winded to fly. Let’s get out of here.”
Aelia shook her head. “Not-without Acylius,” she managed, turning back towards the clearing.
“Who?” asked Fulgor, baffled.
A short distance from where Krabo was lying, Aelia could see that Acylius and Krabouic were still wrestling for control of the gun. The pilot was much bigger and stronger than the prince, but Acylius was stubborn-every time that Krabouic seized the gun and started to bring it up in a firing position, Acylius would dive for it again, pulling it back down towards the ground. Every so often, Krabouic would raise a hand, or his leg would twitch, a clear signal that he would have liked to do more than just push this foe away-but every time he would restrain himself, apparently remembering that this was his prince, and the consequences for striking him would be dire. If he hadn’t had such self-control, Aelia was sure that the fight would already be over.
But Acylius’s valiant struggles couldn’t last forever. Aelia could see that the prince was breathing as hard as she was, and his movements were becoming more and more uncoordinated. Krabouic was gradually get the upper hand.
Aelia grabbed the guitar from Fulgor’s hands and dived down towards the clearing. She heard him shout after her, and Gallopus almost screaming, but she didn’t bother to listen. All of her focus was on the wrestling pair below her. She braked hard, her wings screaming at her, just as Krabouic shoved Acylius away again. As the Yuk pilot raised the gun, fingers fumbling for the trigger, Aelia brought the guitar up and sounded a perfect G chord.
She heard the kolor blast splatter all over Krabouic’s chest, but didn’t wait to see its effects. She dived for Acylius and seized his wrist, hauling him up into the air.
“Come on!” she shouted, trying to pull Acylius up while still holding Fulgor’s guitar with her other hand. Gallopus and Fulgor had followed them down, and Aelia shoved Fulgor’s guitar into her brother’s hands and hauled Acylius onto Gallopus’s back.
“Aelia, who is-” began Fulgor, as Aelia dropped onto Gallopus behind the winded Yuk prince.
“I’ll explain later,” she said shortly. “Let’s go!”
Gallopus needed no further encouragement. The robot shot skywards, throwing Acylius backwards before he got a proper grip on the front of the saddle. Aelia folded her wings back to minimize drag as they levelled out, and twisted to look behind her. The clearing was little more than a dark dot below them, and she breathed a sigh of relief.
“We got away,” she told Acylius, who was still trying to catch his breath. “You can relax. I don’t think they’ll be going anywhere for a while.”
Acylius took a few more deep breaths before he replied. “You came back for me,” he said, sounding equal parts confused and awed.
She put a hand on his shoulder. “I believe you now,” she told him. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to let them take you back.”
Fulgor flew up beside them, still holding his guitar at the ready. Conversationally, he said, “You guys can explain what’s going on any time now.”
Aelia explained on the way to the springs, with Acylius occasionally chiming in to provide an extra detail or clarify something. Fulgor was not as inclined to believe the prince as his sister, and said so as Aelia led Acylius into the water and grabbed a scraper.
“How do you know that this isn’t some kind of trick?” he asked, eyeing Acylius with open suspicion. His guitar was not quite pointed at the prince, but it would only take a twitch of Fulgor’s hands to correct that. “He is a Yuk, after all.”
“He is a Yuk,” agreed Aelia, starting to run the scraper over Acylius’s back. “But he’s not like the other ones.”
Acylius twitched, a muffle giggle escaping his mouth. “That tickles!” he said.
Aelia couldn’t help grinning in response. “Naturally! I have to scrape you clean, you’re covered in pollen and cold karbon juice.” She gently directed the scraper around Acylius’s wings. “I never thanked you for pushing me out of the way,” she said. “Can you spread your wings so I can get underneath them?”
Acylius obliged, after a few false starts. “I almost wasn’t in time. I saw the gun pointing towards you, and…reacted.” Despite the scraper-induced thread of laughter in his voice, he sounded troubled. “I never thought that koal juice would make it so difficult to fly. I hate to think of what they might have done if it was you they had hit.”
“Well, apparently Fulgor was already looking for me, so it probably would have turned out alright,” said Aelia, not entirely truthfully. “But you did save me from having to have my wings repainted again, so thank you. I hate to bother Papa when he’s working, but he’s the only one who can get my kolors right.”
Acylius twisted to look over at Fulgor. “Your entrance was most timely,” he said. “Thank you. I don’t know how much longer I could have kept Krabouic from firing, and I couldn’t help Aelia with Krabo at all.”
Aelia glanced over her shoulder. Fulgor was still scowling, but his hands were no longer poised to strum the guitar.
“Aelia’s my sister,” he said, gruffly but not openly hostile. “I look out for her.”
“Why were you looking for me at all?” asked Aelia, returning to her scraping. With every stroke, she managed to peel a little more of the pollen-and-karbon coating away from Acylius’s carapace.
“The Yuks passed by my spot about half an hour ago,” replied Fulgor. “Gallopus said you were out by yourself, and I went to warn you. So they were looking for you, Your Highness?” The title wasn’t quite a mockery, but Aelia scowled over her shoulder at her brother anyway.
“Yes, they were,” said Acylius. “My mother is determined that I will be a proper prince of Yukdom, but that’s the last thing I want. I want to live here, with flowers and kolors and music. I want to live like a Joyce.” The desperation in his voice made Aelia put her hand on his shoulder in an attempt to reassure him. He sounded like he expected to be immediately rebuffed.
“If that’s what you want-” she began, but a snort from Fulgor cut her off.
“I never heard of a Yuk hanging around with a Joyce,” he said.
Aelia whirled on her brother. “So what?” she demanded. “If that’s what he wants, then Acylius should be able to live here with us.”
Fulgor held up his hands. “If that’s what he wants, it’s what he wants! I just don’t know if a Yuk can.”
The stricken look on Acylius’s face made Aelia want to smack her brother. “I don’t see any reason that he couldn’t,” she declared.
Fulgor gave her a sceptical look. “What about what’ll happen when he gets kolor on him?” he asked. “You can’t avoid it, and we don’t have a way to get it off again, short of dropping him in here.”
“Acylius isn’t affected by kolor,” said Aelia flatly, scrubbing at Acylius’s arm.
“What?”
“I don’t experience any elevated mood when I come into contact with kolor,” said Acylius. “That was what persuaded Aelia to give me a chance. He shifted a little, wincing, and Aelia immediately lightened her strokes.
“Sorry,” she murmured. “Rinse your arm?”
Obediently, Acylius dipped his arm in the spring. It seemed that without the koal juice and the pollen, Acylius was a rich brown. He was, in fact, the same colour as good loam. Aelia took that as a positive sign, and handed him the scraper. “Here. You start on your front, and I’ll rinse your back.”
She risked another glance at Fulgor as she dipped to scoop up a double handful of water. He hadn’t responded to Acylius’s claim, and his scepticism had faded into a thoughtful look that Aelia didn’t often see on her brother’s face. Ordinarily, she would have said something about the rarity of Fulgor actually stopping to think about something, but this was too important. Instead, she let him ponder while she and Acylius gradually removed the rest of the karbon/kolor mixture from the prince’s carapace.
When they stepped out of the springs and started to slick the excess water from their skin, Fulgor stood up.
“Well, I guess we should go talk to the Great Pyro,” he said. “If you’re really sure about wanting to stay here, Acylius.”
The prince blinked disbelievingly at him for a moment, then said fervently, “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”
“Alright,” said Fulgor. He sounded as though he meant it. “Then hop on Gallopus, and let’s go.”
