Archive of Our Own

Below deck, The Mistake was a place of water-logged planks and oozy black moisture, where the sea reached down clammy hands and touched with cold-tipped fingers. Caduceus’s fur stood up in stiff peaks as it dried, itching against his skin. The ship never stopped swaying, and his head swayed with it. Like a half-empty waterskin, it sloshed – no, it sluiced. Caduceus’s teeth gritted around the word, nausea churning in his stomach. He closed his eyes and tried not to be sick.

It was their first opportunity to rest after a very trying series of events. First the journey into the Nicodranas sewers, with its water spouts and undead specters, then the scene at the dock which had erupted into such chaos Caduceus still didn’t entirely understand what happened. It ended with predatory shapes making shadows beneath him as he powered weakly through the waves toward his friends – sure, in that moment of desperation, that he had been forgotten and would be abandoned in that dark, urban place, surrounded by enemies, or – worse – left to flounder until the ocean took him for good this time.

He was startled from spiraling thoughts by a hand on his own. It was startlingly warm and sudden, and Caduceus’s grip closed instinctively, with almost compulsive strength. Something known had surfaced in anchorless territory, and his first instinct was to hold on as tightly as he could.

The hand squeezed back. “That’s right, mein freund. Hold tightly as you wish, but you need to breathe as well.”

The voice was also known. Caduceus opened his eyes. “Mister Caleb.”

It was subtle, but even in the low lighting, Caduceus saw the man wince. “There’s no need for formality,” he said. “We are comrades, are we not?”

Had he been asked that question even a few days ago, Caduceus wouldn’t have hesitated to say, ‘Yes.’ He liked these people and considered their appearance in his life providential. They were also badly in need of caretaking, and that had given Caduceus purpose. It made his current desire to run away sear with guilt, and yet uncertainty clung, as cold as the water that had sluiced down his neck when Yasha pulled him onboard this ship. Sluiced.

Caleb said, “It has been a long day, has it not?”

Caduceus’s throat worked. “Yes, it has.”

“May I sit?”

Caduceus’s chin trembled as he nodded, but any shame he felt was washed away under a flood of relief when Caleb pressed flush against his side. His thigh radiated heat. It was better than a hot water bottle, and not just because of how warm it was. It was the proximity of another person that soothed him. He let out a deep breath from somewhere tight and uncomfortable inside his chest.

“There now,” Caleb said. “It’s been a nasty few hours, soon after an unsettling battle.”

Unsettled was a feeling you had when you entered a new place and found the furniture unfamiliar, or when a shadow stretched in a strange way and made you want to light a lamp. Caduceus would have described the way he felt as more unhinged than unsettled. The foundation of the world was off its tracks, and he didn’t know how to put it back where it belonged.

“I don’t like this place,” he admitted. “It’s,” – wet, water, wet – “cold, and strange.”

Both Zadash and Nicodranas had been foreign. Metallic smelling, sparse in flora, crowded. But at least they’d been attached to the road home. If he’d wanted to, he could have walked that road, and though he hadn’t felt the need at the time, its presence had comforted him. Now there was no earth beneath his feet. No path. Just endless depths of water that would steal the breath from his lungs if he tried to leave. And the only thing between him and certain death was this rocking, wooden vessel. These thin bulkheads. These wretched, oozy –

“I’m warmer than the average person,” Caleb said. “If you would like, I can stay until you feel comfortable enough to fall asleep.”

The offer came as a surprise. The Mighty Nein were a diverse group of people. Some, like Jester, were mischievous and easy to understand. Others, like Fjord, were less approachable. Caleb was a muddle. When Caduceus first met him in the Savalierwood, the man had been fixated and aloof, and Caduceus had assumed that was simply his nature. Later, though, when their friends had been restored, Caleb had shown another side. His interactions with the rest of the Nein were surprisingly soft. Still, he paid little attention to outsiders. And outsider, Caduceus had remained. Or so he’d thought.

“That…would be kind of you.” Then, because it seemed as though something else should be said, he added, “You are warm.”

“A product of metabolism, I think. Or perhaps the arcane. The source of my magic, it runs rather hot.” By way of demonstration, Caleb pressed in further, giving Caduceus the full measure of his radiant heat. “You see?”

Caduceus leaned into it. It was nice. Already, the rigidity of his body was beginning to unknit. If only the sound of the water would die away, maybe he would be able to…

“Would you like me to tell you a story, Mister Clay?”

