Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

In the aftermath, these are the things Mithrun is told most often: that he’s been rescued, that he is no longer Lord. That dungeons are in his past. The date, the year. What he’ll be eating today.

He is being cared for. He’s safe.

()

Every morning the sunlight falls through the window and crashes onto his chest. It’s heavy. It makes him tired.

He’s not at home. He wasn’t allowed to return home. He has been dispatched to one of his family’s country estates on the far eastern coast, where the sun shines brightly nine days out of ten. Green calming meadows. Green healthful saplings. Insipid white-and-yellow flowers. Nothing you could even call a proper forest. There used to be a golden berry which grew on the roaming brambles here, just the size of your littlest fingernail, which tasted sweeter than honey. As a boy he once ate so many he was sick; he remembers hanging his head over a fountain, watching a cloud of little fish gather to nibble at the remains.

Those brambles are gone now. They were removed in anticipation of his arrival, because their branches bore thorns. White calming fish.

This is just one more entry in the ledger of things that Mithrun of the House of Kerensil has ruined.

()

Mithrun has been here three months, and he hasn’t learned any of the staff’s names.

His mother used to scold him whenever she caught him addressing a servant as “you over there”. “Always thank them. And always with their name.”

“Why?”

She scoffed. “Because—it shows grace.”

“There’s no point in showing grace to a slave.”

“Gods’ sakes, Mithrun. As if we own slaves.”

“Don’t we?”

“Not in the house! And the nightmen hardly count. There aren’t any free peoples willing to do that kind of work anyway. What are we supposed to do? Let excrement build to the rafters?” Her earrings flashed as she shook her head—dwarven work, lace filigree, another of her husband’s favors. “I’ll not hear another word on this. Names, Mithrun. They matter.”

In fairness, the staff don’t address him by name either. They mainly refer to Mithrun as Him. As in: He is being difficult today. He’s acting up again. All the caretakers here are elves, some well-born. Noble people. Trusted.

“He’s gone and scratched himself again.”

“Ugh. For someone who sleeps all day…”

Hands setting him upright, alcohol sluicing over his arm. The body shivers like grass under fire. Lately his wounds are prone to infection, an ailment which usually only afflicts the lower races. They emit noisome smells, they cry in the dark. The woman holding him crinkles her nose.

They’ll put him in the mittens tonight. If he continues to worsen, he’ll be bound. Breath coming a little quicker. There are spells that can immobilize the body entire—the old courts used to sentence prisoners to be turned into living statues. For fifty years, a hundred. There are spells to feed someone who doesn’t want to be fed. Spells to silence every noisome cry. His people are ancient and well-learned.

Now magic strips the blood from under his fingernails. All restored to its place. All in order. The healer fixes his arm in a quick stroke; his body leaps once, the great leap of a fish as the skewer runs through it.

()

Slowly he is being taught to use his magic again.

Of the things the demon damaged, his power is the worst off. Magic was his birthright, ran strong in his blood; it came easy to him, gentle, like the lamb. Now it dangles from him like a snapped limb, attached by a very few tendons. It aches to reach for. Hurts to use.

They put him in a circular stone room and say Here, and Here, go Here. He goes There, and Elsewhere; he staggers Off Course and leaves half his leg in a wall.

He falls. He doesn’t desire to scream but noise comes out anyway. That’s the animal part of him. The spouting shivering beast.

“Bring it back, my lord.”

I can’t.

“Bring yourself back now.”

I can’t do it. I’m all torn.

Pain loud like thunderhead. Pain like slavering sea.

He faints from hemorrhage; they revive him with ten pounds of blood sausage.

Every time he fails he is less and less himself.

Meat made of meat; the offal, the black stew.

()

They make him a false eye. Its glass is cold, he can never seem to warm it. The hollow of his right eye socket rings like a struck bell as the orb is inserted. The body echoes, the glass sinks downwards. He staggers. He seems to weigh ten tons.

On cooler evenings, the ice of the glass expands, and he can track the hours by its slow progression: the steady march to the crown of his scalp, outwards where it caresses the rubble of his ears, finally, the gradual seating of the talons in the back of his neck, seized like a rabbit by an eagle, where it shakes him, shakes and shakes the pelt of the bastard of the House of Kerensil.

It is to be borne. It makes him less bad to look at. The caretakers look him in the face more often, now, they are tenderer with his body when they bathe it. They slough the skin from the balls of his dead feet. He understands that he’s regained a degree of humanity.

So the eye stays in, and at night he dreams of ice and his family. Warm brown walls. Mother. He wakes to chill fever. Perhaps he will be welcomed back soon.

()

“You have a letter, Mithrun.”

His head still raises instinctively at the sound of his name. It’s been a while.

“Shall I read it?” the caretaker says, when he doesn’t take the paper from her.

He doesn’t listen. It’s quite easy to not listen. To think he used to be so sensitive to gossip, letting the slightest of criticisms prick him all over. Now not even the bluntest arrow reaches him. Under the ribs: “Your father wishes.” In the throat: “Sends her regards.”

“... advised that the idyllic conditions in the east would be most conducive to your rapid recovery…”

There’s a long silence after she is finished reading.

“They’re not coming, my lord.”

He says nothing. In the meadow a bird breaks a worm in half.

“I’m sorry.”

He says nothing.

()

They should have sent him somewhere dark. They should have buried him in a cave. His body is not fit for this landscape of velvet meadows and shy clouds, persistent sun, a curious, scrutinizing sun, which digs and twists its fingers into all the divots of him. His body is cratered and shadowed; it is not mild weather. It lacks skin. The healers scold its recalcitrant scar tissue.

He wonders if they will take down the portraits of him, back home. Mithrun the youngest of the House of Kerensil, seventh of its seven stars. So favored by Mother that he was taken in despite his bastardry, covered in the veil of her grace. He was loved on her behalf, he was well-loved and well-petted. In the big painting on the stair he stands slightly to her right, one hand on the gold crest rail. Not quite in the center, but placed where the most light fell.

The Duke, his mother’s husband, had a story he liked to tell: that on the day Mithrun was born, his mother had looked upon his face and told her maids to cast her jewels into the garden, for she had no more need of their beauty.

One of his companions in the Canaries had joked, “Well, the Duke is legendarily ugly—no wonder you turned out so well.”