Acylius got more and more tense as they approached the Great Flower, and by the time they touched down on the landing platform, he was almost vibrating with anxiety. All Aelia could do was put her hand on his shoulder and give him a reassuring smile; she wasn’t nearly as calm and certain about this as she was pretending to be, and she didn’t dare speak in case her voice gave that away. Her stomach churned as they all made their way to the Harmonicum, and even the music that drifted down the corridor didn’t do much to soothe her. She knew that Acylius was felt just as sick with nerves as she did, because he didn’t ask any questions about the music. The only one who seemed completely calm was Fulgor. He walked right up to the doors of the Harmonicum and-before Aelia or Acylius could say anything-pushed them wide open.
The Great Pyro finished the phrase he was playing with one more chiming chord, then stepped away from the keys. “Hello, children,” he said. Aelia saw her father’s feathery antennae twitch when he noticed Acylius, but his voice showed no sign of his surprise. She envied the ability. “I heard that there was some fuss down among the bluebells not long ago. I hope it wasn’t anything too serious.”
Aelia and Fulgor both opened their mouths to say something, but Acylius beat them both to it. “I’m afraid that was my fault,” he said, stepping forward. “Hello, Great Pyro. My name is Acylius.”
“Hmm,” said the Great Pyro. He peered at Acylius over the tops of his glasses. “How interesting. What brings the son of Queen Bakrakra to Flower City?”
Acylius looked at his feet. Aelia shuffled forward a little so that she stood alongside him.
“He wants to be a Joyce,” supplied Fulgor.
The Great Pyro gave his son a mildly reproving look. “Please, Fulgor, let Prince Acylius speak for himself.”
There were a few long moments of silence. Then Acylius took a deep breath, stood up a little straighter, and told the Great Pyro the whole story-from tunnelling out of his room that morning, to stealing the frog machine in order to cross the swamp, to meeting Aelia and the subsequent argument, to the flight lesson and finally their encounter with Krabo and Krabouic, and Fulgor’s timely intervention. The Great Pyro remained silent for the entire recitation, and whenever Aelia or Fulgor opened their mouths to add something, he would give them a quelling look before they could utter a single syllable.
“I see,” he said, when Acylius fell silent again. “This is most unexpected. But on behalf of all Joyces, I welcome you to our Flower City. I hope that you will be very happy here.”
Acylius looked up with wide eyes. “Really? But-my lack of kolors-”
The Great Pyro shook his head with an indulgent smile. “It makes no difference whether one is drab or full of kolors,” he said. “The important thing is what is in our hearts. And it is clear to me where your heart lies, whatever your outward appearance.”
Fulgor’s antennae stood straight up in shock. “You mean a Yuk can be a Joyce?”
“Yes, naturally,” said the Great Pyro. “There’s less difference between us than you imagine.”
“Then Acylius can stay here with us!” exclaimed Aelia. She nearly threw her arms around the Yuk prince through sheer excitement, only catching herself at the last moment. That wasn’t the sort of thing that you did only hours after meeting someone, no matter how much you liked them. She settled instead for shaking one of his hands.
“Prince Acylius, welcome!” said Fulgor, taking the other and shaking vigorously. All his reluctance seemed to have vanished now that the Yuk prince had received the Great Pyro’s seal of approval. “C’mon, let’s go celebrate!” He almost ran out the door, bursting with excitement.
Acylius glanced at Aelia. He looked bewildered, as though the reality of the situation had not quite sunk in yet. “I don’t know what to say,” he said in a hushed voice.
She smiled at him, so wide that her face almost hurt. “You don’t need to say anything. Come on, we’d better catch up with him before he arranges something insane as a welcoming event.”
Acylius glanced after Fulgor, and nodded. “Right.” He still looked bewildered, but there was a smile on his face as well. When he turned it on her, her heart gave another great thump. “Shall we?”
With a laugh of sheer joy, Aelia led Acylius out of the Harmonicum to explore his new home.
FANDOM: Insektors
PAIRING: Acylius/Aelia
RATING: G
SUMMARY: When Acylius first tells Aelia that he's a Yuk, she doesn't believe him. Then she gets angry. And then she starts to notice what doesn't fit...
WARNINGS: Mild purple prose in parts.
NOTES: A minor AU of The Eskape. Some of the imagery that Aelia uses was inspired by Ilan Stavans’ translation of Pablo Neruda’s ‘Ode to the Rose’.
As the early dawn light peeked through the window of her room, Aelia flipped through her notebook, skimming over delicately-coloured sketches and scrawled lists of potential experiments. Usually, it brought her excitement-the thrill of possibilities just waiting to be turned into reality. This morning, the first since the salvage of the destroyed daffodils had been completed, she just felt dull and heavy. None of the ideas that had been scribbled down in an inspired frenzy were bringing with them the least spark of excitement-and just when she really needed that spark, too.
“It figures,” she muttered, then flipped to the start of the notebook and began to read more carefully. The pressing issue was that with the daffodil field cleared, they needed to replace them with something-or they risked losing the ground to the swamp thorns or some other noxious weed. Aelia wasn’t about to let that happen; the Joyces needed that ground. If the Yuks kept up with their current rate of destruction, the yield of pollen would fall, risking their ability to grow new flowers. If they lost enough of that, the Great Prism would soon be at risk of going out. And if that happened…
Well, she wasn’t going to let it. Their seed stores could only take a few more emergency plantings before they started to run dangerously low. If Aelia could relieve some of the pressure on the existing plants by creating a new cultivar with cuttings… And if she had anything to say about it, the cultivar would be something difficult for the Yuks to harvest. Bluebells and flowers like it dropped their pollen easily if the stems were shaken, which would at least slow the Yuks down, but flowers like that were all bulbous. She could prepare something new, but it would take at least a year before they would be ready to plant. Then there were flowers with very fleshy stems that were little use for burning-or at least needed much longer to dry out before they would be useable-but they tended to require shade, which these fields no longer possessed. That left plants with more traditional defences.
“Roses,” said Aelia decisively, snapping her notebook shut. “If those fields are going to be covered with thorns, they’ll at least be the right kind of thorns.” Aelia had plenty of roses that she could take cuttings from, and perhaps she could crossbreed them with one of her faster-growing varieties to create something that would cover a wide area in a short space of time. That would be tricky, since none of them were even in the same family as roses, but it was possible to use the kolor energy of the Prism to encourage rapid growth or hybridisation, depending on how it was applied. So long as she got the initial pollen mixture right, there was no reason for it to be impossible.
The thought did not bring the joy that it should have.
“You know, just once I’d like to create a new cultivar just because I wanted to try something new,” said Aelia aloud. “Not because we need something to replace another ruined field.”
She picked up her collection bottle and made her way out to the Great Flower’s landing platform, joining the stream of bees and butterflies that were taking advantage of the early morning cool. Most of them began a slow descent as soon as they reached the edge, dropping towards the tulips and asters at the base of the Great Flower, but Aelia flew straight on. She’d have to go out to the furthest fields to avoid getting in anyone’s way, but that might be a good thing. While she was out there, she would check to see if there were any species that were at particular risk-there were a few flowers that struggled in drier soil, and they were often the Yuks’ first targets when they came looking for easy flower wood.
Below her, she heard a familiar honking, and slowed to a hover as Gallopus rose up to meet her.
“Good morning, Gallopus,” she said, patting the robot’s nose affectionately. “How are you today?”
Gallopus honked cheerfully at her, then made an enquiring sound. Aelia lifted her collection bottle for the robot’s inspection.
“I’m going out to the edge of the fields. I want to check on the swamp-growing plants, and I also need to collect some pollen for a new cultivar I want to make, to help replace what we’ve lost in the last month.”
The robot squeaked anxiously.
“No, don’t try to wake him! You know that he’s a menace when we have to do that.” Aelia fought the urge to fly off in a huff. She didn’t need Fulgor as a bodyguard; she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself. Besides, he’d get bored, and start messing around, and he’d probably ruin whatever she tried to collect. It had happened before.
