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“Any day now, Enthir,” drones the thin, tired voice of the Arch-Mage. She’s leaning against the stone frame of the doorway, adjusting her jewelry.
Enthir shuffles around the impact site that is his lab, sweeping aside all manner of detritus with the back of his hand: blotchy papers, chipped test tubes, uncorked amber-tinted reagent bottles, hunks of what looks like iron laced with shimmering olivine veins. A magnificent silver cauldron glows in the center of his workbench, marred by a huge slash of blackened patina.
“I assure you my space doesn’t normally look like this,” he says, and knocks over a fleshy plant specimen that shrieks when it hits the floor. Neither of them flinch. “I’ve got a contract to devise some… summoning techniques. Thought I’d experiment in here before taking it down to the forge. Mitigating risk, and all. I know you prefer that.”
The Arch-Mage huffs snidely. As he putters back and forth, redistributing the unholy mess, he tries not to lift his head to look at her. He can feel her eyes on him, watching him boredly; he knows she’s exhausted today, and impatient always, and yet somehow her gaze on his back feels elegant, softly resigned as if she were apprehending the rolling ocean waves or imminent doom. He’s unsure if she’s gotten better or worse at holding it together. He’s unsure if anyone ever notices that there are things in her that have no real structural integrity, that if the wind blew across the Sea of Ghosts in a certain direction she might scatter and disperse on the breeze.
He finds that he doesn’t mind being watched. After a point he’s decided to start fussing with the amber cabochons his patron sent him, deliberating where they might settle amongst the chaos of overflowing surfaces. The pale arctic light streaming in through the high window glints off them, and they sparkle like crystallized drops of honey in his hands. The Arch-Mage makes another small noise of displeasure.
“Sorry,” Enthir rushes to say, and puts them down. “I’m just thinking. My head’s still in the work. I know I have my list of expenditures here somewhere. I pay for most things out of my own pocket, as always.” Finally he glances up at her. “You might as well take a seat, Arch-Mage.” Gesturing with a tilt of his head: “There’s a clear chair over there.”
She nods and peels herself off the granite wall, moving to claim the odd dining chair repurposed from the refectory. The clack of her nails against her enameled earrings sets the rhythm for Enthir’s continued squirreling about, shoving equipment here and there, fishing through teetering piles of ingredients, until at last he seizes the paper scrawled with his petty cash receipts. He waves it in the air and then marches over to present it to her triumphantly. “Three-hundred seventy-six gold,” he says. “And not a drake more. As promised.”
“You said three-hundred fifty-nine gold,” the Arch-Mage replies.
“I bought a big sandwich at the Frozen Hearth yesterday.”
The Arch-Mage takes the list from him with a sigh, her downward gaze along the crabbed items and numbers revealing her blue-lacquered eyelids. Eventually she is satisfied and slips the paper into the pocket of her robes. Then she looks up again, and her eyes catch something behind Enthir, in the far corner of the room.
“Are you using that or selling it?” she asks. Enthir’s face scrunches in bewilderment as he looks over his shoulder: then he notices the lute.
He laughs. “I own that. I can strum a few chords, believe it or not. An old friend taught me.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Do I need to prove it to you?”
“Yes.” The Arch-Mage’s mouth quirks slightly, almost imperceptibly. “Boss’s orders.”
Enthir smirks and turns to fetch the lute. It’s a slender swan-necked piece hewn from unvarnished spruce, etched about the belly with simple Rift fretwork. He cleans a space on his haphazard workbench and perches upon it like a ragged passerine, gingerly cradling the instrument in his lap.
A few moments pass; the awkward quiet stretches taut in the air. “I’ve got no idea what to play,” Enthir admits.
“I thought you can only do a few chords.”
“Alright, enough. I can play a full song.”
“Just the one? Then why the indecision?”
He means to fix her with a look of irritation. He sees that she’s smiling.
Surprised, he can’t help but smile back.
“How about this, then,” he says with bravado, plucking randomly at the strings. He coaxes the melody from the lute like he’s pulling it out of the ground, grasping inquisitively under the darkness and unsure of what will emerge. Soon the form of it becomes clear to him: his hands are playing an old Bos folk song. The melody meanders along, lingering inquisitively upon every few notes, rounding them out and letting their delicate timbre shine in the cold hollows of his room.
He glances up at the Arch-Mage again. “I can’t sing,” he warns as he continues to strum.
“Then please don’t,” she replies. “Neither can I. What’s it about?”
Sudden shyness overtakes him. The music rings in the width of his silence. In these thirty-odd years, holed up in this icy burrow of a laboratory, Enthir’s never been asked for context. No one risks demanding provenance; he deals in objects without origin, actions without due cause, and over time his own person has become just another inexplicable fixture of the building. A full accounting would locate him in a real sequence of events that at this point he’s unsure he could convey or comprehend. He doesn’t know what to say.