The story obviously wasn’t true—as an infant he spent hours playing with her silky chains, gobby pendants, putting her rings in his mouth. He lost at least one emerald down a drain. She didn’t even notice.

He has seen his mother reject a necklace which took ten years to forge, for a single malformed link.

“Send it back. Have him make it again.”

“My lady—but the craftsman is a tall-man…”

“Hasn’t he got children? Let one of them continue it.”

“Never wear silver,” she told Mithrun, frequently. “It doesn’t suit your coloring.”

Wonderful tidings: he is no longer allowed near any silver. Knives are silver, tines, pen nibs. These days Mithrun wears white, he wears ivory and bone. Red. Colorful yellow pus.

He should not be looked at. He should not be looked at. He is not recovering rapidly. This world is not conducive to him.

()

Chewing brings out thoughts of the goat. The endless mashing of the teeth up and down and up and down and down, down.

When he was first brought here he couldn’t eat anything solid, nor things which had been cooked with meat. Not that he had any particular desire not to have these things. It was just that his throat refused them.

At some point he is informed that protein is to be reintroduced to his diet, because he is not gaining enough weight. When he begins to eat meat again, that is when the dreams of the goat come.

The dreams are not conducive to his recovery. He finds it difficult to stay calm afterwards. A better spell-caster is found. She puts Mithrun down for four, six hours, and Mithrun sleeps in a bed of iron chains, the goat groaning outside the circle. But the goat is resourceful and wiley and won’t be denied—he begins to come for Mithrun in the day. He is struck down in the calming lily-blue-painted room, in the calming eggshell room, in the white white laundry, where he upset the fresh-washed linen, as they fought to pry the soap from his mouth. He becomes, for the first time, uncooperative. His minders write disparaging letters. “Progress slow,” they report.

The only thing that helps when the goat comes is to run, so one night he does, down a haphazard footpath into the forest. When his legs give out, he propels his body crookedly through space, exploding moths and lithe mayflies. After weeks of stillness, all this movement is making him dizzy, so he closes his eyes, and leaps. In the darkness, little spatters of cooling blood. The foaming of his heart.

He trips and falls at the edge of the trees. Mana sickness, dirt and bile in his mouth. It was too much for him. But still, a little lighter. Behind him he can already hear the caretakers running. Sweat cools on his face. In the distance, the sound of waves.

()

After that day, he is no longer left alone. A chair is put in his room and a person assigned to sit in it. The heat of the everpresent watcher oppresses him, it is like a bow drawn slowly over an untuned string. The bow draws over his untuned neck. He sleeps as much as possible.

He sleeps, wakes, sleeps, sleeps. Wakes. He cracks an eye and an eye cracks back.

“Oops. Caught me napping.”

The man yawns, rolls his neck back and forth.

“Gods, but I could die of boredom,” he says, as if Mithrun had asked him a question. “How about it, my lord? Up for taking my head? No, you’re probably still tired out. That was quite an escapade the other day. Scared our living lights out. Honestly, though, it was pretty fun.”

When Mithrun doesn’t close his eyes, the carer says again, “How about it, then? Shall we have another walk?”

()

Mithrun is too weak to walk all the way, so halfway there he teleports down the path. He makes it farther this time, out past the last of the trees and onto the gray scribble of beach. A pile of driftwood catches his foot and he goes down. Sand in his mouth; a cloud of flies. Salt wind pets his hair.

The carer arrives some while later; he doesn’t seem to have bothered chasing after him.

Leisurely he picks Mithrun out of the wood and props him against a slimy log and they sit there for a while.

“I’ve never sat on a beach,” says the carer, right as Mithrun is thinking it. “It’s not really the done thing, is it? Splashing around in the water and all that? Tall-men seem to like it well enough. You see them with their children, sometimes, in that cove a little ways down. We haven’t got a very nice spot here,” he adds dismally, stirring the flies with a stick. “And it’s totally foggy to boot.”

“I—”

The man startles so badly that he knocks Mithrun in the knee with his elbow. Mithrun can’t fault him. It would be as if a skeleton spoke. “My lord?”

“... going to…”

The carer stands and watches Mithrun as he limps towards the ocean, but he doesn’t move to stop him. The water hits like a face-first fall, but it’s nice against his fever. The false eye pierces and cries at the cold. He ignores it, lies down at the rim of the waves. Pebbles and seaweed touch his hands, his back; pebbles rattle and roll like an earthquake. The pain in his eye floods outwards, it batters his walls, but he can stand it yet. From this vantage point every crest looks as tall as a castle keep, fit to blot out the world. A black cloak falling over him. He holds his breath, holds his breath, holds—releases it, gasping. Salt rammed up his nose. The frying of foam, like barley in oil. He’s made it through, he thinks, as he begins to tremble. The moon peeks through the fringes of his shivering.

()

“What on earth were you thinking? Taking him to that nasty little beach. The ocean here is not clean.”

“Funny you say that. You know, some people think salt water is healing.”

“Tall-men. Ogres. We put stock in magic, not superstitions. You’ve endangered him.”

“He endangers himself, Ysil. He wanted to go into the ocean, so he did. Maybe his body recognized it. Can you really tell me he’s any safer up here?”

“That—”

Quietly: “He’s on the edge, either way. You know that.”

“Silence. Your attitude unbecomes you.”

“My apologies.”

“I will send to the lady about this. Let her decide what will be done with you.”

()

In the morning, the sun crashed into his empty room.

In all the years to come, Mithrun will never be able to recall this man’s name. He will dig and scrabble, blacken and break his nails scraping in the dozens and hundreds of times he must have heard it, in the months they were in one another’s orbit—but to no avail. The name is gone. Dropped like an emerald down a grate. He had blue eyes. A warm voice.

He meets another with a voice like that, in time.

Chapter Text

In the aftermath, these are the things Mithrun hears most often: “Are you hungry?” “Do you want to eat?” “Are you up to eating?”

Occasionally, Kabru will fly the spoon towards him like a bird: “Say ‘aaah’...”

Something warm, a little bland. Kabru likes warm bland foods. They eat the same things most days now, ordered in from the tavern below, living in their tiny rooms across the hall from one another. His room with half a stopped-up chimney in it, Kabru’s stocked with wine barrels. Sometimes Kabru’s fork darts in and steals a bit of his meal.