Gallopus acknowledged this with a sad honk, and Aelia immediately felt guilty. Her family just wanted her to be safe, after all. She patted Gallopus again.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I promise that if I see any Yuks, I’ll find Fulgor and tell him about them. Alright?”
Gallopus made a much happier squeak, pressed his nose against Aelia’s hand for one final pat-which she gave him, laughing-and then slowly descended again. Aelia watched him go. Maybe she should have asked Gallopus to come with her to the edge of the swamp. The robot was far more patient than Fulgor, and she could collect a lot more with his help. But if Fulgor woke up and Gallopus wasn’t there, he’d be sure to come looking, and when he found them he would insist on staying, and that would be just the situation that she was trying to avoid. No, it was better that she go by herself.
Aelia flew on.
To her relief, none of the plants at the edge of the swamp were in any real danger. She made a mental note about two or three iris cultivars that might need to be replenished if the Yuks chose to make their next incursion in that area, but it was a low priority-more caution than necessity. Fulgor would have said that she worried too much, but he wasn’t the one that had to assess the damage every time that the Yuks came through, and see all too clearly how much they lost with every attack. Aelia scowled at the thought, and gripped the neck of her bottle until she felt like it might crack under her hand. Then she shook herself. Just hovering here and steaming about what the Yuks had done wasn’t going to fix things.
Instead, she made her way over to a few stray tulips and began examining them. Creating a pollen mixture for a particular purpose was an exacting task. Kolor energy did influence the resulting hue of the flowers, but it also altered physical properties as well. If the balance was wrong, then the plant could be very different from the desired result. “Red…pink…blue,” she muttered. The loss of the daffodils was still too fresh for her to contemplate including any yellow. That was a shame, because she did love yellow-bright and cheerful and shining. Yellow could be stately or frivolous, bold when it was rich or shy when it was just separating itself from cream. Golden flowers gave light to rainy or cloudy days, like miniature suns come to earth to remind them that warmth and blue skies would come again.
But when Aelia tried to picture yellow flowers at the moment, all that she could see was the hacked and bruised daffodils that the Yuks had left behind, trodden into the mud and all their light extinguished. No, it would be some time before she could think of yellow flowers as sunlight again.
“Pink…blue…red,” she murmured again. “Purple?” She’d never made a purple rose before. For the first time since she had decided to begin this project, she felt a spark of excitement. She looked at the flowers with fresh eyes. Blue was the colour of the Prism, and plants that required kolor energy to grow often had a strong blue hue-like the Exuberansis supervelosis that Fulgor had used to cover the desert with flowers. If Aelia wanted to cross that with her new rose to speed up its growth, then it would be a good idea to use some blue pollen as a connection between the generations. Pink, of course, was a traditional colour for roses. And red was often used to mix secondary colours.
Feeling lighter of heart than she had in a week, Aelia fluttered over to the tulips. “A few grains of blue pollen,” she said aloud, reaching into the plant, “for the Great Prism and its eternal crystal.” Blue was all-encompassing, the colour of water and the sky-the colour of things necessary for life and growth. And yet blue was also a secretive colour, hiding distant things behind its blurry shroud, as though they were wishes that could not be articulated. “Blue,” she said, “like a secret dream.”
She fluttered over to the next flower. “The heart of the crimson chalice, to fuse all the colours together.” Red was the colour of passion, leaping into the foreground and commanding the attention of everyone around. Perfect to balance the mysterious serenity of blue; red warmed and illuminated, a fire to soften and meld different elements into something new and amazing. “Red, like a fabulous flame.” She sprinkled the pollen into her bottle, and moved to the next flower. This was the last one that she would need-and perhaps the most important of the three.
“Some pink petals to help the cycle of the rose fulfil its destiny.” True, Aelia had chosen the rose because of its natural thorny defence, but it was still one of the most beautiful flowers in Joyceland. Watching roses unfurl, petal by petal, growing more and more lovely as they opened themselves to the sky, was a wonderful reason for impatience. And even their eventual death was elegant-the flower hanging its head as gracefully as any bluebell, petals gradually dropping away until only the golden centre was left. Their gradual blossoming and decay, as well as their beauty in form and scent, made the rose a symbol of love in Flower City. Pink roses, in particular, always made Aelia think of the first blush of love, like the sky just before the sun rose.
Not that she’d ever experienced that kind of emotion; no one in Flower City had ever captured her attention that way. Sometimes, Aelia wondered if she would ever find it, or even if she would recognise it when she did. She pushed those thoughts away. There were other kinds of love than romantic, and if the roses she intended to create weren’t for love of someone special, they were for love of her people and her home. “The rose-flower of love-” She broke off. Someone had stepped through the fronds of the surrounding flowers-someone that she had never seen before. “Oh!”
Her first thought was, He’s beautiful. He was more slender than Fulgor, with a smooth upward sweep to his shoulders and a curiously ridged nose. But his kolors were what really caught her eye-he was primarily a golden yellow, shading smoothly along his limbs from pink to blue. He looked like a sunrise.
Aelia’s heart gave a great thump.
As she stared, he raised a hand in greeting. “Hello. What’s your name?” He had a nice voice, too-smooth and pleasant, tinged with an accent she hadn’t heard before.
Aelia’s heart gave another thump.
“Aelia,” she said, fighting not to stammer. “And yours?”
“Acylius.”
He even has a lovely name. Oh, that just isn’t fair. “Where are you from?” she blurted. “I haven’t seen you in Joyceland.” She was sure that he couldn’t be from around here; she certainly would have noticed someone as distinctive as him fluttering around. But if he wasn’t from Flower City, where could he have come from? Was there another colony of insects out there, somewhere beyond the desert?
Acylius chuckled, which made Aelia’s stomach flutter pleasantly. “That’s no wonder. You see, I’m a-” But before he could complete his sentence, loud thudding shook the ground. Acylius looked around in surprise, but from her higher vantage point, Aelia had already spotted the ugly, blocky shape of a Yuk walking machine. She clapped her hands over her mouth-dropping her collection bottle in the process-and glanced at Acylius. She saw the moment that he spotted the walker too-his eyes widened, and she saw him suck in a breath.
She gestured to a nearby mushroom. “Quickly!” With Acylius beside her-he sprinted rather than take the extra moment to launch himself into the air, which Aelia thought was sensible-she arrowed towards it. They threw themselves around the other side and huddled together behind the stalk. They weren’t a moment too soon. The walking machine crashed through the flowers, shaking the ground with every step. Accompanying it was the sound of-sneezing?
Aelia peeked around the mushroom. She recognised Lord Krabo, the Yuk Prime Minister, immediately, though not the Yuk that stood beside him. One of their soldiers, probably. In between sneezes, Krabo managed to gasp, “Accursed flowers! Where’s that kid?”
Kid? Did he mean Acylius? Aelia might have spared her companion a glance, but her gaze was caught by a spot of something pale lying in the dirt. Her collection bottle! She had dropped it when she flew for cover! And it was right in the path of the machine! Aelia clutched at the stalk of the mushroom, her fingers digging in. The machine had long strides. Maybe it would miss the bottle? Please, don’t let them destroy this, too! I’ve barely started!
Her prayers went unanswered. The machine’s flat foot came down squarely on the top of the pale ceramic. The crunch of shattering pottery wasn’t even audible above the walker’s footsteps, and the two Yuks went blithely on. Krabo was still sneezing, and Aelia hoped rather viciously that it would give him a headache. She could feel her hands shaking with the strength of her anger.