“It’s about nothing,” he finally answers. “Just a tune.”
The Arch-Mage extends a leg to nudge him peevishly with her foot. “No, or you wouldn’t have mentioned singing. What are the lyrics, Enthir? Tell me.”
He’s unable to further hesitate at the spur of her touch. "Oh, it’s an old Green Hall lay. Concerns a lying pauper making out to be a Namespinner, unweaving lovers’ nymics and whatnot.” A few more notes and he dares to add: “A bit silly to transcribe it to a Nord lute. Of course we played it on the chelys down in Grahtwood.”
This astonishes the Arch-Mage, as her face opens and stares at him with wide tawny-colored eyes. “I didn’t know you were born in Valenwood,” she says.
Enthir raises an eyebrow that he hopes suggests amusement rather than incredulity. “Why is that surprising?” he asks. “Because I don’t keep Pact like you?”
“No, don’t be absurd. I just thought—well, you’ve never really brought it up in all these years. I would imagine it’d be important to you…”
“Not every Bosmer has to wear it on the outside.”
The Arch-Mage leaps to her feet. “How dare you patronize me,” she snaps, whirling indignantly on her heel, and making for the door.
Music vanquished, Enthir drives the lute off his lap like it’s on fire, springing to catch her before she vanishes over the threshold. “Satu, Satu,” he blurts out, scrambling for her arm, “that’s not what I meant. I didn’t mean it like that. Come back, sit down. Don’t slip away misunderstanding. Let me explain myself to you.”
She rather lets herself be caught than fails to exit, hovering angrily in the doorway. Glaring over her shoulder at him, she then turns and acquiesces with silence back into her chair.
“Thank you,” Enthir sighs. He resumes his own place upon the workbench. Sitting here, he now feels like a contrived art piece propped up for display, or an anatomical model. The Arch-Mage has him pinned by her eyes.
He takes a breath and begins to unravel. “I grew up in a small graht-town called Cormount,” he says. “It used to be something once, I think, to the Camorans. But you know, Satu, the Dominion made life in Valenwood… unpalatable. Untenable. I always wanted to be a scholar and there was nowhere for a Bosmer to be a scholar or a king in his own home. And I never got on with my family anyway. So I crossed the Strid.”
A self-conscious pause. He smiles for lack of other recourse. “Even that’s the most I’ve told anyone in years. But our lives are long. Maybe I’ve forgotten how it goes.”
“Have you ever gone back?” the Arch-Mage asks.
“No.”
“Do you want to?”
“No.”
Quietly: “I do.”
Enthir smiles again, in anguish, wrenching his gaze up from where it’s been dwelling on the safety of the floor to meet her. Her expression has melted into pain. Wreathed in her marten-trim mantle, sorrowfully bowing her small head dangling with handmade jewels, she looks so abrupt, so gruesomely out of place that his heart slams in outrage against his throat. “I know,” he murmurs back. “I’m sorry.”
Neither of them speak for several beats. The Arch-Mage rises from her seat, and Enthir makes an involuntary movement, fearing she’s leaving again. To his faint amazement, however, she circles around him to rescue the lute he had flung so disdainfully away. She returns and places it in his hands.
“You remember one thing,” she says. “You remember the song. Play it for me again, even on this human’s instrument. Go on.”
Mystified, he obeys, his fingers caressing the gut strings without conscious thought. His eyes are on her. Watching her brighten as the crisp sound fills the room once more, her face suffusing with light and longing, the tremble of her shoulders as she sinks helplessly back into her chair. The music is a telekinetic pull through which Enthir scrabbles together a makeshift shelter, pieced from Greensong played on another land’s culture in a disastrous laboratory, from dry salted sea air, from desolate woodless plains of snow, and he places it over her. Now he can’t see her, because as the otherworldly lullaby winds to a close, her face is in her hands.
He frets over what to do, gently lying down the lute and making to comfort her, but then she draws her hands away, and she has smoothed completely over. As if she hadn’t heard a thing, the joy and eating grief hinted only by a creeping ghost of a smile.
“Satu,” he says despairingly, as if incanting her name could will her back.
“Arch-Mage. Arch-Mage”—a pause—“Enthir.” She stands and straightens out her dark woolen robes. “How the time has flitted by. I have to go take your receipts to Tolfdir. I swear, we need to hire someone who actually knows how to do the books… but without knowing how to do the books, we don’t have the funds…” And muttering to herself she disappears through the doorway, wisping like smoke subsumed into the damp crypt-like passages of the Hall of Attainment, floating aloft on spectral hands.