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It’s a warm summer morning on Pyrrha’s half-flipped moon. A scrawny evergreen sapling sits in the corner, freshly watered and strung with fairy lights. Colorful garlands hang above the breakfast nook, courtesy of Nona and her great fondness for construction paper. (Palamedes put Nona on his shoulders for the installation, which nearly gave Camilla a heart attack, although she could admit the sight was charming.)
Pyrrha and Palamedes are conversing in hushed tones when they step into the farmhouse. Camilla, sitting at the kitchen table and sipping tea, looks up from her crossword. A tight knot unclenches in her chest when she makes eye contact with Palamedes again, even though they woke up in the same bed that morning.
“Is the kiddie still asleep?” asks Pyrrha. She’s holding something behind her back with the posture of a soldier at attention. Something small but heavy, then. Camilla doesn’t question it, although she does spare a glance at Pyrrha’s deltoids.
She checks her clockwork. “You should have another twenty minutes.”
“Thanks, Hect.”
Before Camilla can get a good look at it, Pyrrha takes the present to her bedroom, where it will be wrapped and waiting next to the tree by the time Nona untangles herself from her blankets. (Nona has taken to sleeping in lately, in true teenager fashion.) Camilla revises her earlier estimate: the present is small, heavy, and something she will probably disapprove of, to warrant such subterfuge.
Palamedes doesn’t follow Pyrrha. He stands in the entryway, hiding something just behind his leg. “I have a gift for you, too.”
Camilla takes another sip of her tea, then quirks an eyebrow. “Want me to leave the room?”
Palamedes shakes his head. “It’s a present for today. Close your eyes?”
She obeys. A crinkly bag is dropped into her palms, weighing maybe a kilo. Camilla doesn’t need to be a psychometrist to figure out what’s inside; she can feel the texture through the sack.
“Real coffee,” she says, eyes flying open in surprise. “Warden, how did you—how expensive was this?” The climate of this moon was too arid for coffee plants. How had he managed to find a bag?
“Oh, it was steep,” admits Palamedes cheerfully. “The importer made me read his son’s uni application essays, which were terrible, and help him revise. They wouldn’t have passed muster in the Third Circle. It was worth it, though. Coffee was the only thing you asked for.”
Camilla hadn’t even asked, really. She had just mentioned a few weeks ago that she missed the terrible instant coffee from home, the kind they drank during exam season. She puts her hand on the Warden’s cheek.
“You’re my present this year,” Camilla tells him, smiling softly. She tugs him down into a kiss, but just as their lips make contact, they’re interrupted by a muffled thump from the corridor: Nona’s present, dropped on the floor.
Pyrrha, re-emerging from her bedroom, stares off into the distance, remembering the distant year of two thousand and nine.