Later, he says, “You know I was joking, right?”

“Okay,” says Mithrun, when it’s clear a response is expected.

“I won’t do that anymore. If you don’t like it.”

He says nothing.

“I don’t mean to treat—” The tall-man breaks off. “I just don’t want you to feel like a child.”

Mithrun considers this. “I’m used to it,” he says.

()

He is sent to the dwarf to learn how to cook. Another one of Kabru’s ideas. Perhaps he’s sick of paying the tavern. Perhaps he’s sick of paying for Mithrun, and wants some use out of him. It doesn’t matter either way.

He doesn’t know what to say when the dwarf asks him what he’d like to learn to make. “Something simple,” he says finally. “Not spicy.”

As they don aprons, the dwarf asks, “Can you close it all the way?”

He points at his own eye. It takes Mithrun a moment to understand what he means.

“No.”

“Ah, then better wear one of these.”

He hands him an eyepatch. Faded black, mildly greasy, seemingly a secondhand from some previous occupant. The cloth scratches as he ties it behind his ears. It’s not uncomfortable. A little tight. His vision feels slightly different after he puts it on, although he couldn’t name how, and in any case this is an illogical feeling.

When he goes to hand it back at the end of the lesson, the dwarf tells him to keep it. It’s a spare from some guild or other—he doesn’t know, he stops listening halfway through. It’s still tiring for him to listen to others. There is so much talk, a sea of chatter.

()

Kabru is a chatterer. And he writes even more than he speaks. His bookshelf tilts under the weight of innumerable leather-bound journals; sometimes half the heap slides right off, and he spends half an hour cursing and reordering them according to some arcane system he keeps.

Mithrun has seen his own name in some of these books. Although he cannot read the Utayan script in which the tall-man writes, he recognizes his name because Kabru spells it in Low Elvish. Badly, may he add—he hasn’t picked the correct characters. Still better than in Common, where it must fall back to transliteration.

The language of Kabru’s people was not considered worth learning, at the sorts of schools Mithrun attended. Even with such a luxury of lifespan as his, it did not merit consideration.

Thus stands the translation between them: one shore of disdain, the other dissimulation. Wariness. Exclusion. Mutual ignorance and spite.

Kabru’s handwriting looks somehow like Kabru.

()

Sometimes when they’ve been apart a while, Kabru will ask him how his day has gone.

Mithrun feels obscurely pressured by this question. He doesn’t have “good” or “bad” days. His days are long and empty. Sometimes consuming the cold oatmeal that has been left out for him is as much as he can do.

What has he done today?

Looked out the window.

Heard Kabru’s books thudding to the ground.

Laid for a while with his ear against the floor, listening to a fight unfold in the kitchen below. Glasses smashed and curses hurled. A gust of peppery odor rose up and made him sneeze.

“I went to that dwarf’s.”

Frowning face. “Senshi, you mean.”

“Yes.”

Kabru seems to divine something deeper from this monosyllable than a simple affirmation, because he adds, “I’m just saying, it’s a bit rude. I don’t go around calling you That Elf.”

It doesn’t matter, Mithrun thinks. Call me what you want.

“Did he teach you something?”

“Beans.”

Now a faint smiling face displaced the frown, tugging at the discipline of the lips. Why? What joy was there to be dredged from Mithrun’s ledger? There was nothing good to be found there.

“I love beans. What’d you do with them?”

“Made soup…”

()

After a few visits to the dwarf’s kitchen, it becomes fairly obvious that Senshi is keeping knives away from him.

Mithrun watches him snuffling over mounds of diced onion as he flips pieces of browning pepper with a pair of those slender Eastern sticks.

“I can do that.”

“With magic?” Senshi looks as if he’s about to say something, but thinks better of it. All he says is, “That won’t be necessary. You can take that off the fire now.”

Mithrun heaves the pan off the fire. It’s very heavy; his arms shake a little. Short-lived races can be so obstinate about this kind of thing.

Kabru had gotten a bit short with him when he mentioned this observation: “Well, some of us don’t have the greatest history with ‘that kind of thing’. I mean, ask the ogres. Or the orcs.”

“Magic saved Utaya.”

“Sure—it was also used to kidnap and enslave people.”

“Tall-men enslave one another.”

“That’s true. But you know what I’ve never seen? An elf slave.”

“There are elven slaves,” Mithrun says. “Pleasure-workers. Things like that.”

There’s a silence after that. Kabru sighs. “I guess all races are alike…”

He’s never heard of dwarves owning slaves. Perhaps that’s what makes Senshi a good cook. He comes from a people who know what it is to care for. To nourish, not stamp down.

()

Some days, he thinks of writing to his mother.

Doubtless she knows where he is; Pattadol will have sent word. None of the Canaries has left the island. Sometimes he runs into them in town.

Once he asked Lycion point-blank, “Why haven’t you run?”

Lycion looked rather stumped by this. “That’s a good question,” he said, finally.

They don’t seem to know how to treat him, now that the hierarchy of commander and commanded has dissolved. “And how are you?” Pattadol flusters at him in the market square, after picking through a minute of uneasy small talk.

Mithrun has no more answer for this than he ever does. “I pickled kelp today,” he says.

“Ah. I see…”

Silence again. There are some leafy tops poking out of Pattadol’s satchel.

“You have carrots.”

“Oh—yes. They looked fresh, I suppose. I don’t know what I’ll do with them.”

“You can roast them. With some honey and salt.”

Smiling face. “Yes, captain. That’s a good idea.”

()

He has borrowed a leaf of paper from Kabru with the intention of writing a letter, but after half an hour all he has written is:

tart

1. steam the fruit
2. peel skin
3. mash

His memory breaks off there. It’s not as easy to remember without someone standing there telling you what to do next.

He sets his brush down and goes to close his door. From across the hall: the sound of Kabru scribbling. His nibs always split. He presses down too forcibly. 

“G’night.”

Only when the door is firmly shut does he slip the false eye out. He has to raise the lid with his finger to pry it loose. The glass is as heavy as ever. He doesn’t like to look at it sitting there, so he folds it into some discarded orange peel on his desk.