“Dirty Yuks!” she burst out. “All they ever do is destroy! I hate all Yuks!” If I could get my hands on them! She controlled herself with an effort, and looked at her companion. Acylius was staring at the ground, looking guilty. It seemed as though the Yuks really had been looking for him. She put a hand on his shoulder. “Is it you they’re looking for?” she asked, keeping her voice gentle. She didn’t want him to think that she blamed him for the Yuks and their destruction.
“Um, well…”
It was all the answer that she needed. “It’s alright, they’re gone.” Hopefully, they wouldn’t be back. And if they were very lucky, the Yuks would give up and go away before they did further damage to the flowers. At least they were limiting themselves to bruised stems and torn leaves, rather than felling entire plants. It was much easier to trim away anything too badly hurt than it was to replant an entire field.
And while they were on that subject… Swallowing, Aelia steeled herself and fluttered over to the small circle of crushed pottery and pollen. She’d known that there really wasn’t any chance of salvaging the work she’d done, but she still felt her stomach sink and her throat clench when she saw the way that the pollen had been muddied beyond use. She dropped to her knees in front of it, her anger momentarily replaced by an exhausted despair. “All that I gather, ruined,” she lamented.
Acylius came up beside her. “Is it really so important?”
Aelia glanced up at him. What a strange thing to ask-of course it was important! Then understanding came. He meant was it really so important that this particular mixture was destroyed, when she could always gather more pollen. For a moment, she considered explaining that her grieving was not just for this mixture, but for every one of her flowers that the Yuks had destroyed. For every one of her projects that she had seen reduced to something to burn, crushed into the mud, or just hacked to pieces for the love of destruction. But somehow, she didn’t want to explain that to Acylius. The feeling of excitement and wonder that had accompanied their first few moments together had vanished entirely at the appearance of the Yuks, but she didn’t want to spoil the mood any further by pouring all of that bitterness into Acylius’s ear.
“It’s kolors and pollen, that give life to our city,” she said, choosing a more general explanation. “And with them, we create new flowers.”
“New flowers,” repeated Acylius. “And new kolors as well? Why, that’s marvellous! It must be the most beautiful country in the world. I want to go there and smell all of the perfumes!”
His excitement had an electric effect on Aelia. Maybe the mood hadn’t been so spoiled after all; maybe they could recapture that magical atmosphere. She sprang into the air. “Well, then, come on! I’ll show you everything.” She waited, but Acylius didn’t follow her up. “Acylius? Won’t you come?”
“But-I don’t know how to fly,” he said, his excitement visibly fading.
Now that was strange. “How can that be?”
Acylius looked down. “Well, I guess it’s because I’m a-”
Heart sinking, Aelia cut him off. “It doesn’t matter! You can explain to me later!” She shouldn’t have asked; she should have guessed that there would be a difficult story behind it. Now she’d made Acylius feel ashamed that he’d never been taught what every winged insect should know. Hoping that she could restore his excitement, she hurried on, “I’ll show you how! Spread your wings.”
She tilted to one side, fluttering her own for demonstration. But Acylius didn’t mimic her movements. Instead, he kept staring at the ground. After a moment, her heart sinking even further, Aelia dropped back to earth. “What’s wrong, Acylius? Are your wings hurt?” Maybe that was why he’d never learned. If he’d been sick or had some kind of injury, perhaps when he was small, then it might have been safer for him not to learn. That way, he wouldn’t have risked straining them and doing himself even more harm.
“No-at least, I don’t think so,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. His wings were fluttering slightly. They moved smoothly enough, which argued that it wasn’t some kind of problem with the muscle. Maybe with the wing itself? “Blue,” he said, almost to himself. “Like a secret dream…”
“They’re a lovely colour,” said Aelia politely. “May I see them?” If he didn’t know if there was a problem, it would be best that she check them over before she tried to teach him to fly.
Acylius slowly turned around, and Aelia leaned in to peer at his wings. There was no damage to the membrane that she could see, no misshapen veins or anything that would create an obvious weak point. “Hmm,” she said. “I don’t see anything wrong. Does it hurt when you move them?”
“No, but I don’t think I have full control over it,” said Acylius. His wings twitched as he spoke.
“Have you used them before at all?” asked Aelia, hoping that her gentle tone might soften the blow of any unpleasant memories.
“I think I might have-when I was younger,” said Acylius slowly. “But it was…discouraged. I think I’m the only one in my family to have wings-at least, the only one for a long time. I know that my mother doesn’t have any.” He had twisted so that he could watch their fluttering. They continued to twitch as he tried to control their movement.
“It’s easier once you’re in the air,” she offered. “Taking off is hard, at first, but I can help!” Hastily, she added, “If you want to, I mean.”
“I don’t know if you want to help me,” said Acylius, softly. Then he turned back around. “Aelia, the reason that I don’t know how to fly is because I am a Yuk.”
Shock blanked Aelia’s mind for a moment. She forced a giggle. “Very funny,” she said. “You can’t be a Yuk.” But as soon as she said it, she felt doubt creeping over her. Acylius couldn’t fly (something she should have realised when he had approached her on foot rather than by air), she had never seen him before, and he was completely ignorant of how Flower City worked and lived. But there were other explanations for that, surely? There were other things that didn’t match-his kolors, his appreciation of flowers-
“I’m afraid that I am.” He looked terribly solemn. “As I said, my name is Acylius. I am the son of Queen Bakrakra.”
Aelia shook her head. “That isn’t funny.” He had to be lying. The most interesting person that she had met in ages couldn’t possibly be a Yuk. The universe wouldn’t be that cruel. Wasn’t it bad enough that she had to watch part of her home destroyed every few week?
“It isn’t a joke!” said Acylius, beginning to sound a little distressed. “Aelia, I promise that I am telling the truth.”
“But-your kolors-”
“I landed on a flower when I arrived, and I had to jump to several more to reach the ground without hurting myself,” explained Acylius. “It will probably come off if I rub it…”
Aelia went cold. “You mean that you disguised yourself?” Her hands began to shake. So all that talk about the flowers-he must have been pretending so that she wouldn’t have known that he really was a Yuk. He had probably wanted her to show him around Flower City so that he could go back to the Stump and tell them the best way to attack it.
“No, it wasn’t on purpose-”
“You-you horrible spy!” said Aelia, her voice rising as her anger took hold. “You were trying to trick me into helping you! Well, I would never help a Yuk. You just wait until I tell Fulgor about this. He’ll sort you out.” She made to jump into the air, but Acylius lunged forward and grabbed her wrist. She struggled. “Let go of me!”
“Aelia, please! I am a Yuk, but I swear that I didn’t come here to destroy your flowers or anything of the kind! The two Yuks who passed us a few minutes ago? That was Krabo-”
“I know who Krabo is!”
“-and Commander Krabouic, one of the highest-ranking officers in the Yuk army. They came to catch me and send me back to the Stump, because I escaped in one of their machines!”
Aelia snorted, making the sound as derisive as she could manage. “Escape? You just said that you were the son of Queen Bakrakra-that would make you a prince, wouldn’t it? And you expect me to believe that you had to escape from the Stump?” She tugged again against his grip. Acylius’s hand was very strong, and surprisingly rough-she could feel callouses on his palm. He also wasn’t holding her tightly enough to hurt. He probably thought that she wasn’t much of a threat, or he was overconfident and believed that she wouldn’t be able to break free.
“I am a prince, that’s true, but my mother considers me a disappointment,” said Acylius, his voice desperate. “She’s counting on Krabo to educate me to be ‘worthy of the throne’, but I don’t want to be anything like her, or like him. I want to be a Joyce, Aelia. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
The idea was so ridiculous-a Yuk (the prince of the Yuks, no less), wanting to be a Joyce?-that Aelia laughed. It made her feel slightly sick. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “It’s a nice story, but you probably planned this with Krabo. If I thought that they were looking for you, I’d be more inclined to help, after all.” It had nearly worked, too, and Aelia swallowed against the acid taste of guilt. What did it say about her, that she had been willing to show a complete stranger all around her home, just because they were pretty and needed help?
