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Essek was doing the thing Caleb often did when they took a rest between fights, Jester noticed. The details were not exactly the same, of course; Essek’s spell book looked very different to Caleb’s, the small motes of light that danced around his hands and fingers as he muttered under his breath were a shade of purple rather than rich golden-orange, and he sat kneeling on the snow rather than that odd half-cross-legged position Caleb took, apparently to be kinder on his knees. But he was certainly performing the same ritual.
Jester recognised some of the incantations Essek repeated under his breath. She could hear Caleb muttering the same fifteen feet away. Essek was a little over five minutes ahead of Caleb though, from what Jester could gather, and was nearing the end of the recovery ritual.
She sighed as Fjord soothed the last of her injuries with a hefty healing spell. Now the only sign of the attacks that left her all but helpless during the fight were some gashes in her clothing and some flecks of ice in her hair.
“Thanks, Fjord.”
“No problem.” He kissed her on the cheek before getting to his feet and walking over to Caduceus, who was keeping a close eye on the horizon.
Jester brushed the last of the ice from her hair and crawled across the cold rocky ground towards Essek. His eyes were closed, his hands hovered over his open spell book, and the little grey-purple lights danced like fireflies. She considered poking him, just to see what happened, before recalling how frustrated Caleb generally became when his concentration was broken by distractions.
However, it was only another minute before Essek sighed and opened his eyes. He shut the spell book and whisked it away into that strange invisible pocket.
Jester quietly clapped her hands. Essek, seemingly unaware of her approach until now, jolted and blinked at her.
“All done now?” she asked.
“Ah, yes, the recovery process is complete,” he said hesitantly. “Were you waiting for me? Sorry if—”
“No, no,” she said, waving her hands. “We’re not in a hurry just yet. I just wanted to watch, you know? Not in a creepy way. No way. I just think it’s cool how your spells look so different from Caleb’s even when they’re the same spells. You know?”
Essek stared at her. “I suppose I can understand the curiosity.”
Now that they sat side by side Jester was treated to a front-row seat for what she considered a prime example of Essek’s effortless beauty. She recalled, the very first time they had met, teasing him in the way she did anyone whom she found attractive. She also recalled noticing that, at the time, at least half of the others in the group had certainly noticed the same about Essek. He was difficult to ignore in that way.
Although the exoticism had long worn off by now, Jester still enjoyed his face in the way anyone would a familiar masterpiece painting, or their favourite song. Maybe that was a weird thing to think. She didn’t care much. She thought his eyes were pretty.
She also liked his sugar-white hair and long eyelashes and his funny little smile. She liked his fancy earrings and gentle accent. She liked how he floated, like the balloons they would send up over the rooftops of Nicodranas at every new year festival.
Jester frowned at Essek. Confused, Essek frowned back.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“Your earrings, Essek!” exclaimed Jester, distraught. “Where’d they go?”
She pointed to his ear, then waved her finger up and down the length of it, indicating the three or four empty punctures that until recently (or at least, until the first time they had visited Essek at the outpost) had held a wonderful collection of glittering studs and chains. Even the shiny silver cuff at the tip of his ear was gone.
“I loved them so much,” said Jester, suddenly aware of Caleb still concentrating on his ritual nearby. She lowered her voice even further to a near-whisper. “I never said so because I guess I didn’t want to get too personal, you know, but I really thought they were very pretty. Why did you take them off?”
Essek smiled thinly. “You thought that asking me about my earrings would be too personal ?”
She nodded. “Yes?”
“Hm. Okay.”
“Aren’t they like, symbols of authority or something? Like merit badges? Are they super valuable? Does one of them represent your rank in the Dynasty? Oh my gosh, did you take them off because, like, they represent your loyalty to the Dynasty and now you’re on our team so you’re more loyal to us, so you took them off and stuff?”
Essek blinked a few times. “…No,” he said slowly. “None of that. They do not represent anything. I wear them because I like how they look.”
“Oh! Same.”
“I took them off because it is very cold here, as you might have noticed, and if I were to keep them in my ears while travelling through the arctic weather, I would risk frostbite.” He rubbed his right ear uneasily. “The super-chilled metal would damage my skin very quickly.”
“That makes sense.” Jester looked at his ears again. The skin around his earlobe already looked chapped from the cold, like everyone else’s lips and noses, and possibly even a little sunburnt at the tip. “You’re very smart, Essek. I wouldn’t have thought of that.”