There’s something absurd about this image. For a moment he imagines turning the letter over, writing Dear Mother on the back, and sending it just like that. In the mirror he sees a Smiling Face. He gets into bed and tucks under the covers.

()

The goat comes.

“—run. Mithrun.”

His head bumps about; Kabru is rummaging in his pillowcase. You’ll not find anything there, he thinks. Don’t you know I’m haunted?

Kabru’s hand withdraws, empty. He’s ruined the sheets. He can feel the wet edges touching him. The blotchy stinking Mithrun-shadow.

“Do you want to—would it help to sit up?”

After a moment, he props him up anyway.

For whatever reason, after he’s stripped the bed, the tall-man stays. He lights a candle when Mithrun’s magic fails him, and leans against his desk, telling some complicated story about a diplomatic incident at the castle. Mithrun doesn’t listen. He’s watching the heel of Kabru’s hand drift closer and closer to the orange peel.

At some point he gestures and knocks it a few inches sideways. Mithrun twitches. “Don’t—”

“—sorry?”

“Don’t put your hand there.”

Kabru looks at him, at the desk, back at him, and jumps back.

“Oh—gods, I’m—sorry, I didn’t—”

The boy is flushed neck-to-scalp, eyes darting around the floor; these are the signs that someone is embarrassed.

“—and it was so dark, I guess I didn’t notice. I’m sorry. I just—you didn’t look that different.”

“Okay.”

Again, Kabru seems to take some hidden meaning from this, because he insists, “Really. Your eye’s, er, like it’s mostly shut anyway, so I don’t…”

Mithrun looks at his lap. The fresh sheets scratch. “I’m meant to wear it. They said it would keep my bones in place.”

“I see…”

Some nights he dreams of being deformed; neither pleasant nor unpleasant dreams.

“It hurts. Sometimes.”

They falter. “I’m sorry,” Kabru repeats.

()

On the day he learns to make beet soup, he says to Senshi, “Let me use it.”

“That’s alright, I’ll handle the prep. Keep stirring that stock. It’s looking good.”

“I won’t—” He draws up short. I won’t move forwards, like this. “I have to learn,” he says instead.

They stare at each other through a vegetable fog.

“Are you good for it?” Senshi asks.

“Mm?”

He flips the knife to hold the blade, pointing the well-worn grip out to him. “I’m asking if I can trust you.”

Mithrun thinks about this.

“Yes,” he says.

The knife winks in his hand as they switch stations. The first flight of blade through the cabbage’s core tells him it’s very sharp. The cabbage falls away in shreds. The veins of his left wrist surge and sing.

()

Kabru thinks the stew could use more pepper.

“I didn’t say anything,” he maintains. “One of your Canaries must have told him something.”

“You write with a pen but you make me use a brush.”

“That—” He bites his lip. “Your lieutenant came to me. She said, um. That you’d struggled, before.”

“You don’t think I’m better.”

“That’s not true.”

“Okay.”

“Mithrun, come on.”

After a moment, he rises. “Come over,” he says, “I’ll cut you a quill.”

They sit together in Kabru’s room. He props the feather against his ankle bone to cut it. There is something—marked about this scene; the white glow through the dirty window, the boy hunched over his own foot. The shadow of the barbs of the feather slope along the curve of his ankle. The feeling isn’t clear-cut, Mithrun can’t put a name to it. Perhaps he finds the scene striking. Charming , even.

()

Mithrun catches ill as summer ripens.

“Comes from working in a kitchen,” Senshi advises. “You’re around all these people.” He dispatches him home with a tankard full of broth, which Mithrun walks all the way back, since teleporting might spill it.

He ought to seek out a healer. Kabru suggests as much, after he touches his forehead: “I know some reputable people in town.”

“Senshi said it’d get better on its own.”

“Hmm. We’ll wait a few days, then.”

Sickness returns to nest in him like a familiar. Its feathers brush the backs of his eyelids. Some elders of his house used to insist that elves couldn’t catch disease from the lower races, which is patently ridiculous. In truth, his weak constitution is probably inherited from his mother. She was ill more often than was fashionable for women of her standing. Whenever she took sick, she cloistered herself even from her maids, and Mithrun was not allowed to go to her; he wouldn’t see so much as a strand of hair until she was again a picture of perfect health. He can’t recall her ever sneezing. Her strategies were very effective. The beauty of the Lady of Kerensil was renowned.

After Mithrun was grown, he found he couldn’t fault her. She was the second wife, younger, not so well-born, not vigorous of magic. It must have been difficult.

When the academy mages first examined him and reported back the strength of his abilities, Mother had said, “Thank the gods, you’ll have something else to fall back on.”

Now, suspended in a haze, he thinks, I forgive you, although she has never asked for his forgiveness.

The door to the stairwell scrapes open and shut; he hears Kabru call out: “I’m home.”

()

His fever deepens.

The goat eats his brain, it eats his eyes. His bones shake. Jewels rise and overflow the gutters, they encrust the foundations of the castle like mussels on a pier. He turns into a bird and flies away.

What he dreams is the ocean being poured into a spout in his ear turns out, in actuality, to be a droplet of water leaking from a towel placed on his forehead. Two emeralds floating in the dark.

“Are you awake?”

No, answers Mithrun. All is but illusion.

He falls asleep, breathes deep water, skims the surface once again. Kabru is still there, seated at Mithrun’s desk. In his right hand he holds his pen, in his left some little marble—the false eye, removed from its now-dessicated husk of peel. The wind walks about, the scent of orange disturbs the room. Kabru cups the eye absentmindedly in his palm, like a child’s toy. Now he raises it to his lips, even as he turns a fresh page; Mithrun hears the faint click of glass against his front teeth, as he places it delicately, carefully, inside his mouth.

Chapter Text

The eye smells faintly of soap.

Mithrun replaces it in his socket, seeking some answer to a question he can’t name. Kabru doesn’t react whatsoever.

“Will you be alright on your own today?” he asks distractedly, “there’s a commotion at the castle I should go deal with.”