“If I was truly working with them, then why would I tell you all this?” demanded Acylius. “If I was a spy, it would be stupid of me to blow my cover so early, wouldn’t it?”
That made Aelia pause for a moment. He was right; that would be pretty stupid. But what if that was part of the plan, too? If she believed that no spy would be stupid enough to tell their target that they were a spy-the Yuks might count on that to remove any suspicion. That seemed a little too complicated for Krabo, but that didn’t mean that someone else couldn’t have come up with the idea. She couldn’t take that chance.
She shook her head. “I don’t believe you.” Then an idea struck her. “You probably told me because not being able to fly was going to blow your cover anyway,” she said, triumphant. “You couldn’t get me to show you around Flower City if you couldn’t fly! It was stupid of you not to think of that; how else would you get around here?”
Acylius abruptly released his hold on her wrist, and Aelia almost fell over backwards. Panting, she rubbed her wrist, which-sure enough-had smears of pollen on it. Acylius was certainly no Joyce, and she should get out of here, as fast as she could. She had to tell Fulgor about all of this, no matter how reluctant she felt, and then he would be able to drive Krabo and his accomplices out of Flower City. She bent her knees, ready to spring into the air-then stopped.
Acylius had not moved to follow her as she moved backwards. He just stood there, looking…resigned. His antennae drooped, and he couldn’t quite meet her eyes.
“I can see that I am not going to convince you,” he said. “I suppose it was foolish of me to believe that any Joyce would ever like me. I’m sorry to have bothered you, Aelia. And-even if you don’t believe me-it was nice to meet you.” He turned to walk away, and every step was dragging and slow.
Aelia stared after him, still rubbing her wrist. The grains of pollen rolled under her fingers-
Pollen. Kolor.
“Wait!” she called. Acylius stopped and turned around. He looked a little surprised, but he didn’t speak. Frowning and biting her lip, Aelia cautiously approached him. He made no move to grab her again. Reaching out with one hand, she brushed her fingers tentatively along Acylius’s arm. Sure enough, more pollen came away on their tips, leaving a few faded streaks to show the path of her fingers. “You really are covered in pollen,” said Aelia softly. “But-this doesn’t make any sense.”
“What doesn’t?” asked Acylius.
“Any Yuk exposed to kolor starts behaving…oddly,” said Aelia slowly. She’d seen the effect for herself, many times. It struck each Yuk a little bit differently-some started laughing uncontrollably, some started dancing (or trying to dance, anyway), and some started playing silly games with one another-but there was always some element of heightened mood. Acylius hadn’t shown any of those kinds of symptoms. And he had been obviously dejected by Aelia’s refusal to believe his story, something that no kolor-covered Yuk could have managed. “Why aren’t you?” She frowned. “Or…is this odd, for you?”
“Not really,” said Acylius. “The Stump is a terribly depressing place. The oddity was my excitement when you told me about the beauties of Flower City-” He stopped abruptly. During the last sentence, hope had started to rise in his voice. But now his head dropped down to his chest, and his voice sounded resigned again. “Which I suppose only proves your point.”
Aelia bit her lip, then said, “Actually, no, it doesn’t.” When Acylius blinked up at her in surprise, she explained, “I’ve seen kolor-affected Yuks plenty of times. They experienced a heightened mood until the effects of the kolor are neutralised. I’ve never seen any Yuk who could manage to be calm while they were covered in kolor, let alone experience an obviously negative emotion.” She frowned. “And they usually don’t make much sense. But…you haven’t been anything but logical.” She stared at him, thoroughly baffled.
As she stared, she saw hope slowly dawn in Acylius’s eyes. He took half a step forward, and Aelia tensed a little, then stopped himself. “Does this mean that you believe me?” he asked, obviously trying not to sound too eager. He didn’t succeed very well.
Aelia shook her head slowly, but it was more of an attempt to clear her head than a negation. “I’m not sure what to believe,” she said. There was a long silence, and eventually Aelia asked, “Did you really have to steal a machine to escape?”
“Well, first I had to dig a tunnel out of my room and down to the hangar,” said Acylius. “And then I stole the machine.” He pointed. “It’s back that way, if you want proof.”
“No, I-you had to dig a tunnel out of your room?”
“I was locked in,” said Acylius. “It was the only way that I could think to get out without being noticed.”
“And you really like the flowers?”
“They’re the most beautiful things that I’ve ever seen,” said Acylius, with transparent passion. “I’ve spent a lot of time in the observatory lately, but seeing them at a distance is nothing compared to seeing them up close.”
“Oh.” This still didn’t make much sense, and so much of it depended on whether or not Acylius was telling the truth. He sounded like he was-she wanted to believe that he was-but she wasn’t sure that she could. “I’m not sure what to think of you, Acylius. But, I have to admit that you aren’t like any other Yuk I’ve ever seen. So…I guess it would be okay if I showed you around, at least a little.” It wasn’t as though he would learn much simply from looking at the flowers. If he started to get curious about anything else, then that would be the time to fly to Fulgor as fast as she could. Aelia took a deep breath. “Do you want to learn to fly?”
It didn’t take long for Acylius to learn to keep himself aloft.
“Just let me know if you get tired,” said Aelia. “And I’ll help you land so that you can rest. Since this is your first major flight, you shouldn’t try to push yourself too hard, or you might strain a muscle. Then it would be days, maybe weeks, before you could fly again.” Acylius nodded solemnly, and Aelia went on, “Okay. See if you can follow me.” She traced a wavy line across the sky, keeping the curves wide and shallow so that Acylius wouldn’t send himself into a spin by mistake. When she thought that she had enough distance, she paused to watch him.
There wasn’t much doubt that he’d never flown before-even if the occasionally stuttering rhythm of his wings hadn’t been a dead giveaway, the way that he used his arms to balance himself would have been.
“That’s good!” she told him, when he caught up to her. “Try to keep your arms still. It’s okay to use them for extra balance, since you’re just a beginner, but if you flail around too much, you might send yourself into a corkscrew.”
“It’s harder than I thought it would be to keep my balance,” he admitted. He didn’t sound at all downcast by that-if anything, he sounded excited. “It reminds me a little of swimming, except in the air rather than in water.”
Aelia blinked. “I guess so,” she said. “I never thought of it quite like that.”
Acylius glanced at her wings. “I suppose that you don’t often go swimming.”
She nodded. “My wings would drag me down. They’re more fragile than yours.”
“But much more beautiful,” he said earnestly.
Aelia felt her face heat a little. It was sweet of Acylius to say that, especially with such transparent sincerity. And somehow, she didn’t feel like explaining that by butterfly standards, her wings weren’t exactly plain, but they weren’t anything exciting, either. She cleared her throat. “Thanks,” she said, and turned away. “Alright, let’s try this…”
After another ten minutes of practice-which took Acylius through the basics of climbing, descent, and changing direction-she could see that he was starting to flag, and she led him down to a broad leaf where they could both sit and rest.
“You did very well,” she told him.
Acylius was breathing a little hard. “How in the name of the great King Karbon do you manage to do that all day?” he asked. “It’s exhilarating, but it’s also exhausting.”
Aelia shrugged. “It takes time to build up the strength in your wings. But it’s almost always how we get around, so we get used to it. And, to be fair, we don’t usually fly all day.”
“Just most of it?” asked Acylius wryly.
