Her mother took her time answering. She looked at the water, then at their two hands, then at Emrys again, with a small smile that was no longer the least bit embarrassed.
"I know everything," she said.
"Everything what?"
"Everything, my heart." She made a vague gesture with her free hand, as if reciting a list she knew by heart. "That you can't see anymore. What you can do, and what you still do badly. The life you've lived up to now, year after year... And most of all, the fact that you're still single at your age."
She had said that last sentence with a little venom in her voice.
Emrys stayed there with his mouth half open. It took him a few seconds to decide which part of that answer to start with.
"Wait. Start over. How do you know all this?"
"Let's say I have eyes everywhere you are." She patted his hand. "And a lot of free time."
"That doesn't answer anything."
"I'll explain, don't worry. All in good time."
He sighed. She had always done this. When he was little, she would give him half an explanation and let him guess the rest, watching him search with a far too satisfied look on her face.
He had hated it back then. And he still hated it now. But he couldn't deny that he had missed it a little.
You could say he loved to hate that attitude.
"Fine," he said. "If you really know everything, prove it. Tell me something nobody could possibly know."
"Are you sure you want to play this game?"
"Go ahead."
"A very long time ago, when you were still living with Dubs, you spent days trying to run through the forest by teleporting whenever an obstacle came up." She raised a finger. "One day, you barely dodged a tree, and you slammed face-first into the dirt right afterward. When you got back, you told Dubs a tree had come looking for you."
Emrys blinked.
"Did Dubs squeal on me?"
"No."
"Then how..."
"I told you. I have eyes everywhere you are."
He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. None of his questions seemed clear enough to deserve being asked first.
He ended up crossing his arms, sulking, which did absolutely nothing to impress his mother.
She laughed a little. Then her smile softened, and she raised her hand to place it on the side of his mask.
"I also know about your eyes," she said. "What those Belialuin mages did to you."
At those words, Emrys could feel an immense anger boiling inside his mother, even though her tone gave nothing away.
He stayed silent for a moment.
"I've had time to get used to it," he replied. "Haki is enough most of the time."
"Most of the time. Not all of the time."
"Most of the time," he admitted. He hesitated, then finally said it. "What I miss is not being able to see you. I could use Structural Grasp on you to know what you look like, but it would have less of an effect."
"Anyway, that's not the point." She stroked his cheek through the mask with the tip of her thumb. "I'm not saying this to hurt you, my heart. I just wanted you to know that I know."
He nodded. He couldn't find anything else to say and squeezed her hand a little tighter, until she withdrew it to steer the conversation back to a lighter tone.
"Anyway," she said, pinching his arm one last time. "Back to what I was saying. Your advanced age."
"Stop saying that. I'm not old."
"You're older than most of the people who call you Your Majesty. And I remind you that people your age generally already have children, grandchildren, and a garden."
"I have an entire dimension. That's a very big garden."
"It's not the same thing, and you know it perfectly well."
"And besides, I just didn't have the time, that's all. There was a war, a kingdom to run, plenty of people to protect. I didn't exactly wake up one morning thinking I'd go make introductions."
"I know," she replied more gently. "I'm not blaming you for doing that. I'm blaming you for not doing something else on top of it."
She put a little too much conviction into it. He could tell, and he couldn't help laughing.
"And why are you reacting like this?" he asked. "You seem more upset than I am. And I'm the one this concerns, it seems to me."
His mother stared at him for a few seconds without a word. Then she pulled her hand away from his and stood up all at once.
"Of course I'm upset!"
Emrys jumped.
"Do you know how long I've been waiting?" She had started pacing back and forth, arms crossed, at a very quick pace. "Years. Years, Emrys! I watch, I wait, I tell myself it will eventually happen, and nothing. Never anything. You have a kingdom, you have a Sacred Treasure, you have people who call you Your Majesty, and you couldn't even manage to bring someone back with you!"
"Mom, I don't see where you're..."
"I want to see my grandchildren!"
The silence that followed lasted a good while.
Emrys stopped moving. His brain had stalled in the middle of a thought. He tried to restart it, any way he could, and found only one word that was willing to come out.
"Gr... grandchildren?"
He had said it stuttering, in a voice far too high-pitched for a king.
"You heard me perfectly well," his mother said, looking at him. "But I can repeat it, if you want."
"No! No, thank you. I understood."
What he had mostly understood was that he wouldn't manage to have this conversation without sounding like a ten-year-old, and that his mother was perfectly aware of it.
"Grandchildren," his mother repeated, very calmly, as if she had just asked him to pass the salt. "You know, little Emryses. Or little girl Emryses. I'm not picky."
"But we only found each other again barely an hour ago!"
"All the more reason. I've already lost forty years, I have no time to waste."
"But I'm a king! I have a kingdom, responsibilities, people counting on me..."
"Are you trying to lie to me? To me? You dumped all your responsibilities on Rou and you spend your time slacking off. And even Rou, with all his responsibilities, has a daughter."
"Rou is different, he already had Iklia..."
"And you already had excuses. Very neatly arranged ones, too."
She even knows about Rou.