While Kabru is away, Mithrun ventures out to the town’s library. The phrasebook intended for Utayan tourists he finds is brief and not very useful, but he does stumble on two copies of a novel which had been authored in Utayan, then translated into a dwarven dialect. As Mithrun is fluent in all four major dwarven tongues, this provides solid ground on which to start. But he gets mired rather quickly in both the idiosyncratic Utayan syntax and the complexities of this particular dialect, which aren’t mapping as well onto standard Dwarvish as he’d hoped. After a couple days of study, he can only identify a few dozen words confidently: “king”, “dungeon”, something roughly akin to “clusterfuck”—none of which occur in any sort of conjunction with his name in the journals. Also, he’s starting to suspect that Kabru’s handwriting is quite bad.

When Senshi catches him reading the dwarven copy during some downtime in the kitchen, he asks him if he often reads novels.

“Yes,” says Mithrun. It is a very odd feeling. He hasn’t had cause to dissemble in a long time.

Senshi scans through a few of the pages. “I didn’t expect elves to learn Dozakh. I used to have a Dozakhian comrade myself. Could barely understand a word he said, to be honest.”

“We are schooled in many dwarven tongues.”

“‘Better know thine enemy’, hm?”

Before Mithrun can puzzle out a response to this, he hears someone say, “Oi, you there.”

His vision casts about a bit before landing a foot downwards.

“That’s guild property,” says what by all appearances is a child, but Mithrun knows is actually a halfling of some indeterminate age. Probably adult—his race’s version of it, at least. His heartbeat has sped up slightly; perhaps this is irritation, at being referred to as “you there” by someone the same age that Mithrun was in his infancy.

“What is.”

“That patch you’ve got. I’m conducting an inventory. Hand it over.”

“Hello Chil. I gave it to him,” says Senshi, before Mithrun can get a word in.

“What? Seriously?” The small face emanates a surprising quantity of derision.

The dwarf shrugs, immune. “I thought it’d fit him. Half-foots’ and elves’ heads are the closest in size. I didn’t know you were looking for it. Sorry.”

“Well, that. I. I am, so.”

Shuffling of feet. Senshi stands planted between them, arms crossed. He reminds Mithrun of his academy teachers when a class prank had been played. After a second, Mithrun unties the patch and hands it over.

“My apologies.”

“Right, yes. Thanks.”

“We’ll not be frying anything today, so you should be alright. Still, better to find a replacement…”

He watches the halfling patter off. Are their heads really the same size? He’s certain the former him would have been dearly insulted by such an observation. The current him registers no particular physiological upsets regarding the topic.

It is strange, too, how these people talk openly about his injury. When he’d visited home after his rehabilitation, not a member of his family had acknowledged his changed circumstances. They sat at the long table like always, ate the same foods they always had. It induced a kind of vertigo: the unfaded portraits smiling from the wall, the aromas of a dish he once loved. Transporting food into his uncaring mouth, with a hand that sometimes shook and spilled.

He heard somewhere once that creatures who dwell at the bottom of the ocean experience enormous pressure due to the weight of water, many tens of times what a land-dweller can bear, and this is how he felt, sitting at the table of the House of Kerensil. Planetary pressure. Like a great throat swallowing. They meant to be kind, but air could scarcely reach him.

Conversely, the residents of this island—virtual strangers to him—aren’t afflicted by the slightest propriety. Children and adults alike gawp, then move on. People who’ve known him two days feel free to ask about his ears. He’s started noticing the unusual rate of injuries amongst the town populace. Probably because a large share are adventurers and rogues, it’s not unusual to see someone missing fingers or a whole limb, not to mention scabs and scars of every sort. Once he even saw an ogre with a bold red band tattooed around the stump of his missing knee, like a festive ribbon fastened around a bouquet.

If these people were elves of any means, their wounds would have been long smoothed away. But maybe, as Kabru said, “that sort of thing” wasn’t as common among the strivers and schemers of the dungeon. People wore their pasts on their skins here. The kingdom was a broad dish; held every color of history, every flavor.

()

He is sleeping poorly himself when Kabru wakes him. The smell of smoke crosses the hall. The candle Kabru keeps by his bedside has burned out.

The witchlight he raises reveals the boy thrashed and knotted. His pillowcase is empty when he searches it.

He responds to neither touch nor sound until Mithrun uses his finger to prise his left eyelid open.

The galloping breath steaming in the night was familiar. The fight for the reins of control.

“I’ll go,” Mithrun says, and Kabru says lowly, “Please, don’t.”

So he stands there.

“I don’t have any stories to tell you.”

“That’s alright. You don’t have to say anything.”

Silence.

“Was it Utaya,” he ventures.

“No. It isn’t, always. Is it always the demon for you?”

“No.”

Quiet again. A cricket is loose somewhere in Kabru’s room. The rustle of mice in the rafters. Mithrun realizes he’s left the eye out. It doesn’t bother him as much as it used to.

“I could teach you how to draw a light.”

“I know the illumination spell.”

“Not fire. A witchlight, like mine. It’s less tiring. You don’t have to focus on it.”

Kabru scrubs his hands over his face. They’re bare, tonight. Sometimes he wears his gauntlets to bed.

“But then it won’t stay. When I’m asleep.”

“No. But it will wake when you do.”

The light casts them on an island of amber. Ship-wrecked, the survivors of varied calamity.

“Yeah. Okay.”

“Okay.”

()

Cithis escapes. A week later, Otta follows. He learns this from Pattadol. Kabru invited her over to dinner.

“I’ve neglected my duties.”

Pattadol shrugs. “It’s not like I’m making any particular effort to watch over the other two. It seems they’ve shacked up together. No doubt they’ll be running some scheme soon. Doesn’t it feel like there should be a spell to handle this?” She’s referring to washing the dishes.

“There’s not.”

“There isn’t, is there.”

Mithrun moves the steel wool around the lip of a pot. At the table, Kabru drools in his sleep. He’d gotten a bit competitive and had too much to drink.

“Captain—your mother has written to me.”

He scrapes at some burnt-on sauce.

“She requests that you return home.”

The sauce whisks down the drain.

“Why send you the letter?”

“I don’t think, um. She knows your address.”

Pattadol has been opening his letters. She has been covering him from the scandal, the gossip that would erupt, if it were to be known that the scion of a house whose name spans the continents had moved out of his captain’s quarters, his rightful place, and into a smoky tavern flophouse. With a flatmate, and the smell of pepper.

“I will write to her.”