Aelia couldn’t suppress a giggle. “The hard part is taking off, and you can make that easier by using a high place as a launch. When we move on from here, you can practice.” She stretched her wings out and fluttered them slightly. “Different kinds of wings find different things easier. Mine will let me glide for long distances if I hold them still, but I’m not as agile as someone with wings like yours. Closely-grown places are hard for me to navigate without running into anything.” She smiled. “But if I take off from the Great Flower, I can glide halfway across the fields before I need to flap my wings again.”
“It must be breathtaking from up there,” said Acylius. Shielding his eyes, he looked up to where the Great Flower rose above all others. “You must be able to see the whole of Joyceland.”
“You can,” confirmed Aelia. She didn’t offer to take him up there-not yet. Partially, it was because making it up to the Great Flower would be a difficult for an inexperienced flier like Acylius-he would almost certainly strain something if he tried at the moment. The other problem was that she still wasn’t sure whether she should trust him. He hadn’t said or done anything yet that contradicted what he had told her, but there was still a chance that he was just a very good actor.
She cast a sidelong look at Acylius. His gaze had moved from the Great Flower to the smaller blooms around them. His eyes were wide with wonder, one hand partially extended as though he wanted to reach out and touch them. She wondered what kolor he was, underneath all that pollen.
“What kind of flowers are these?” he asked. “They’re very different to the ones by the edge of the swamp.”
“Different plants grow in different kinds of soil,” said Aelia, shaking off her thoughts. “The land edging the swamp is mainly silt, and it’s best for things like irises and roses.”
“The flower of love,” said Acylius, and Aelia felt her face heat again for no good reason. He was, after all, just repeating what he had overheard her say during her pollen gathering. She coughed, hoping that the sound would excuse any resulting oddness in her voice.
“Yes, that’s right. Since we’re further away from the swamp, we start to get more sand mixed in, but most of the soil is clay. It doesn’t drain well and it can be hard for the roots of the plants to break it up. But there are still a few kinds of flower that thrive here.” She pointed. “The purple ones with lots of small petals around the centre are asters-you might see more of them around as we go on. They come in whites and pinks as well. And over there are daylilies.” The plants were in full bloom, throwing out sprays of golden, trumpet-like flowers in all directions. “They can come in all kinds of colours as well. The flowers only last one day, but they put out a lot of buds, so the plant blooms for a long time.” She continued to name the different flowers, trying to keep her explanations simple. Fulgor always complained that she got too technical when it came to plants. But even when she gave the full botanical names by mistake-Coreopsis grandiflora slipped out accidentally-on-purpose, she hated calling it ‘tickweed’-Acylius didn’t so much as blink. She wondered what kind of things he was expected to know, that the precise botanical names (which Fulgor considered to be needlessly long and complicated) didn’t bother him at all.
When she came to the end of the list, Acylius stayed silent for long enough that she started to worry that she might have overwhelmed him. But just as she was wondering whether to apologise, Acylius turned to her and asked, “How many kinds of flowers are there?”
Aelia blinked. “Different species, or different cultivars?”
“…I don’t know what a cultivar is,” said Acylius, sounding a little sheepish. Aelia could have smacked herself. Of course he wouldn’t know what a cultivar was. Why would a Yuk ever need to know such a thing?
“Sorry. A cultivar is a different variety of the same plant. Like a purple aster would be a different cultivar to a white aster, but they’re still the same species.” It was a little more complicated than that, but it was enough for now. She tipped her head to one side. “The number of cultivars is theoretically endless,” she said. “We create new ones all the time-different colours and different shapes, or varieties that will grow better in different places. I know that we have at least one hundred kinds of tulip on record, and that’s just one species.”
“That’s incredible,” said Acylius, his eyes wide with awe. “You record them?”
“Yes, it’s important to know what’s already been done. Otherwise we might waste a lot of time repeating experiments that have already been carried out.” She shook her head. “Anyway, I’m not sure exactly how many species of flowers grow here. I’d have to check the records; some of them aren’t very common.” And some of them weren’t possible to grow within the borders of Flower City; the golden-orange desert flower, for example. “Are you ready to go on?” Something made her tease, “You might not be able to see all of the flowers we grow here today, but I can show you more than just these.”
Acylius stood up eagerly, his wings already fluttering against his back. “Yes, please!”
Aelia couldn’t help laughing.
She wasn’t able to spare a lot of thought, in between helping Acylius with the basics of flight and the lessons in basic botany that accompanied their rests, but even so, it took her less than an hour to conclude that she liked Acylius entirely too much. It was almost impossible not to: he was clearly intelligent and eager to learn, he was effusive and unselfconscious in his praise of the beauty around him, and he was politely charming. It was the last-a complete lack of any arrogance or superiority-that she found particularly attractive. It made such a nice change from Fulgor, who delighted in stating misinformation with complete confidence, just to drive her crazy.
So, yes-she liked Acylius far too much for the length of their acquaintance. The question was what she was going to do about it. The longer she spent with him, the more she wanted to invite Acylius to stay with them permanently, but she still didn’t dare to trust him that much. But if he really had escaped from the Stump, and if Krabo and that Commander Krabouic were looking for him to drag him back, then it wouldn’t be right to leave him by himself, either.
Maybe she could find some way for Papa to meet Acylius. He was a good judge of character; everyone said so. He would know if Acylius wasn’t as trustworthy as he appeared. And if anyone would be prepared to accept the idea of a Yuk wanting to live as a Joyce, it was Papa. Papa would befriend Queen Bakrakra herself if he could.
She paused a moment to look back at Acylius. His attention was focused on the flowers below, and she could just hear him murmuring to himself, naming what he recognised. It was almost unbearably cute, and Aelia looked away. She had to make a logical decision about this; she couldn’t take in a Yuk just because he was cute.
Acylius gasped. Puzzled, Aelia turned back towards him, just in time for him to crash into her.
As she tumbled head over heels, knocked breathless by the impact, Aelia’s first thought was that Acylius had lost control of his flight. He was learning fast, but there were some things that you could only learn through practice, and a few spectacular crashes were only to be expected. Her second thought, hard on the heels of the first, was that Acylius really was a spy, that he had lulled her into a false sense of security before making his move. Before she had time to decide which one it had been, she heard Acylius cry out.
She spread her wings as wide as she could to slow her spin and her fall. It seemed to take a long time, and she was hyperaware of the need to hurry, to see what had happened to Acylius. Wobbling dizzily, Aelia got herself upright again and scanned the landscape below her. She couldn’t see him. If this had been an attack, it had been a miscalculated one.
Or this might be another trick.
“Acylius?” she called. Her carapace was one solid prickle, anxiety for an innocent Acylius who had lost control alternating with anxiety for a ruthless Acylius just waiting to attack her again. It did nothing to settle her stomach, still roiling from her unexpected fall.
Then she heard him shout, panicked, “Get away!”
Aelia hesitated. Then, swallowing hard, she dove in the direction of his voice. One way or another, she had to see.
She broke through the canopy of flowers and stopped short, her hands flying to her mouth. Below her was the Yuk walking machine. Krabo was still in the cockpit, but the Yuk pilot had dismounted. In one hand, he held a karbon gun. In the other, he held the arm of a struggling Acylius.
Karbon juice had turned the Yuk prince an ugly brown-black, and with a sinking stomach Aelia realised that the prickling of her carapace had not just been because of anxiety. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the scene in front of her, but now that she knew they were there, she could feel the flecks of karbon that dotted her skin.
“Stop that struggling at once,” Krabo was saying. There was a sickening sweetness to his voice that made Aelia shudder. “Dear prince, it is only us, you are quite safe now. You have my personal assurance that Commander Krabouic will be severely disciplined for daring to fire upon Your Highness…”
Commander Krabuoic shuddered, but didn’t release his grip. “Terribly sorry, prince,” he said. “Thought you were a Joyce, all kolored-up like that. Not to worry, we can put you through the Dark Box as soon as we get back to the City, get you all cleaned up.”
