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Droplets patter quietly on the stone windowsill of the temple. Like a tiny bug’s drum-beat. Caduceus knows he should get up from where he kneels, balanced at the head of him and his siblings’ bed, and close the shutters before the rain gets in. But it smells earthy and lovely on the warm dirt, and he can’t help but savour it.
This rain is the first in a while.
The sky had hung low and dark all morning, lavender clouds heavy, watery. And only by mid-afternoon did they finally open up.
Caduceus closes his eyes and breathes deep, drinking in the scent of chamomile, rosehips, and fern. Of peat-bog pools, and decay. He opens his eyes again to watch the fiddleheads nod with each raindrop that lands on them. They drip and drip, gathered outside the temple wall. He reaches out the window, catches droplets in his cupped hand, and draws back inside to lick the water from his palm. It tastes just the same as the rainwater from the basin in the garden, perhaps a little less rusty.
As the patter becomes a pour he latches the shutters closed and goes to find his sister.
☾
He finds her quickly, in the shed round back of the temple. It’s an old stone hut, growing ivy up one side. Ma says the ivy will break the hut, crumble apart the stones, so they’ll have to cut it off soon, before it does too much damage.
Calliope is sat on a stool, hunched over something, brow furrowed. It must be one of the things Pa’s had been teaching her to make. An important thing. A shield, Caduceus remembers.
His hair’s wet and he shakes his head to try and dry it.
“Away with you, brother,” says Calliope when Caduceus wipes his damp hands on her tunic. She swats at him. “Bug off or I’ll wrap you in a shroud so tight you can only wiggle while Pa buries you with the Aysgarths.”
She sets the shield down and ruffles Caduceus’ hair roughly.
He scrunches his nose and smiles when it’s over, pressing his palms to the edge of the workbench as he peers over the top. Calliope goes back to working on her shield, hitting it with a small hammer. It’s an eclipsed shape, shiny and shifting between forest green and teal, like those big beetles that hang out on the washing line.
“I remember when you couldn’t even reach the table,” Calliope says, and then she sighs. “I wish you would say something. It’s weird that you don’t.”
Caduceus reaches out to touch the edge of the shield, on his tip-toes. It’s smooth, funny-feeling, dewy-cold. It feels just like the big green beetles. He’d tried before to keep them as pets but they’re always gone by morning, disappeared from their eggshell beds.
“Hey. Don’t touch.” Calliope shoos him away. She waves the little hammer at him.
Caduceus steps back from the table, dusting his paws off on his trousers. He flicks his tail at her, just to let her know.
Calliope rolls her eyes.
“You can touch it when I’m done,” she says. “Be patient.”
So Caduceus sits crosslegged in the doorway, watching the rain, listening as it makes music in a rusted old bucket that’s being swallowed by the moss. Far away, across the grove, Colton and Pa carry shovels on their shoulders. They come to a stop and wipe their brows, standing with their muddy hands on their hips, talking. Caduceus’ ears perk up as he tries to listen but they’re drowned out by the rain, too far away.
Pa points to a spot on the ground, Colton nods to him, and they both start digging.
After a while the cling-clang of the hammer stops and Calliope sighs like she’d been holding her breath. She does that when she’s concentrating.
“There,” she announces. “All done.”
Caduceus is struggling to his feet before she can say anything else. He waits as Calliope slips off the tall stool and holds the shield at arms length, examining it, one eye closed, half her face all scrunched. She flips it so it face Caduceus and crouches down, holding it for him to look at.
“You can touch it now,” she says.
Caduceus presses his palm to the shield. It’s still cold, still smooth like a river stone. He runs his fingers along it and feels the ridges and bumps that run along where the shiny green is joined to leather straps. Calliope lets him take it in both hands as he presses it to his ear and taps the surface with his nails to hear the hollow tink-tunk noise it makes.
“You know, Caddy, we’d play with you more if you spoke to us,” says Calliope. “Colton and I.” She follows suit as Caduceus sits down in the doorway again, shield in his lap. She huffs a long exhale. “I just don’t get it. I said my first words so many seasons earlier than you. So did Colton. And I bet the new baby probably will too, when they’re born.”
Caduceus looks up at her, smiling because maybe that’ll be enough of a reply. Enough to let her know that just because he doesn’t say anything doesn’t mean he’s not listening. Because he is listening. Always.
Ma says it’s okay if he takes his time.
When you’re ready, honey, she tells him. Especially when Colton complains that he’s being weird, staring at him across the dinner table.
The shield in his lap is really nice. Smooth and shiny. He rubs his paws across it again and it feels so nice that he has to kick his feet and swish his tail.
Calliope laughs at that (not in a mean way) and stands. She takes the shield back.
“Let’s go show Ma and Auntie Corrin,” she says.
☾
Ma and Auntie Corrin are in the kitchen, sitting at the table with teacups cradled in their hands and incense smouldering in a bowl between them, talking quietly. They stop when they notice Caduceus and Calliope at the backdoor, which has been left ajar. The floor just inside is wet with rain.
“I finished my shield,” announces Calliope, passing it to Ma.
Ma’s eyes light up, pale lilac.
“Oh. This is wonderful, dear,” she exclaims. She turns it this way and that, watching the colours change the same way Caduceus did. She hands it to Auntie Corrin, who does the same.
“Very fine craftmanship,” Auntie Corrin adds, buckling and unbuckling one of the straps on the underside. “A lovely colour too.”
Then she passes it back to Calliope, who hugs it proudly to her chest. She clears her throat after a moment, and holds her head high. “Thank you,” she says. “I’ll be Melora’s finest paladin.”
Ma’s smile is warm and wide. “I’m sure of it.”
And with that, Calliope is gone into the garden, running through the wet grass and calling out to Colton and Pa, leaving Caduceus standing halfway through the kitchen door. He steps back and forth, trying to decide between snail-collecting or asking for jam on bread.
“Are you coming inside, little one?” Auntie Corrin asks him.
Ma pushes herself up from her chair with a groan, her stomach nearly as round as a ripe plum beneath her robes. She lifts Caduceus onto her hip and he nuzzles into her neck, already gathering the end of her braid in his paws.
He’s not sure why he does it — maybe it’s because no-one else had mentioned it, no-one had said what he’d been thinking— but quietly, so quietly, he whispers: “It’s a beetle shield.”
Ma lifts her chin from where it had rested atop his head. She watches with wide, softly questioning eyes.
“Did you say something, honey?” she whisper-asks.
“Beetle,” repeats Caduceus before it’s too much and he hides against Ma’s shoulder.
She pats his back, rubs it in a circle, like the Wildmother’s spiral when they paint it on river stones with blueberry juice.
“The shield’s like a beetle?” Ma asks.
Caduceus nods.
It’s just like those beetles on the washing line and in the hammock with the spiders.
Ma’s eyes grow shiny as she smiles, rubbing spirals between his shoulder blades.
“I love you, little one,” she says, before pressing two kisses to his forehead.
She sits him down at the table and pours him a cup of tea and cuts him a slice of bread, spreading raspberry jam across it with a wooden knife. As they drink Ma pinky-promises that neither she nor Auntie Corrin will tell the others he spoke. Not until he’s ready.