“I can post it for you.”

“No,” he says. “Thank you,” he adds.

She takes a dish from his hand. “Captain,” she murmurs.

()

“Hey, you. Sorry. Didn’t catch your name.”

“Mithrun,” says Mithrun. “Of the House of Kerensil,” he adds, belatedly.

“Ah. I’m Chilchuck Tims. Of the house of Tims.”

If he looks past his appearance, the halfling has a familiar attitude. Like certain councilors of his father’s. Skilled, prideful men, who falter outside the arena of their work. Distrustful of silver-eyed, heedless inheritors.

“Listen, I didn’t mean to be rude the other day. The guild’s really fucked on money right now. Total shitshow. Anyway, uh, I threw this together. It might fit you. I don’t know.”

It fits better than the old patch; Chilchuck seems to have a good eye for approximation. The bands have been sewn closer together, to accommodate narrower ears.

“It’s kind of you.”

“Yeah, well. Since you’re sticking around, and all that.”

()

In the journals, he reads:

— black eyes. Weird for elf?

Don’t be put off by flat affect

sound of —— made him laugh

beet soup, tart, rubarb ? pie

v. much endeared.

()

“Anyway, enough of me. How was your day?”

Why don’t you order your journals by year? Why don’t you order your pages by date? What went wrong in your education that you see fit to place summer on the first page yet spring in the middle? And have I misunderstood or do you count months by thirteen?

Could you please distinguish your ‘6’s and ‘8’s?

And why do you always misspell the word ‘ship’? Yet you never misspell words like ‘disambiguation’? Why are the words for ‘morning’ and ‘evening’ the same? What is the meaning of ‘like a frog at the well-bottom’? You have written my name incorrectly. Is this word over here ‘cask’? Is that word ‘egg’? What does ‘V’ stand for? Vast, violet? Vein? Does the tall-man king know you sketch him with x’s for eyes? Why don’t you just refuse the harpy-egg omelette next time? ‘v. bad stomachache, you wrote. Your handwriting differs from the printed character in violent and disturbing ways. Urgently, have you never heard of blotting paper? They sell it at the stationary just north of the docks.

Is ‘V’ very?

Very much endeared?

What is this ambiguous squiggle above it, which breaks off so suddenly where it should run on? Plunging like a fall down the rocks? Is it the outline of the silhouette of an ear?

()

Tension grows like mold in corners.

“Would you quit slithering?” says Kabru, as he shucks Mithrun’s hair from where it’s caught under his collar. “Have you gotten ticklish or something?”

Maybe. His voice fights in his throat. I do not wish. I do not wish you to touch me. I don’t wish to be dependent. On anyone, ever, again. I want to be a lighthouse tower. I want to be the keeper of that lighthouse.

Kabru’s little finger brushes his nape. He pulls away; the hair snaps and stings.

This kind of thing never ends well. “Special friendships” between the races. Despite all the trite romances and overwrought plays that’ve been penned on the subject, in real life these affairs were at best an agreeable mutual fetishization. At worst, they were dangerous. He once spent an afternoon sheltering underneath an academy lab table, because one of his classmates had broken off with a tall-man mage, who then showed up in the halls threatening to burn the place down.

“And after only, like, ten years,” whispered a classmate. “They get obsessed so easily.”

The girls saw tall-men as boorish and uncouth. The boys saw them as a hunting ground. “You don’t have to court them hardly at all,” crowed one of his friends who considered himself an expert in this area. “And the women are just as easy to bed as the men. They’re really desperate for it. They’ll fuck any elf, even if he’s ugly.”

One of his mother’s great fears was that he’d get entangled with an inferior person. He knew this because she actually managed to overcome her abhorrence of unpleasant topics long enough to address it: “Just don’t, Mithrun. Just. Don’t.” She scanned him dubiously up and down. “And if you do, do not get her pregnant.”

Mithrun has been with one tall-man woman. It was basically impossible to make it through one’s academy days without this occurring. His friend was right. He did not court her, and he didn’t get her pregnant.

His taste always ran more towards elves. Back when there were elves. Back when he had tastes. 

For thirty years he has been passed from hand to hand; for thirty years the skin remained untouched. Sometimes the lonely skin begged at night. Even a seagull. Even a wave.

From the street outside, the boy waves at him, and he nods back.

He wonders if Kabru considers him ugly.

()

Kabru departs for two weeks, on a scouting expedition to the new lands. Mithrun sleeps and eats and bathes irregularly, and considers whether he should depart from the Tavern of the Phoenix. Sometimes he remembers to pull the hair from under his collar. Mostly, he forgets.

On the evening he learns to make stewed lentils, Kabru returns. The sound of armor being set down wakes him. He’d fallen asleep at Kabru’s desk, which they use for their meals. His neck twinges. The lentils were very filling.

“I’ll go,” he says, and then stops. “You’re injured.”

“Our healer was swamped.” Kabru dabs at the blood clotted over his eye. “So I said I’d have a go myself, but I’m not very good at recovery spells.”

“Auto-healing tends to be ineffective.” It’s like melting a candle to create more wax. He reaches for the hem of Kabru’s undershirt, and then hesitates.

“Can I.”

“Sorry?”

“Heal you.”

“Oh. Yeah. Yes.”

The witchlight reveals a bruised, battered torso. He has been cut in a few places by his own mail where his gambeson ripped. “It was foolish not to wear your cuirass,” Mithrun says, and Kabru says, “No, this was when we were ambushed.”

Mithrun doesn’t listen to the long tale that follows. There’s no need. It’s a common stress reaction, this compulsive chatter: the adrenaline after the battle, the reluctance to be alone. Soon the jittering will drain away. And then: the long night, the uncomfortable comfortable bed you dreamt of. Yet you feel yourself somehow changed. How you’ve longed to be home; how strange home feels. Once again you’ve achieved what you wished for. You sleep. The nightmares come.

And while Kabru is talking, and Mithrun is thinking, all the while he is roaming through his body, walking the path of lung kidneys heart. Close your eyes, start the deepest, with the torso, work your way to the extremities. The sensitive road of the spine which arches when traveled. Kabru’s body is full of leftover damage: a chip out of his hip, tooth marks on his left shin bone. Certain nervous tendons. Mithrun leaves them—nothing to be done. There are wounds too old to be healed.