In three weeks’ time, Caleb had exchanged perhaps a score of words with Caduceus, so the offer came as a surprise. Still, any distraction would be welcome. “Please.”

He knew Caleb liked to read, so he expected something from one of his books. A folktale, perhaps. Even one of the tales Jester preferred – the ones she would giggle over and invite Caduceus to take a peek of with an impish grin. But, no. The story Caleb told was something totally unexpected. It was a story about himself.

“When I was a boy,” he began, “I lived in a village called Blumenthal. I knew every person who lived there, every stone and stream and goat. It was all I knew, my whole world. When I left, it was to go to school in Rexxantrum. I think you can imagine what that was like.”

Caduceus flashed back to his own first encounter with Zadash; how bright it was, resplendent with a thousand lamps and torches, and so full. People, noises, color. “It must have been overwhelming.”

“I was excited, but yes.” Caleb’s face maneuvered into the faintest smile, though a rather sad one. “And despite being impressed by my surroundings, I often missed the smells of Blumenthal. Of hay in the summer, of pine and mossy stones by running streams.”

“You were homesick,” Caduceus said, starting to understand why Caleb had chosen to share this. It was touchingly empathetic. Apparently, Caleb had many layers, one of which he was graciously drawing back for Caduceus to see. Emotion made Caduceus’s heart beat harder in response. It was kind, and Caduceus was sorely in need of kindness right now.

Caleb nodded in answer. “I had – at least I felt then – very important work to do, yet as proud as I was of being chosen, and despite my dedication to the Empire, there were still hollow days. Many of them, in the beginning.”

“Did it get any easier?”

“Yes,” Caleb answered. “And it has become easier still in the years since, though I still go back sometimes. Smells do it most often.”

Caduceus knew what he meant. He was often drawn back to the Blooming Groove by fragrances. Burning leaves as they passed a farm. Loam and mycelium. And, of course, the smell of tea. He had a particular blend at the bottom of his pack made from the plants of home. He had portioned it out carefully, yet even so he was down to the last few cups. He admitted to adding a few silent tears to this particular mixture, it put him so in mind of a cottage on the perimeter of a graveyard, with its pungent smell of weeds and vines and old-growth forest.

His reverie was shaken when – in a stroke of unexpected intimacy – Caleb laid his hand, almost uncomfortably hot, against Caduceus’s neck. “It does get better, Mister Clay. People…” He hesitated, grief streaking across his eyes. “People come to take the place of a physical home. Though that can bring its own griefs.”

Caduceus’s fists had loosened enough to reciprocate the comfort being offered. He touched Caleb’s knee. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Caleb didn’t say anything, but Caduceus recognized mourning. He wondered if it was for that Mollymauk fellow the Nein all thought so highly of, or if these waters went deeper still. “Anyway,” Caleb said. “I thought it might help to know that someone understands your feelings. In fact, many of us do. It’s just that we are further along the journey than you are.”

Caduceus thought about that. It left a taste in his mouth that was not altogether pleasant, this idea that home could become less dear as time went by. But the sentiment was kindly meant, and it did make him feel better. The heartache he felt was neither his alone nor of endless duration. The pain would not always be keen and overwhelming.

“Thank you, Mister Caleb.”

Another of those funny flinches, the ones that were only around the eyes and mouth, too faint to be seen by anyone whose perception wasn’t highly attuned.

“Does it bother you when I call you ‘mister’?”

There was a beat of strained silence in which Caduceus was certain Caleb would not answer, but in the end he made his confession. “It reminds me of someone I once knew. But that isn’t a good reason. You may call me whatever you like, Mister Clay. That is, after all, the prerogative of a friend.”

“Like when Jester calls me ‘Deuces.”

Caleb made an abbreviated sound, his version of laughter. “Ah. I’m afraid so, yes. I hope you know she means no harm. She’s fond of you.”

“I’m fond of her, too,” Caduceus admitted. His mind drifted to the embrace they’d shared on the deck a few hours ago. She’d wrapped her arms around his neck, and he’d buried his face in her shoulder. It had felt almost like holding onto his siblings, though she was so different from them.

“Jester was the first for me, too,” Caleb confessed. “Aside from Nott, of course. The first of them to cross the silver string without raising an alarm.”

Caduceus understood the reference to the spell Caleb frequently wove. It was a barrier, a protection, but those who were allowed to come close could do so with impunity. In the beginning, Caduceus feared he would never be allowed into that intimate circle, yet here they sat, with Caleb’s hand wedged into the space between Caduceus’s neck and shoulder, pressing warmth to the core of him. Surely that was a sign, right?