“Well, you are somewhat hardier than I am against the cold,” he said. “Isn’t that so?”
She brightened. “Yep!”
“Then you needn’t worry about it. You may wear as much jewellery as you wish to.” He gave her a tight smile and shifted his seated position, apparently under the impression that their conversation had been completed.
“When you say that you wear the earrings because you like how they look,” Jester blithely went on, “are they all yours? Like, did you buy all of them yourself or are any of them gifts?”
Essek looked at her with some apprehension. “One or two in my collection are in fact gifts, but I do not wear those.”
“No?”
“No. They are less my style and…and frankly, wearing those gifted items in public would send an unfortunate message.”
Jester blinked, then gasped. “ Oh , they were like courting gifts?”
Essek looked away and cleared his throat. “Yes. Unfortunately. But—I, ah, I like yours too,” he said, gesturing blindly to the chain connected to her left horn. “They are pretty.”
“Oh my gosh, thank you Essek! My mama gave me these,” she explained, fiddling with the chain. “She had them made by a super fancy jeweller in Nicodranas for my birthday ages ago. Oh, oh! You know what, Essek?”
He glanced back at her, still visibly nervous.
“I should totally get you some jewellery from Nicodranas! You’ll love it. And don’t worry, Essek,” she said, wiggling her brows, “It’s not a courting gift this time. Just a normal gift from a friend, you know?”
Essek opened and closed his mouth like a fish for a moment. He appeared to have been stunned into silence.
Jester ploughed on. “I think you’d really like some of the pretty gemstones that come through the port, Essek, they’re so pretty. I have a ring with an emerald in it that was made in the city but the emerald, well, the emerald is from a totally other continent. It’s super cool. Would you like something like that? I bet you’d look so sexy with Nicodranian jewellery in your ears.”
Essek flapped his mouth a few more times before settling on making a vague vowel sound that Jester took to be an agreement.
“Great!” Jester clapped her hands with cheerful finality.
Apparently, the energy and excitement of the conversation had let Jester become carried away. Once the idea settled in her mind, reality quickly faded back into view, and Jester sobered.
The thought of returning to Nicodranas was warm and comfortable, as always, but it was shortly accompanied by a horrible stabbing sadness that swept away any nostalgia that Jester might have wished to cling to. She could feel the grin slipping from her face. Quickly, she stamped down the train of thought and focussed back onto Essek’s face.
But his expression had changed somewhat. His nervousness had given way to a kind of tentative concern. She may not have hidden her worry quick enough that time.
“Jester?”
“Hm?”
“Would you like to see my earrings?” he asked.
“You have them with you? I thought you left them at the outpost.”
“I never said that. I removed them while I prepared for this outing earlier today, but I have taken them with me. They are in my wrist pocket – the interdimensional space where I hold my spell book and valuable components.”
“Your—” She gasped and straightened where she sat. “Oooh, show me, show me!”
Essek flicked his left hand, summoning a thin blue line that hovered in space like a wire, which split open above his open palm. A small series of silver objects tumbled into his hand. The tiny floating portal closed with a quiet zipping noise.
“These are the earrings I was wearing last your group spoke to me at the outpost,” said Essek as he poked through the pile of silver in his left palm. “None are particularly extravagant, given that I have not been attending any formal gatherings of late, for obvious reasons. They are also rather short, not excessively…um, dangly, so that they would not become tangled in my furs.”
Jester peered into his hand at the earrings. She recognised some, a couple that she remembered having seen him wear before, such as a small diamond stud and a drop earring in the shape of a delicate four-pointed star. All were highly reflective and elegant, as polished as Essek’s own veneer.
“This one is new,” she said, pointing at an inch-long cuff. Minute engravings in the silvery surface appeared to be in Undercommon, foreign curling characters following the curve of the metal. “I’ve never seen you wear it before, I think.”
Essek stared at the cuff. He picked it up between thumb and forefinger and frowned. “Hm. I suppose I must have picked it up from my home the last time I visited Rosohna. My brother has a matching one. We used to wear them, as boys, when we were taken to formal functions together with the Den.”
“What do those words mean?”
“It is a poem. Well, fragments of a poem. It is the kind of poem our children are taught at a very young age, about good behaviour and family honour – dreadful stuff really.”
“Like a nursery rhyme?”
Essek smiled grimly. “Sort of. As rotten as it is, I still remember every line of the damn thing. Perhaps it is nostalgia,” he muttered, dropping the engraved cuff back into the pile in his hand, “only nostalgia that made me take it with me.”