“I am not going back to the Stump,” said Acylius fiercely. His wings were buzzing, trying to propel him out of the pilot’s grip, but Aelia could see the dark film coating his wings. Koal juice didn’t make it impossible to fly, but it did make it much harder, and Acylius was only a beginner. He hadn’t had the time to build up the strength in his wings that might have let him tear free.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” snapped Krabo, the honey leaving his voice. “You are coming home with us immediately. Do you know how long we’ve had to spend wandering around in this land of nauseating flowers, looking for you? If your mother the queen realises that you left the Stump without an escort-” He cut himself off, but Acylius was already scoffing.
“You only care about saving your own carapace,” he said. His free hand was prying at Krabouic’s, trying to loosen the Commander’s fingers. “I tell you, I am not coming back to the Stump. I don’t care what you say, or what my mother says!”
Krabo’s yellow eyes gleamed with rage, but before he could start shouting, the Commander looked up at him. “Must be some kind of Joyce witchcraft,” he said. “Twisting the prince’s mind, turning him against all that’s dark and true, Your Unreasonableness.”
Krabo deflated very slightly, and he assumed a lofty posture. “Right. Yes, of course. Joyce mind-control, explains everything. Bring the prince up to the cockpit, Commander Krabouic, we shall return to the Stump at once and have Teknocratus-” Krabo’s eyes had left the prince as he made his declaration, and now they fixed on Aelia, hovering frozen at the edge of the clearing. “Joyce!” he shrieked, clutching at the rim of the cockpit with knobbly hands.
It broke Aelia’s paralysis. “You let Acylius go, right now!” she shouted. She might not have Fulgor’s guitar or one of the dragonflies’ kolor bombs, but with all the flowers of Joyceland around her, she wasn’t exactly defenceless. There was a fringe of bluebells hanging just above Krabo’s head that would do very nicely. She dived for it.
“Shoot it!” shouted Krabo. “Commander Krabouic, get that Joyce!”
“Aelia, get away!” cried Acylius at almost the same moment. As Krabouic released Acylius and brought up his gun, the prince tackled the pilot. Bolts of koal juice shot into the sky as Krabouic tipped over backwards. Aelia, meanwhile, had seized the stem of the bluebells and yanked it down hard. Blue pollen showered from the flower heads, coating the machine’s cockpit. Krabo began to sneeze.
“Achoo! Achoo! Blasted blue butterfly, you’ll pay for that! Hatchoo!” One flailing hand seized Aelia’s ankle as she tried to get clear of the machine. She cried out, and Krabo screeched again as her frantic wingbeats lifted them both into the air.
“Let go!” she shouted.
“Put me down!” Krabo hollered. “Achoo! Achoo!” Each sneeze shook Aelia, sending her careening into the flowers that bordered the clearing. Pollen rained over them both every time that they hit another one-and every fresh shower made Krabo sneeze even harder. Aelia covered her mouth with her hands, but she could feel her throat tickling from all the pollen in the air. I have to get above the flowers, or we’ll both choke to death! She beat her wings harder, knocking a fresh spray of pink pollen onto the Yuk clinging to her leg.
“You-achoo!-wretched thing! Achoo! You kolored-achoo!-clown! You-achoo!-brainless jester! Put me down this instant!”
Aelia risked taking her hands away from her mouth. “You’re the one holding onto me!”
“Aelia!”
She spun towards the voice. A bright, strong chord sounded, and suddenly Krabo was no longer clutching her leg. He shrieked as he plummeted towards the ground-a shriek that was cut off by fresh sneezes as he bounced from flower to flower. At last he hit the dirt and lay there, still sneezing. Aelia panted, her heart pounding fit to burst, as a loud honk sounded and Fulgor grabbed her wrist.
“Are you okay?” he asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Get on Gallopus, you’re too winded to fly. Let’s get out of here.”
Aelia shook her head. “Not-without Acylius,” she managed, turning back towards the clearing.
“Who?” asked Fulgor, baffled.
A short distance from where Krabo was lying, Aelia could see that Acylius and Krabouic were still wrestling for control of the gun. The pilot was much bigger and stronger than the prince, but Acylius was stubborn-every time that Krabouic seized the gun and started to bring it up in a firing position, Acylius would dive for it again, pulling it back down towards the ground. Every so often, Krabouic would raise a hand, or his leg would twitch, a clear signal that he would have liked to do more than just push this foe away-but every time he would restrain himself, apparently remembering that this was his prince, and the consequences for striking him would be dire. If he hadn’t had such self-control, Aelia was sure that the fight would already be over.
But Acylius’s valiant struggles couldn’t last forever. Aelia could see that the prince was breathing as hard as she was, and his movements were becoming more and more uncoordinated. Krabouic was gradually get the upper hand.
Aelia grabbed the guitar from Fulgor’s hands and dived down towards the clearing. She heard him shout after her, and Gallopus almost screaming, but she didn’t bother to listen. All of her focus was on the wrestling pair below her. She braked hard, her wings screaming at her, just as Krabouic shoved Acylius away again. As the Yuk pilot raised the gun, fingers fumbling for the trigger, Aelia brought the guitar up and sounded a perfect G chord.
She heard the kolor blast splatter all over Krabouic’s chest, but didn’t wait to see its effects. She dived for Acylius and seized his wrist, hauling him up into the air.
“Come on!” she shouted, trying to pull Acylius up while still holding Fulgor’s guitar with her other hand. Gallopus and Fulgor had followed them down, and Aelia shoved Fulgor’s guitar into her brother’s hands and hauled Acylius onto Gallopus’s back.
“Aelia, who is-” began Fulgor, as Aelia dropped onto Gallopus behind the winded Yuk prince.
“I’ll explain later,” she said shortly. “Let’s go!”
Gallopus needed no further encouragement. The robot shot skywards, throwing Acylius backwards before he got a proper grip on the front of the saddle. Aelia folded her wings back to minimize drag as they levelled out, and twisted to look behind her. The clearing was little more than a dark dot below them, and she breathed a sigh of relief.
“We got away,” she told Acylius, who was still trying to catch his breath. “You can relax. I don’t think they’ll be going anywhere for a while.”
Acylius took a few more deep breaths before he replied. “You came back for me,” he said, sounding equal parts confused and awed.
She put a hand on his shoulder. “I believe you now,” she told him. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to let them take you back.”
Fulgor flew up beside them, still holding his guitar at the ready. Conversationally, he said, “You guys can explain what’s going on any time now.”
Aelia explained on the way to the springs, with Acylius occasionally chiming in to provide an extra detail or clarify something. Fulgor was not as inclined to believe the prince as his sister, and said so as Aelia led Acylius into the water and grabbed a scraper.
“How do you know that this isn’t some kind of trick?” he asked, eyeing Acylius with open suspicion. His guitar was not quite pointed at the prince, but it would only take a twitch of Fulgor’s hands to correct that. “He is a Yuk, after all.”
“He is a Yuk,” agreed Aelia, starting to run the scraper over Acylius’s back. “But he’s not like the other ones.”
Acylius twitched, a muffle giggle escaping his mouth. “That tickles!” he said.
Aelia couldn’t help grinning in response. “Naturally! I have to scrape you clean, you’re covered in pollen and cold karbon juice.” She gently directed the scraper around Acylius’s wings. “I never thanked you for pushing me out of the way,” she said. “Can you spread your wings so I can get underneath them?”