“Keep still.”

“Sorry.”

Now upwards and back in. Muscle and skin. Vision should be relied on for this part of triage; he opens his eyes to find Kabru has shut them—perhaps he is asleep, his chest rustling softly under Mithrun’s hand. Soldiers do this sometimes, sleep sitting up like horses. Kabru is a soldier, has the body of a soldier, roughly used. The imprints over his ribs which Mithrun seals, the solar plexus bruised the color of tawny port. But in some ways yet a child, in the eyelashes and the fine bones of the ankles, his waist unthickened, like a boy’s. The drinking will take him there, in time. He is drunk tonight. Mithrun leaves it. It will be a comfort.

The head. The brain, the last great mystery. They couldn’t fix Mithrun’s in twenty years, and he will be able to do no better for Kabru tonight. But he can heal the cut which arcs from his temple down to threaten the eye; he can undo that little bit of time. Blood creeps backwards, and he works even slower, aware he’s growing tired. Little by little. Stitch by stitch. Sclera, cornea, pupil. There is peach fuzz coming in over Kabru’s lip. Emerald irises in the dark.

“You’re good at this.”

Mithrun falls back. “I’m adequate.”

“Well, better than what I’m used to.”

“You’ve been ill-treated then.”

He laughs. “I’m not passing that onto Rin, thanks. I won’t have friends fighting.”

Are we friends? thinks Mithrun. We aren’t friends. This ambiguous coexistence—don’t mistake it, it erases no lines, blurs no boundary. Just because we live above an uncouth tavern. Just because of your uncouth mouth, which no longer addresses me as Captain. Captain is my title; I lived a century before your mother’s mother was born. I have no friends, and you too many. You’ve no need of another. I won’t be collected.

Kabru’s finger presses against his lip.

“Shh,” he says, blurrily. “You look, look like you’re going to say something mean. Don’t.” The finger slips, flicks the plane of his cheek. “You’re cold.”

“From the healing.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’ll pass.”

He pulls Mithrun’s hands towards him, chafes them between his own. Mithrun allows it. The dizzy, cold lighthouse. The tall-man’s hands are large. He runs warm, as Mithrun knows.

As he’s hefting him into bed, the boy slurs, yawning, “And you?”

“I, what.”

“You, captain. You’ve been eating?”

By which he means, are you well?

“Yes,” says Mithrun. As much as I am able.

“’s good.” He rolls away from him, onto his uninjured side. With his lips nearly pressed to the wall, he murmurs: “I missed you.”

()

Scrawled on a loose page, torn and reinserted:

It’s unfair I still miss you this much. That I’ve got to get up everyday and talk, and laugh, and make nice, and keep going with all this bullshit. And you just get to be dead. Must be peaceful.

Haul around all these memories and frankly it’d be fucking easier if someone just cut them out.

If I had a demon, would ask it to eat the desire to return.

Just kidding. Demons are terrible.

Miss this thing you used to make. It was like a dessert? Like this round doughnut kind of thing? It took ages and it was expensive—you had to use rose water to make syrup or something. We only had it once or twice.

Have the money now, but don’t know how to make it—don’t even know what it was called—and can’t ask you, and can’t go back home and ask—you’re all gone. Can’t can’t fucking can’t.

—guess I could ask another survivor, if I ever find one. We avoid each other, I think.

Could ask my roommate, haha. He’s become a good cook. He feeds me well.

Gotten really dependent on him

()

There is magic to remove memories. Condoned for use only in extreme cases, but still. His people are ancient and well-learned. They have solutions for every problem.

They considered using it on him. His carers discussed it in front of him, in the depths of his catatonia. He was an extreme case. The extreme case remembers.

If it hadn’t been for the irreversible loss of his ears, his eye, they probably would have. No doubt his family would’ve preferred it. The model son restored. He could have returned home at once; he could be dining at the long table, even now.

And you, Mithrun? Would you prefer that? Forget the past thirty years, but a passing season of your life. Go back to who you were. A bargain any fool would take.

He neither prefers nor doesn’t prefer. His heart beats a little faster. He is coring apples mechanically, and narrowly avoids slicing his own thumb. The blood awakens.

Does it not ring a little false? Such a bargain. Is it not the bargain a demon strikes? Which is the hunger which cuts its own arm off to appease?

Wasn’t it cruel? Wasn’t it cruel, to talk in front of someone like that? Like they were already dead. Worse than you’d speak of someone dead.

Even such a life. Even such a worm-like life. Even such a life as his.

We save the apple seeds, that we might grow forests.

()

On the last day of the week, he learns to clean a fish. It’s not unfamiliar to him. Like skinning a rabbit. Ripping the jaw out stirs no particular emotions in him. He rolls the fatty eye in his palm.

They bake a fish-catcher’s pie, while the halfling and that strange beast-woman flit impatiently around, eyeing the oven.

The girls burns her mouth on the first bite and Chilchuck chides, “Serves you right.”

“Save the head,” Senshi tells him. “Izutsumi’ll want it for soup, later.” He hands him a cloth-wrapped dish. “Your half. Enjoy.”

They always leave him so much food. Too much to eat in a night, surely, even for a man of normal appetite. Do they know he lives with someone? They probably assume it’s the Canaries.

Kabru opens the stairwell door before he reaches it; “I smelled you coming,” he says.

He scarfs his slice of pie while Mithrun hovers a fork in the air.

“I think.”

“Hm?”

There’s flakes of fish stuck to the boy’s cheek; Mithrun stares at them as he says, “I think I won’t eat meat, anymore.”

“Oh. Alright. Can I have the rest of this then?”

He glances up at him and deflates slightly.  “What? I’ll get you something else from downstairs. I figured you didn’t like meat, anyway. You hardly ever eat it.”

“You like meat.”

“Mm, I love it.”

Mithrun’s stomach twists and pangs; he is feeling troubled. “But then we won’t. Share things.”

Kabru laughs, gently. “Of course we can still share things, silly. I can eat vegetables. I’m not a complete wolf, you know.”

()

“Rose water? No clue.”

“It can’t be the stuff you water plants with, right?”

“Hm. Unfortunately I’ve never come across it. But it sounds similar to making tea, no?”