He rubbed his face, which had no effect at all through the mask.
Outside the dimension, the woman was watching the scene through a small screen that looked like a portal in front of her.
She had left the pocket dimension housing the real Lake Salisbury and was using projection magic to see inside the dimension.
She had remained silent throughout the entire exchange. Then, when Emrys's mother had started pacing and talking about descendants, she had given a very slight frown.
"I've never seen Nimue behave like this," she said in a low voice, to herself. "She's like a completely different person."
Meanwhile, Emrys was still trying to get his breathing under control.
"Listen," he said, raising both hands in front of him. "Let's calm down. I'm an adult. I'm entitled to have a complicated love life."
"You don't have a love life. It's not complicated, it's nonexistent."
"That's... painfully real." He lowered his hands. "But it's not for you to take care of."
"I'm your mother. It's exactly my job to take care of it."
She came back toward him, leaned in, and brought her face right up to his, so close that he felt her presence almost against his mask.
"I'm not demanding," she said in a very soft voice. "Someone kind, someone patient. Especially patient, it'll take a lot to put up with a lazy oddball like you."
"Thanks a lot."
"And if you want, I can even try to arrange something with the lady from earlier."
Outside the dimension.
"Huh? What on earth is she saying?" said the woman, baffled.
Emrys froze.
"She's quite pretty, you know."
"No."
"I'm just saying..."
"Never." He had backed away so fast he nearly fell. "Never in my life! That woman is way too weird. She's gloomy, she shows up when you least expect it, she vanishes the moment you try to look at her..."
He stopped, then continued more quietly:
"And anyway I couldn't even appreciate her beauty. I can't see anything, remember?"
"I know," his mother replied, undeterred. "But if you get close enough to her, I'm sure she wouldn't say anything if you used your Structural Grasp on her. And for once, it could be a chance to learn how to do it politely."
"Mom!"
"What? I'm not proposing anything indecent. I'm proposing that you look at her."
"She's seen me attack her twice," Emrys pointed out. "Are you sure that's a good starting point?"
"The best stories start badly."
"This one is starting very badly. I'm already surprised she hasn't shown any hostility toward me."
"She stayed all this time to watch, though."
He opened his mouth to reply, and realized his mother was right, which annoyed him even more.
"I'm not going to use Structural Grasp for frivolous stuff like that!" He backed away a few more steps, hands raised in front of him. "And anyway, I'm not interested. Not at all. Not even a little."
Now that he was a bit farther away, he sensed something he hadn't noticed until then. His mother was standing above the water. Not on the shore, not on the ground, but above the lake, as if it didn't pose the slightest problem for her. She had been there since she started pacing in all directions. He hadn't seen it coming. His emotions had clouded his Haki, and all the magic in the place made perception difficult.
He concentrated anyway, and the sensation grew clearer. His mother's magical energy wasn't merely close to the lake's. It was the same. Exactly the same, without the slightest difference, as if the water in front of him and the woman floating above it were one and the same thing.
What the...
He opened his mouth to ask the question. It never came out.
The magical energy twisted a few meters away from him, at the exact spot where the woman had vanished earlier. A presence appeared, silent, one he only sensed once it was already there, taking Emrys by surprise.
Damn, only now do I realize how annoying it is to fight an opponent who teleports.
Usually he had no trouble anticipating teleportations thanks to the distortion of the ambient magical energy at the moment of the jump, but in a place this saturated with magical energy, it was almost impossible to tell them apart.
"The feeling is mutual," said the female voice, perfectly neutral. "So please do not involve me in your domestic dispute."
Then she vanished again, as quickly as she had come.
Emrys stood still, his hand still raised toward the spot where she had been.
"She was listening from the start?!"
His mother didn't answer. She had put a hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh that couldn't hold anymore, and her shoulders were shaking. She looked at him, lips pressed together, for a long moment.
"What?" he grumbled.
"Nothing, my heart." She wiped the corner of her eye. "Absolutely nothing."
She was still laughing. He dropped down to sit, exasperated, and waited for her to finish.
He took the opportunity to think. His mother hadn't been surprised once, not by the woman, not by what he had said, not by the way he had reacted. She had waited for each line a step ahead, like someone who already knows the end of the story and enjoys watching it unfold.
And that magical energy, the same as the lake's. He still hadn't understood what it meant. But he had the feeling the answer was very close, that it was just waiting for him to stop yelling so it could make room to arrive.
"You knew she was there," he said. "You could have warned me."
"You had just spent half an hour crying in my arms. I wasn't going to tell you that you had an audience."
"And you had a good time."
"Immensely." She came back to sit beside him, and he could tell she was still trying not to laugh. "You should see your face, my heart."
"I can't, remember?"
"Then trust me. It's worth the trip."
"Mom," he said after a while, more seriously. "If one day I had someone... would you really be happy?"
"I'd be happy if you were happy," she answered without hesitation. "The grandchildren come right after."
"Right after."
"Very right after. I won't lie."
He laughed despite himself, grumbled something about impossible women, and mothers even more so, but he didn't try to pull his shoulder away when she leaned against his.