She had been promised pies and a fight. Tavish had not lied about either.
Mei Lin rode into Kirthaven on a borrowed pony with three coats on her back and a head full of the warning he had given her in a Shrine bar weeks ago. The wind up here was a different animal. The town smelled of woodsmoke and wet wool and something baking that had a deep authority to it. Banners on the long poles. Red on one side of the aisle, blue on the other. The Firebeards sat down in a row that took itself seriously. The Thundermars sat down in a row that took them seriously. A child between them held a small cushion with two rings on it, and her face said she was prepared to defend the cushion against weather, beast, and uncle if necessary.
Tavish met her at the gate.
"Yer here."
"You said pies."
"I said pies. Plural. There's twelve in the kitchen and four already cooling in the rafters, an' the cake is the size of a small altar. Sit down before someone notices yer not from a clan an' tries tae adopt ye."
She sat. He pressed a tankard into her hand that took the colour out of the sky for a moment. She took the smallest sip a Pandaren could take and did not breathe for a while afterwards. Tavish did not laugh. He did grin.
The bride was Fanny Thundermar. Tall, beard braided in copper rings, axe across her back the way some women carry a bag. The groom was Keegan Firebeard. Short, broad, built solid. Both of them grinning. A hundred-year fight, and the two of them were going to fold it up like a bedsheet.
The bard was already playing.
"That's Russell Brower," the dwarf at her elbow said, when she asked. "Travels. Plays at things that need playin' through. Don't take it personal if he doesnae nod, he's listenin' to somethin' else."
He was a long-fingered man in a coat that had weather in the seams of it. He held the lute loose against his hip. He played as if the music was a thing he was holding open for everyone to walk through. Grandmother would have liked him on sight. She liked anyone who did one thing well and did not stop to be admired for it.
The thane in red robes opened the ceremony. Fanny spoke. Keegan spoke. Keegan missed a line and Fanny corrected him without looking at him, and the whole crowd laughed in two colours. Russell took the laugh into the next bar of his tune like he had been waiting on it.
That was when the wind brought the smell down off the rise behind the head table.
Wet fur and old blood and something underneath that Mei Lin had no name for and chose not to look for one. The lute did not stop. Russell's eyes lifted past Fanny's shoulder, and his fingers kept moving, and his free hand reached down by the leg of the stool and came up with a second tankard which he set on the post beside him, ready, like a man who had done this kind of evening before.
The Beast Unleashed came over the rise.
It was bigger than it had any right to be. Teeth at the front. More teeth where teeth had no business being. It came at the head table at a gallop that put two of the older Firebeards flat on their backs without touching them. Fanny turned around with the rings still in her open palm.
"Keegan. Hold these."
He held them. She pulled the axe off her back.
Mei Lin was already on her feet. She drove a fire totem into the dirt by the aisle and a water totem two paces beyond it, and healing rain came down soft over the front rows, settling onto shoulders that had not yet realised they were going to need it. The first sweep of the beast took out the cake.
A century of grudge. A wedding cake the size of an anvil. Gone in one jaw.
The crowd did not scream. The crowd gasped, in one offended voice, and a Thundermar aunt picked up the nearest pie and threw it at a Firebeard who had said something, in the noise of the gasp, about the cake having always been a Firebeard cake. The pie hit him square. His wife retaliated before the first one had finished sliding off his beard. Russell's lute skipped half a beat and came back faster, and Mei Lin understood, in the same moment, that he was holding the wedding open with both hands while everything else came apart around him.
She let the lightning go.
A bolt off her right hand into the beast's shoulder, white and short and mean. A second one through the thick of its chest while it was still deciding which side of the aisle to bite. Chain lightning arced into two smaller things that had loped down the slope at its heels and forgot, halfway through the leap, that they had ever wanted to live. The smell got worse. The lute got brighter.
Fanny was on the beast's left flank. Keegan was on the right with a hammer he had pulled from somewhere wedding-formal. The two of them moved like they had been rehearsing the rhythm by accident their entire lives. Mei Lin called a riptide onto Keegan when a claw came across his back, and the water clung the way grandmother had taught her water clings, mending while he kept swinging. Chain heal from him to Fanny to the thane, who had picked up the ring cushion and was using it as a small unconvincing shield. Earth shock into the beast's hip when it tried to wheel on a Wildhammer cousin, the ground answering with a crack that pitched the thing sideways and gave Fanny her axe-line.
The lute went up a key. Russell leaned in over the strings. Half the crowd, who had been throwing pies at each other, started throwing pies at the beast, which made absolutely no tactical difference and a great deal of moral one. A pie hit her in the ear. She did not stop casting. She laughed once, hard, around the storm in her hands.
Keegan got his hammer in. Fanny got her axe in. Mei Lin dropped one last lightning bolt down through the centre of the beast's skull, and the thing folded over like a tent in a wind nobody had asked for. The lute held its note across the silence after, then resolved gently, gently, into the wedding march again, as if the song had only paused for breath.
Fanny turned around with the axe still wet.
"Keegan. The rings."
He looked down at his palm and remembered he was holding them. He stepped over a leg of the beast, kept his eyes on her the entire step, and put the ring on her finger. The thane in red said the binding words from where he stood. Nobody made him walk back to the lectern. Russell played them through it. The crowd was still standing where the fighting had left them, pies in fists, mugs in fists, the ordinary tools of joy and grievance no longer interested in the difference between them.
Fanny kissed Keegan. The Firebeards cheered. The Thundermars cheered louder. The two cheers met above the head table and could not be told apart.
The cake was gone. The aunt who had thrown the first pie sat down next to the Firebeard cousin she had been throwing it at and shared the rest of his ale without comment. Tavish appeared at her elbow with a pie that had survived.
"Apple."
"You promised throwing."
"Throwin' was one option. Eatin' is the other one." He handed her a fork.
She sat down on the bench with the fork in one hand and the pie in the other, and watched Russell pack his lute into a case with the same care a smith uses for a good knife. He looked up once, caught her watching, tipped two fingers off the brim of his hat. He had not stopped playing through the whole of it. She had a feeling he did not stop playing very often, and the world was a better-shaped place because of it.
The wind came back through the banners. Red and blue, leaning together over the long table. A hundred years of grudge eating cake off the same plates because the cake was gone and a pie had to do.
She took a bite. It was very good.
She had not realised, until that bite, how badly she had wanted to be at a wedding.
— Mist