“Wouldn’t it be more like making a pickle?”

“Then it’d be called rose pickle, dummy.”

The stems the beast-girl brings back (pilfered from the royal gardens, Chilchuk complains) bristle with thorns thick as fur. Bear-like flowers. Mithrun had forgotten about thorns. He likes them. They fight, they make the plant look healthy.

()

“What the hell have you been doing with your hands?”

Mithrun shrugs, sucking a bloody thumb. “Exploring,” he says.

()

One day, he finds, scrawled dead center on a flyleaf:

are you reading this mithrun

()

He boils the rose petals into sludge. He scorches them into a black mass. He uses olive oil instead of neutral. He drops a precious finished vial and sweeps the glass. He grinds his index fingernail under the pestle. He burns himself on fry oil. He underkneads. He overkneads. He fails faster and faster. It feels like running.

What if he wrote back: yes. What if he wrote, you’re spelling my name wrong. What if he showed him how his name was written. What then?

()

He gasps awake with his hair tangled in his mouth. It’s grown out, nearly as long as it was before. He used to always keep it braided. Wearing it loose made him look unkempt. He doesn’t care much about that anymore, but it does get in his way in the kitchen.

He holds it back at his temples briefly; it makes his ears stand out.

Ugly, says the goat. How quickly your vanity has returned. Have you learned nothing?

Looking kempt is rather beyond you, the way you are now, isn’t it?

Quiet. I didn’t ask. His hand shakes a little as he puts in the thinnest possible braid.

It’s sloppy, hurried work, but when he goes across the hall, all Kabru says is, “You look nice. Want me to do your collar?”

As Mithrun turns around, he says, “I heard the coast came back.”

“Mhm. It was way out west of us for a while, but that land’s gone again. Sunk into the sea.” He gently lifts his hair free of the catch. “But who knows how long it’ll stay. Nothing lasts very long here.”

Nothing does. “The weather is fine.” He hesitates. “For making a trip.”

“A trip?”

He bites his lip. “You’re very busy,” he amends.

“Not that busy.” Smiling face. “Let’s go. It’ll be fun.”

()

They will have a picnic. Mithrun makes sandwiches. One with meat, one without. Cheese made from the goats Senshi raises in the stable. He petted the soft kids’ heads, while their mother chewed his hem.

Today’s beach extends from the base of a cliff, the path there steep and rocky. Mithrun allows Kabru to clamber around for five minutes before he takes his arm and teleports them down. Kabru tries to convince him to join him in the water, as he’d expected. In some ways, all tall-men are alike.

Mithrun jumps between the briny pools, startling crabs and vivid anemone. He wonders what Senshi would make of the kelps growing there. Tentacles pat his toes. To the south, he can see the ship of the Canaries docked at the harbor. The sails have been unfurled—Pattadol will return to the west soon, in her new role as ambassador. There’s room on the ship, if he wants it.

Water flicks his back. “That ocean’s fucking colder than it used to be,” complains Kabru, emerging onto the spit with his teeth chattering. “Want to lunch? I’ve brought something too.”

They sit on a spongy mat of iceplant. Kabru picks one of its magenta flowers and plucks its petals as Mithrun takes out one sandwich and another. He brings out the little covered bowl last.

“I tried to make something.” For you. He doesn’t say it. Next to him, Kabru has gone quite still. The wind scatters the smell of rose, the petals from his palm. He takes one of the little round dumplings. Shiny and brown in his palm, strange fruit. Mithrun’s fingers in their bandages. He still hasn’t said anything.

“Well, this is a surprise.”

“It’s probably not correct.”

“Probably not. The original’s very complicated to make.”

Mithrun flushes. “You said you didn’t know how to make it.”

“I don’t.”

“You keep spelling my name wrong.”

“It’s quicker to write that way. I know how to spell your name. You leave letters that you’ve signed lying around.”

“...What? Why were you reading my letters?”

“Why were you reading my journals?”

“Because I—don’t put my name everywhere if you don’t want me to look.”

“Then don’t write angry letters if you’re never going to send them.”

“I am going to send them.”

“Well, good.”

Silence.

“I feel like neither of us is very normal about things,” Kabru says neutrally. “Possibly.”

Possibly, thinks Mithrun. “So you wanted—to know more of me.”

“I think it’s fair to say you wanted to know more of me, too.”

He isn’t sure how to respond to this. “I learned Utayan,” he says, finally.

“I see,” Kabru says, and kisses him.

“I’m sorry,” he adds, “I don’t have all the time in the world.”

The lighthouse shivers. It’s stood alone a while.

()

Kabru brought them a handful of golden berries, just the size of his pinky fingernail, which he spent weeks searching for in the market, and purchased at exorbitant price, because Mithrun had mentioned them once, and smiled.

They taste strange, not as Mithrun had remembered. He’s been gone too long, traveled too far from the shores of his youth. There is no returning to old tables in old houses. Where they no longer set your place, and the silverware was taken away. But Kabru loves the berries; to him, they’re new. He eats with his hands, messily, as Mithrun once did. He devours all the desserts, and all the fruits, and when he’s done, he feeds him the echo. How much sweeter, from another’s mouth. Even at the ends of centuries, you find there are new sensations. You hunger. He moves closer, tastes again.

()

Dear Mother,

I am well. I remain on the island of the Kingdom Merini. The land takes shape day by day. Lady Pattadol sets sail tomorrow with this missive; I expect you will receive it soon.

I thought over for a long time how best to explain myself, and the actions I have taken, which must seem disconcerting and unfit. Unfortunately this explanation eludes me. I don’t wish to return yet. Someday I expect this feeling will change. In the meantime I remain.

The people of Merini are wonderful, and terrible, and some passing strange. They are like at home.

The wounds from the dungeon continue to close.

I reside in the tavern named Phoenix Takes Flight, under the sign of the crescent on the eastborne road. Any letterbearer will find me. There are few elves here.

I think of you often and wish all the house clear days.

I have copied here a recipe for rosewater dumplings. Please pass it to cook. We both like sweets, so I expect you’ll enjoy it.

()

Recipe for Fried Rosewater Dumpling

flour - milk - fresh cream - butter - sugar - oil - seed of the cardamom ginger - rose water

Gather all ingredients. Begin.