Caleb said, “You look tired.”

There was an ache in Caduceus’s bones, something deeper than physical exhaustion. He let the air out of his lungs, and it seemed to take the last of his energy with it. His eyelids sagged. “Very.”

“Is there something beside the cold making it difficult for you to sleep?”

Sluice.

Caduceus cleared his throat. “Does it…was it not so bad for you?” He’d heard Nott speaking to Caleb quietly after, asking if she’d hurt him with the potion she’d forced in his mouth. Like Caduceus, he’d come very close to drowning. No, they had drowned. As he understood it, Caleb had drowned several times. They just hadn’t died.

Caleb fingered the chain hanging around his neck, the one with the periapt. “It was harrowing. But again, I have the advantage of you.”

“You’ve drowned?”

Caleb shook his head. “No. Well, yes. But that did not make it less, just…perhaps, not as much a shock to body and spirit.”

Though Caduceus had met these people in extremis, he had only recently become aware of the casual violence inherent in the lives of the Mighty Nein, nor was all this violence a matter of pure survival. He was starting to understand money and why it was important, but he was still unclear what they were doing on this boat, bobbing over millions of metric tons of cold, dark ocean like a tiny cork in a bucket of water.

Caleb leaned in. “You’re shaking.”

And like an overburdened dam, something inside Caduceus burst. “I don’t understand,” he said plaintively. Though he resisted, tears gathered in his eyes and dampened the fur on either side of his nose. “What is this all for? Did it just happen, or did we do this on purpose? You all say so much, and sometimes you don’t say anything, like everyone already knows. But I don’t know. Was this something we decided, but I was just too stupid to understand?”

“Shh,” Caleb gentled him, but Caduceus wasn’t done.

He ended with the question he couldn’t let go of, the one which kept him from sleep, that had nipped at him since his first gasp when the waterspout in the Nicodranas sewers finally let him go. “What are we doing, Mister Caleb?”

Caleb looked at him, and Caduceus saw regret. “Caduceus, I fear we owe you an apology,” he said. “When we met, myself and the rest of the Nein, we were already a people unmoored. We had no home to return to, and our purposes were small – having enough to eat, making coin. We were, all of us, on the run, in one way or another. And so, we thought little about the future beyond the next job. As unalike as we were, we had that in common.” He paused. “You, on the other hand, are very different.”

Caduceus shivered. Though all his life he had known there were things about him that simply did not…fit the way others thought and felt, it had never bothered him. His family had celebrated difference, and with them he felt he belonged. Here… “Why does that make you want to apologize?”

“Because we haven’t been very fair, dragging you into the, erm,” he cleared his throat, “chaos that is the Mighty Nein.”

“It was my choice to come.” Not just his choice, but his calling. He’d felt certain that his way forward was with these people. His faith had drawn him alongside them after their initial fight against the slavers had ended. Yet now he was not so sure. Had his faith weakened so much?

“Perhaps,” Caleb said. “But you are our friend, and we have been a bit careless with you. I am sorry, Caduceus.”

The apology, sincerely meant, warmed Caduceus more thoroughly than any mere body heat could.

Caleb’s eyes drifted closed. “We should talk more in the morning, with the others. Though, for now, a bit of rest would be welcome.”

“None of the bunks are big enough for me,” Caduceus said.

Caleb’s teeth flashed. Not a smile, but its near approximation. “Did you know, for almost five years I never slept in a bed? The floor is a familiar friend.”

He stretched out some, which Caduceus took as an invitation to make himself more comfortable. He yawned as a soft, amorphous shape tied itself into a knot, pillowed between Caduceus’s cheek and shoulder. Despite Frumpkin’s less-than-comforting shape, he was almost as warm as his master, and when a tentacle curled under his chin, Caduceus couldn’t help but smile.

Today had been a lot, and the future promised more still, but no matter what happened, he wasn’t alone. He had Jester, with her hugs and her own brand of faith. He had Fjord and his clumsy attempts at comfort. He had Nott and Yasha and Beau, even if they were strange and fast and prone to unpredictable actions like stealing, leaving, and punching people. And he had Caleb, who had let him across the silver line.

And as the ship moved in a motion that now felt more like the rocking of the Wildmother than the jerking of a tempest, Caduceus closed his eyes, nestled close to a friend, and fell asleep.