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Arram Draper had been a very small boy when he'd left Tyra for the first time. He'd never been away from home before. He would not go back again. A decade in Carthak, a decade in Tortall, and he kept only a dark olive-brown complexion, a head of curling dark hair, and the recollected tastes of cakes flavored with saffron and sesame, and aromatic bread heavy with olive oil on his tongue.
He'd known, when he'd fled Carthak in pain and shock, that it wasn't worth trying to go back. He set his face to the north and east, across the sea and up to Corus and safe asylum.
Now, twenty-five years after that small boy had first left the city at the mouth of the river delta, Numair Salmalin approached Tyra again. He was to sail down the River Drell along the Tyran border, carried along on the inexorable human wave of King Jonathan IV of Conte's royal progress, in the eigheenth year of that king's reign.
In truth, the two moments in time could not have been more different. Arram had been a scrawny, surly, unpleasant child, neither desiring nor receiving much in the way of fellowship. A dangerous smouldering spark of magic back then, unpredictable and unsafe. He'd known nothing. He'd been desirous of everything. He'd not been very good at obtaining anything.
Now, Numair told himself, he was coming back surrounded by boon companions. He was one of the seven most powerful mages in the known world. He was the lover of the woman called the Wildmage.
That last, he thought, was worth more than all the others. The pleasure of her presence beside him at the rail completely overwhelmed all the rest of his tangle of feelings as their laden barge drew down the river to Pearlmouth, at the northern edge of the Great Inland Sea. The sun was setting, and she pressed his hand in her own as the flatbottomed barge gided across the smooth and sunset-fired water. “Have you missed it terribly?” she asked in a whisper, looking at the rolling green foothills and steeper cliffs of the Tyran coastline.
“No, not so much,” he told her, looking down affectionately into her snub-nosed generous-lipped face – but then he turned his face again to gaze at the distant shore.
And. unexpectedly, when the gangplank went down, and when brownskinned deckhands moored the king's barge with silken ropes, their teeth flashing white in the fading light as they called the tying points to one another, he felt a deep slow relief run all the way down his long frame, from the crown of his head to the soles of his boots as they stood in the liminal between-space of the crossing plank. His eyes widened in surprise at the rush and roar of his emotion.
The soil was, technically, still Tortallan, but the river delta threaded a current of instability and borderlessness through its region, creating a triangle of cultural intermingling and indeterminacy. Pearlmouth was a merchant's city, sprawling and decentralized. It was in no way equipped to handle the bulk of the Progress, and so while messengers were dispatched on hired horses to prepare the city's nobility against the eventual coming of the Tortallan king, squires and clerks under the direction of the Lord Seneschal began to pitch camps along the water's edge before they entered its proper boundaries. They would spend the night on the margin, and march through in full glory and splendour in the morning.
Numair dutifully set the expansive encampment wards, as he had done since joining the Progress – he was his liege's strongest mage by far, and it was only right that it ought to be his power to protect the king and his people. That duty done, he set off in search of his lover, finding her just as he'd expected; she sat tailor-fashion on the ground surrounded by a host of eagerly welcoming mice, hares, martens, and tortoises, with a sea-eagle perched on one of her outstretched arms and a pair of small grey-brown bats nestled into her hair right beside her glittering eardrops.
He grinned in the gathering twilight. It had been like this everywhere – take Daine to a new place, and she'd end up spending hours getting acquainted with the local People. There were so many she'd never had a chance to see before with her own eyes, she'd told him when he'd teased her. Books just weren't the same.
Her eyes had been closed, but she opened them as he drew near. “I'm hungry,” he said. “Come into the town with me?” At Daine's nod he reached down a hand to pull her to her feet, and creatures scurried away as she stood.
Water gleamed darkly all around them as they made their way hand in hand toward the profusion of small lights that illuminated the outdoor market in the dusk. Paper lanterns, mostly, hung high beside kiosks. Further in, there would be smiths and weavers and jewelers and potters and craftspeople of all kinds – but the outer edges of the market were reserved for food, prepared and unprepared, and it was there he led Daine, into a narrow alley of tents, carts, and simmering panfuls.
It was the smells that hit him first, and then the sounds: spice and honey, the sour tang of yoghurt and the sharp salt smell of fish, a woman's voice singing, a man's voice giving directions, the spit and sizzle of hot cooking oil. Without volition, he felt himself relaxing, felt his face breaking out in a – probably rather foolish – smile. His gift-aura unfurled around them, released from containment and control.
“What is he saying?” Daine asked, and Numair realized with a start that no one around them was speaking Common. Late in the day for tourists, he supposed. The Tyran polysyllables had slotted right back into his mind.
“He's showing the little girl how to prepare fish,” he said, translating easily, mouth twitching in amusement at the overheard byplay. “She doesn't seem to be doing very well at it. He says, 'You need fig leaves and oregano, no cheese, no nonsense.' Oh, no, she's taken too much oregano. He wants her to just wrap it up nicely in fig leaves fastened with string, then hide it under the hot ashes. He's warning her not to overcook it.”
