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“Beau.”
The monk in question lifts her head at the sound of her name being called. Yasha stands above her, practically blocking the mid-evening sun from reaching Beau where she’s crouched on the ground.
Beau squints up at her, hands stalling in her rucksack. Yasha is barefoot, pants rolled up to her knees, and her arms, legs, and face are covered in the slick orange clay of the river, less than a quarter-mile from where they’re camping. “Uh. Yeah, Yasha?”
“Would you like to accompany me down to the river?” She shows off her clay-stained hands. “I, um, need your help with something.”
“Yes!” Beau knocks over her rucksack in her eagerness to jump to her feet. A pouch of spiced hardtack tumbles out, along with a few loose coins and same random trinkets. She scrambles to scoop everything back into the bag, setting it against the stump Frumpkin is perched on.
Yasha looks down at her with what Beau hopes is a gentle, affectionate smile. In reality, she’s probably laughing at her. Beau feels bright red. She wipes her hands off on her trousers self-consciously.
“So…” Beau shifts her weight. “Like right now, or…?”
“If you can, you know, now, then yeah.”
“Yeah! Yeah, of course, hold on - Frumpkin, if anyone asks, let 'em know that me and Yasha are down by the river, okay?” Frumpkin mrrumphs at her. Beau decides to take that as a mutual understanding and follows Yasha down to the river bank.
“So…” Beau ducks under a tree branch. “What am I helping you with?”
“I need new beads, you know?” Yasha says. “So I’m making beads.”
“Oh, uh.” Beau jogs forward in order to be shoulder to shoulder with Yasha. (Well, maybe more like shoulder to ribs.) She looks up at her. “When I said that I work with jewelry a while ago? I meant, like, chaining and setting.” Yasha raises an eyebrow at her, but doesn’t slow her pace. “I mean...I can work with metals, not clay. I don’t think I’ve ever made a clay bead before.”
Yasha shrugs. “No problem. I can teach you.”
Why ask her for help, if Beau doesn’t even know what to do? Beau can’t help but think that Yasha may just be using this as an excuse to hang out with her, one on one. The thought brings a bounce to her step.
Beau follows her, silent, for the rest of the way. It’s the tail end of a dry summer, and the shallow river isn't even really a river anymore; instead, a bunch of little streams of water splitting off and then merging again.
Yasha steps down from the ledge, carved into the earth from the river’s usual course. Immediately, she starts sinking into the mud, but Yasha continues on, undeterred. Beau quickly sits down on a boulder protruding from the ground in order to pull off her boots. She tucks them into her belt, then runs after Yasha, who hadn’t seemed to notice that Beau wasn’t directly behind her anymore.
While Beau is normally incredibly agile, the mud-slick ground isn't exactly the most stable surface to run on. Just as she's about to catch up to Yasha, Beau slips.
Quick as lightning, Yasha's arm shoots out and catches the collar of Beau's shirt, stopping her from falling face-first into the mud. She manages to lift Beau with just the hold on the back of her shirt, and carefully places the monk onto her own two feet.
"Careful," Yasha says. "It's wet here."
"Oh," Beau says. Yasha's hand is warm on the nape of her neck. She swallows. "Uh, yep! I sure-sure am - able to tell, I mean."
Yasha furrows her brows. "Um, sorry. I got, you know, some mud on the back of your shirt." She attempts to wipe it off, but just manages to rub the mud deeper into the blue fabric.
"It's no problem. I can just ask Cad to clean it for me."
Yasha tries one more time to scratch some of it off with the blunt nail of her thumb before giving up. She points ahead. "It's just up here."
Yasha has claimed a tiny little mud-island for herself, bordered by two small streams of water. It’s marked by Caduceus' new metal mixing bowl he bought a few towns back, half-buried into the mud. (Beau cringes internally. She hopes that Yasha asked to use it.) An acacia tree casts shade over Yasha’s little setup, roots wrapped around a blue-green boulder embedded into the side of the river. It’s grown at such an angle that Beau is vaguely worried about it toppling over, taking the boulder with it.
“Here.” Yasha rucks up her pants again and squats in the mud. Beau follows suit. Yasha tips the bowl forward so that Beau can see a ball of slick orange-red clay inside. “I got this from over there. I already started with, you know, cleaning it, getting all the rocks out. Let it dry for a minute.”
“Okay,” Beau says. She looks back up at Yasha with a quirked eyebrow. “So...what do we do now?”
Yasha unfolds a small rag from her belt, laying it flat on the ground. Inside, there’s a small candle and maybe half a dozen thin, finely whittled sticks. She picks up the candle and one of the sticks. They look almost comically small in her large hands.
“You want to take one of these and…” Yasha lightly presses the stick onto the candle. “...roll the end of it in the wax.”
Beau takes one of the little sticks from the ground and then reaches for the candle Yasha offers to her. Following her directions, Beau presses the stick into a rivet already dug into the candle. Once she feels she has sufficiently waxed the stick, she places the candle down on the rag and looks back up at Yasha.
“What now?”
“Well, you wanna take some of this and, you know…” Yasha pinches a small piece of clay off of the large ball in the Caduceus' bowl. She rolls it between her fingers for half a moment before spearing the clay onto the stick. She holds it up for Beau to see.