Acylius obliged, after a few false starts. “I almost wasn’t in time. I saw the gun pointing towards you, and…reacted.” Despite the scraper-induced thread of laughter in his voice, he sounded troubled. “I never thought that koal juice would make it so difficult to fly. I hate to think of what they might have done if it was you they had hit.”
“Well, apparently Fulgor was already looking for me, so it probably would have turned out alright,” said Aelia, not entirely truthfully. “But you did save me from having to have my wings repainted again, so thank you. I hate to bother Papa when he’s working, but he’s the only one who can get my kolors right.”
Acylius twisted to look over at Fulgor. “Your entrance was most timely,” he said. “Thank you. I don’t know how much longer I could have kept Krabouic from firing, and I couldn’t help Aelia with Krabo at all.”
Aelia glanced over her shoulder. Fulgor was still scowling, but his hands were no longer poised to strum the guitar.
“Aelia’s my sister,” he said, gruffly but not openly hostile. “I look out for her.”
“Why were you looking for me at all?” asked Aelia, returning to her scraping. With every stroke, she managed to peel a little more of the pollen-and-karbon coating away from Acylius’s carapace.
“The Yuks passed by my spot about half an hour ago,” replied Fulgor. “Gallopus said you were out by yourself, and I went to warn you. So they were looking for you, Your Highness?” The title wasn’t quite a mockery, but Aelia scowled over her shoulder at her brother anyway.
“Yes, they were,” said Acylius. “My mother is determined that I will be a proper prince of Yukdom, but that’s the last thing I want. I want to live here, with flowers and kolors and music. I want to live like a Joyce.” The desperation in his voice made Aelia put her hand on his shoulder in an attempt to reassure him. He sounded like he expected to be immediately rebuffed.
“If that’s what you want-” she began, but a snort from Fulgor cut her off.
“I never heard of a Yuk hanging around with a Joyce,” he said.
Aelia whirled on her brother. “So what?” she demanded. “If that’s what he wants, then Acylius should be able to live here with us.”
Fulgor held up his hands. “If that’s what he wants, it’s what he wants! I just don’t know if a Yuk can.”
The stricken look on Acylius’s face made Aelia want to smack her brother. “I don’t see any reason that he couldn’t,” she declared.
Fulgor gave her a sceptical look. “What about what’ll happen when he gets kolor on him?” he asked. “You can’t avoid it, and we don’t have a way to get it off again, short of dropping him in here.”
“Acylius isn’t affected by kolor,” said Aelia flatly, scrubbing at Acylius’s arm.
“What?”
“I don’t experience any elevated mood when I come into contact with kolor,” said Acylius. “That was what persuaded Aelia to give me a chance. He shifted a little, wincing, and Aelia immediately lightened her strokes.
“Sorry,” she murmured. “Rinse your arm?”
Obediently, Acylius dipped his arm in the spring. It seemed that without the koal juice and the pollen, Acylius was a rich brown. He was, in fact, the same colour as good loam. Aelia took that as a positive sign, and handed him the scraper. “Here. You start on your front, and I’ll rinse your back.”
She risked another glance at Fulgor as she dipped to scoop up a double handful of water. He hadn’t responded to Acylius’s claim, and his scepticism had faded into a thoughtful look that Aelia didn’t often see on her brother’s face. Ordinarily, she would have said something about the rarity of Fulgor actually stopping to think about something, but this was too important. Instead, she let him ponder while she and Acylius gradually removed the rest of the karbon/kolor mixture from the prince’s carapace.
When they stepped out of the springs and started to slick the excess water from their skin, Fulgor stood up.
“Well, I guess we should go talk to the Great Pyro,” he said. “If you’re really sure about wanting to stay here, Acylius.”
The prince blinked disbelievingly at him for a moment, then said fervently, “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”
“Alright,” said Fulgor. He sounded as though he meant it. “Then hop on Gallopus, and let’s go.”
Acylius got more and more tense as they approached the Great Flower, and by the time they touched down on the landing platform, he was almost vibrating with anxiety. All Aelia could do was put her hand on his shoulder and give him a reassuring smile; she wasn’t nearly as calm and certain about this as she was pretending to be, and she didn’t dare speak in case her voice gave that away. Her stomach churned as they all made their way to the Harmonicum, and even the music that drifted down the corridor didn’t do much to soothe her. She knew that Acylius was felt just as sick with nerves as she did, because he didn’t ask any questions about the music. The only one who seemed completely calm was Fulgor. He walked right up to the doors of the Harmonicum and-before Aelia or Acylius could say anything-pushed them wide open.
The Great Pyro finished the phrase he was playing with one more chiming chord, then stepped away from the keys. “Hello, children,” he said. Aelia saw her father’s feathery antennae twitch when he noticed Acylius, but his voice showed no sign of his surprise. She envied the ability. “I heard that there was some fuss down among the bluebells not long ago. I hope it wasn’t anything too serious.”
Aelia and Fulgor both opened their mouths to say something, but Acylius beat them both to it. “I’m afraid that was my fault,” he said, stepping forward. “Hello, Great Pyro. My name is Acylius.”
“Hmm,” said the Great Pyro. He peered at Acylius over the tops of his glasses. “How interesting. What brings the son of Queen Bakrakra to Flower City?”
Acylius looked at his feet. Aelia shuffled forward a little so that she stood alongside him.
“He wants to be a Joyce,” supplied Fulgor.
The Great Pyro gave his son a mildly reproving look. “Please, Fulgor, let Prince Acylius speak for himself.”
There were a few long moments of silence. Then Acylius took a deep breath, stood up a little straighter, and told the Great Pyro the whole story-from tunnelling out of his room that morning, to stealing the frog machine in order to cross the swamp, to meeting Aelia and the subsequent argument, to the flight lesson and finally their encounter with Krabo and Krabouic, and Fulgor’s timely intervention. The Great Pyro remained silent for the entire recitation, and whenever Aelia or Fulgor opened their mouths to add something, he would give them a quelling look before they could utter a single syllable.
“I see,” he said, when Acylius fell silent again. “This is most unexpected. But on behalf of all Joyces, I welcome you to our Flower City. I hope that you will be very happy here.”
Acylius looked up with wide eyes. “Really? But-my lack of kolors-”
The Great Pyro shook his head with an indulgent smile. “It makes no difference whether one is drab or full of kolors,” he said. “The important thing is what is in our hearts. And it is clear to me where your heart lies, whatever your outward appearance.”
Fulgor’s antennae stood straight up in shock. “You mean a Yuk can be a Joyce?”
“Yes, naturally,” said the Great Pyro. “There’s less difference between us than you imagine.”
“Then Acylius can stay here with us!” exclaimed Aelia. She nearly threw her arms around the Yuk prince through sheer excitement, only catching herself at the last moment. That wasn’t the sort of thing that you did only hours after meeting someone, no matter how much you liked them. She settled instead for shaking one of his hands.
“Prince Acylius, welcome!” said Fulgor, taking the other and shaking vigorously. All his reluctance seemed to have vanished now that the Yuk prince had received the Great Pyro’s seal of approval. “C’mon, let’s go celebrate!” He almost ran out the door, bursting with excitement.
Acylius glanced at Aelia. He looked bewildered, as though the reality of the situation had not quite sunk in yet. “I don’t know what to say,” he said in a hushed voice.
She smiled at him, so wide that her face almost hurt. “You don’t need to say anything. Come on, we’d better catch up with him before he arranges something insane as a welcoming event.”
Acylius glanced after Fulgor, and nodded. “Right.” He still looked bewildered, but there was a smile on his face as well. When he turned it on her, her heart gave another great thump. “Shall we?”
With a laugh of sheer joy, Aelia led Acylius out of the Harmonicum to explore his new home.