“That sounds delicious,” Daine said, the pink tip of her tongue slipping out to wet her lips. His mind went blank for a moment, completely overwhelmed by adoration and desire. He stumbled, and looked back at the man and the girl. Safer. He was holding her hands in his now, showing her how to wrap the fish, tie it off, gnarled knuckles curled around plump ones.
“Sometimes my mother made fish that way,” he said, deliberately casual. “When the boats came in, and it wasn't too expensive.”
Daine's eyes glimmered through the dark, catching and holding myriad tiny points of light from the lanterns around them. “Did she ever teach you how?” she asked.
Numair grinned back at her crookedly. “No,” he said. “I had … problems with fire, as a child. I wasn't allowed in the kitchen much.”
She didn't say a word, but allowed her shoulder to bump up against his torso as they walked together, an insistent reminder of presence and love and acceptance and understanding. “There's so much here,” she said, bright, after the silence grew unnecessary. “I never realized Tyra was so resource-rich.” She stopped to inhale the fragrance from a pan of roasted olives, salt and tangy, gesturing to encompass the entire river delta, hung about with lanterns and good things to sell.
“Tyra has very sensibly never challenged Tortall in force,” Numair replied. “We bend, instead of breaking. By keeping our interests aligned with those of our Tortallan, ah, allies, we have largely managed to avoid the kind of land conflict that has been so damaging to Scanra and Sarain, or the kind of total conquest and assimilation that overtook the Bazhir.”
Daine raised a sardonic eyebrow. “Who's this 'we'?” she asked. “You haven't been back to Tyra since you were a boy, have you?”
“No, but some things never really change. One's homeland is one of those things.”
She “hmm”ed lightly, pursing her lips. It made a dimple stand out in her cheek, and for a dizzy moment Numair wanted her like he wanted air to breathe. “I don't know if I'd ever think of myself as Gallan, anymore,” she said. “I let you train me out of the accent, didn't I? Why do that unless I wanted to change?”
“I didn't work to drop Tyran speech patterns until I'd left Carthak,” Numair said with a crooked smile. “It wasn't exactly a choice.”
“Are you sorry about it?” she asked, her face tipped up toward his, features illuminated by the soft lantern light. Not as long as I've got you, he thought, but didn't say it.
Instead he bent down – rather awkwardly, he had forgotten how out-of-place his excessive height was in the context of his native country and its customary sense of internal proportion – and exchanged a few coins for green cylinders of dark leaves. “Try this,” he said, handing one to Daine and then picking up another for herself. She thanked the vendor in Common, and the man grinned flashingly through the scant light.
He bit into his; inside the leaf wrapping was a warm spiced grain. The leaves tasted green and ever so faintly bitter, the filling savory in contrast. “That's delicious,” Daine said, finishing the little wrap in three more bites. “What is it?”
“It's called dolmas,” he answered. “Stuffed grape leaves.”
She smiled. “I always learn the most interesting things with you,” she said, going up on tiptoes to press a kiss against his lips. She tasted green and spicy and savory and bitter, and he wanted to fall into the world of her mouth, her familiar taste overlaid with these sensations of what would always, somehow, be home.
Together, they wandered down through the labyrinth of stalls and stands, accumulating wheat bread fried fish and goat cheese and a skin of wine and dried fruit and ripe olives. When they had as much as they could carry, they went to the broad pool at the heart of the market. Fed by the watery fingers of the river delta, the water was brackish, and smelled more than a little of salt, but the sounds of its fountains was like music.
They sat on the pool's edge, their bounty spread out on the ground, and took turns feeding one another with their fingers, laughing and trying new tastes and exchanging kisses. The feeling of Daine's full lips grazing his hand, the heat of her mouth, the clinging pressure of her tongue around his fingers as she licked sauces or honey off them, combined to fan him to inward flames.
Almost maddened by her, Numair pulled her into his lap, one hand possessively curling around her waist as the other scooped up yoghurt and fruit and fed it to her bite by bite. She reached down for fig, popped it into his mouth, and followed it with a teasing kiss.
A little boy, maybe four years old, ran and splashed in the water; an older boy, his keeper, lounged nearby talking with a group of friends. On a blanket half in shadow, a man and woman flirted, little sparks of sexual energy constantly popping into existence around and between them. He couldn't tell what language they spoke; here in Pearlmouth, it might be anything.
Numair looked back at his companion. She was feeding a bit of cheese to a small grey mouse. “Can't leave you alone for a minute,” he said, laughing.
“No,” she said, petting the mouse and then sending it off scurrying on its way through the dusk. “Nor need you,” she added, turning her full attention on him again, “because I'm not going anywhere, so neither of us is going to be alone.”
Tomorrow, he would have to face politics, the reality of his status as an expatriate and former refugee, the need to produce the right power plays between Tortall and her neighboring nations. But, for that night, if for that night alone, Numair meant to spend his hours there on the beach with his partner and lover, and enjoy with her a stolen taste of home.