Beau nods. She tries her best to copy Yasha exactly, but after a couple of minutes of fiddling with the bead, she feels like giving up.
"It isn't as good as yours," Beau says. She frowns at her lopsided bead.
Yasha glances up at her. She's already on her sixth bead, all of them maybe a quarter-inch apart from each other on the stick. "It looks fine."
"It's lopsided! It doesn’t look anything like yours’."
“They don’t need to look anything like mine,” Yasha says. “In my tribe, beads are, you know, a gift.”
Beau raises a brow. “A gift?”
“Yes, a gift.” Yasha picks up another one of the sticks, this one the slightest bit sharper, and begins delicately carving into the topmost bead. “In my tribe, beads have, um, different words? None of them translate all that well into Common, but there was a word for pretty much any kind of occasion of bead. Like, a ‘you’re my child’ bead, or a ‘you saved my life’ bead.”
“A ‘we just fucked’ bead?”
Yasha chuckles under her breath. “That too.” She moves onto the next bead. “They are supposed to represent how you, you know, picture your relationship with the person you’re giving them to. You always want to make at least two. How you put them in your hair, is supposed to represent how you feel about the person who gave them to you.”
Yasha points to a long braided in her hair, capped by two long, intricately carved polished beads. “These are the ones that, uh, Zuala gave me. At our wedding. And these ones…” Her finger moves to three purple glass beads on a lock of dreaded hair just behind her left ear. They’re all right above each other, each of them sporting one-third of a detailed peacock feather. “...are the most recent ones I’ve gotten, from Molly. I, uh, gave him some too. They were on his horns.”
Beau winces. “Sorry...We should've like, gotten those back for you.”
She shakes her head. “No, warriors are supposed to be buried with their beads. To take them when they die...that would be like, you know, taking their identity away.”
“Oh, right. Sorry.” Beau clears her throat. She focuses back onto her own beads.
She decides that round beads are way too basic, but trying to make them diamond-shaped, especially when Beau can barely manage ‘round,’ is a bit of a challenge. She thinks about maybe painting them bright teal, the same color as her Cobalt Soul belt. It would tie the whole outfit together.
“Wait,” Beau says. “Am I making these for you?”
Yasha shrugs. “For whoever you want,” she says, soft. “You just can’t make them for yourself, traditionally. I’m making some for all of you guys, since, you know…”
We saved you from a shitty mind control demon? Beau feels like explicitly bringing it up would not be appreciated.
“Though, um…” A light pink color spreads on Yasha’s face. She clears her throat and glances away. “Though, I, um, I made some others for you? For a different reason. Here.”
Yasha slides the top two beads off of the stick and places them in Beau’s upturned palm. She’s careful not to squish the still infirm beads as she turns them over to look at them.
They’re a pair of long, cylindrical beads, with Celestial characters etched into them. Beau searched her mind to try and remember what they meant. She had borrowed Caleb’s Celestial dictionary a while ago, back when Yasha was gone. She’d hoped to try and understand her better, feel a bit closer to her.
She’s sure she saw these characters in the book. Yeah, together they mean -
I love you.
Beau feels as though all the air in her lungs has been knocked out of her. “Yasha.”
“I’m - I’m not as good of an artist as Jester, you know,” Yasha stutters sheepishly. “But it means-”
“I love you too,” Beau says.
The pink on Yasha’s face turns to a full-blown shade of red. Her eyes go wide. “Oh, you know, I - um-”
“I love you too,” Beau says again. She’d thought about it a lot when Yasha was gone. Had a few conversations with Caduceus while on watch, and she’s sure. “I love you, Yasha.”
“That, um - Are you, you know, serious?”
“Hell yeah,” Beau says. She turns the beads over in her palm. “Do you wanna like, go out with me?”
Yasha wide-eyed look fades, replaced by a wide grin. “You, uh, beat me to the punch. Those are kärleksförslags, which means, you know, ‘be mine?’ essentially.”
Beau’s face pinches into a worried frown. “But…what about your wife, Zuala?”
“While I was, you know, gone …” Yasha clears her throat. “...I realized that denying how I feel about you isn’t honoring her memory, just...torturing. She’d...she’d like me to be happy, I think. And you make me happy.”
“Dude, that’s like, the sappiest shit that anyone has ever said to me. C’mere.” Before Yasha can second-guess herself, Beau places the beads - kärleksförslags - aside on the rag before grabbing both sides of Yasha’s face and pulling her into a kiss. Or, at least, trying to.
Caught off guard by the sudden shift in balance, Yasha falls forward. Beau goes back-first into the mud, Yasha’s weight landing on top of her half a moment later and knocking all of the air out of her lungs.
Yasha quickly scrambles up onto her hands, still suspended over Beau. “Gods, Beau, are you okay?”
It takes a moment for the air to fill Beau’s lungs again. She bursts out laughing. At Yasha’s increasingly worried look, Beau shimmies a little in the mud, wraps an arm around the back of Yasha’s neck, and kisses her.
Finally.
Later, just before the sun comes down, Beau and Yasha find Caduceus sitting on the stump where they left Frumpkin, sipping a cup of tea with the fey-cat in his lap.
Caduceus raises a knowing brow at their wide grins, their mud-soaked state. “Well,” he rumbles. “Guess I’ll be doing laundry.”