Jester smiled at the cuff and the other earrings. “Well, now I know that I was right, actually. I was right all along.”
“Pardon?”
“Your jewellery does have secret meanings.”
Essek scoffed. “Maybe. And my thumb-ring will tell you my birthdate.”
“Ha! Well, I’ll figure that out too eventually, Essek,” said Jester, wiggling a finger at him. “I always find the truth, you see. I am a great detective.”
Essek smiled and closed his fingers over the earrings, then paused. He opened his hand again and began assiduously prodding at the pile, making tiny metallic clinking noises as he pushed them around his palm, brow furrowed by intense focus. Jester watched with curiosity.
After a moment Essek emerged from his search with a pair of dangly earrings hanging from his forefingers. It was the four-pointed star Jester recognised; Essek had worn them a lot around the group since they met.
“These…” began Essek. He cleared his throat. “You may wear these if you like, Jester. I will not be wearing them, of course, but given that you are not prone to frostbite, it seems fit that if anyone were to wear them in the meantime it should be you. They are one of my favourite pairs and I have owned them for several decades now, and I believe they would suit you also. If you do not care for them, Jester, that is fine, entirely fine. I will put them away along with the others into my wrist pocket at once. I will not be offended, I promise. But if you do in fact like them and would like to hold them for me during this expedition, so to speak, I will gladly let you do so and wear them.”
Essek finished with a gulp and clumsily put his hand out towards her, making the stars clink together.
Jester touched her fingertip to an earring. “They are very pretty.”
He said nothing. His lips were pressed together into an uncomfortable thin line.
“I’ll wear them,” said Jester. “I want to wear them,” she amended, “because they’re very pretty and they make you even prettier when you wear them, Essek.”
Essek nodded. His hand remained hovering awkwardly in the air between them.
“Just a moment.”
Jester removed her earmuffs and began fiddling with her own earrings. They were simple malachite studs; she hadn’t thought it worth the trouble to wear anything fancier when they would be covered by the fur of the earmuffs anyway. Once she held the studs in her palm, she took the dangly stars from Essek. Essek wordlessly put his other hand out to take her malachite studs. Jester smiled and dropped them in his palm, then watched as he disappeared her earrings along with his discarded collection into the tiny portal.
Finally, with a happy little glow in her chest, Jester fixed Essek’s tiny stars to her ears. While they weren’t warm, they weren’t cold either, evidently protected from the chill by Essek’s pocket dimension.
“They do look good on you,” commented Essek. He folded his hands on his lap and gave her a serious look. “You should keep them.”
Jester balked. “What? No way! They’re yours, Essek!”
He blinked at her. “Oh. Is this not an appropriate gift?”
She blinked back. She had a lot more to teach him than she first thought, apparently. “Um, no, not really.”
His face fell at once. He looked like he was about to apologise, so Jester quickly jumped into action.
“Essek! How about I hold onto them just for now, okay? I’ll wear them until we win the big fight. Until the world is saved. Once the city is destroyed or Lucien is dead, or whatever, I’ll give them back. Okay?”
Essek stared at her with wide eyes and nodded.
“It’s a promise,” said Jester. “We’ll survive and I’ll give you your stars back.”
“Okay.”
Jester quickly clasped his hands between her own, making him jump in surprise, like usual. “You’re the best, Essek,” she told him. “You’re doing so good.”
He still looked rather baffled and frightened, but a nervous kind of glee shone in his eyes through it regardless. “I’m doing this right? Are you certain?”
“You’re doing great. I love the earrings so much .” Jester grinned and turned around, still holding one of Essek’s hands, and faced Caleb.
Caleb, who had apparently finished his ritual some time ago, was staring back at her with an unreadable expression. She had no idea how much of their conversation he had overheard.
“Oh,” she said, still grinning. “Hi, Caleb.” While riding an unstoppable wave of enthusiasm, she fiddled with the earring hanging from her left ear, hoping to make the silver sparkle like a shooting star, and added, “these are Essek’s, you know. He’s lending me them. Am I as pretty as him now?”
Without a word, Caleb stood and walked away. His eyes were wide like a frightened animal.
“Hm. Weird.” Jester turned back to Essek, who had covered his face with the hand she did not hold. “If only his ears were pierced too. You could have given him one of your other pairs.”
“His ears would frostbite,” mumbled Essek from behind his hand.
“Oh, right.”