Work Text:
One day the poet notices, without much fanfare, that he has spent half his life in the tower. The sixteen years he spent with his tutor are smudged with the hazy fog of old memory. The sixteen years he has lived in the tower have blended together, but the daily rituals stay crisp.
The poet wakes one morning with the knowledge that the Emperor, Eritanyr, is dead. The magic of the Empire hangs heavy on him then, without the counterbalance of its central anchor. Those are difficult days, where the simple action of reaching for incense to complete a ritual feels like an impossible task, and his own magic is so deeply smothered in the golden net of Astandalas that he cannot manage so much as a spark. For three days, he sleeps in a chair beside the altar; he cannot face dragging himself the meager distance to his bed only to have to find the will to return in the morning.
Then the golden strings stir again, and he knows without being told—for who is there to tell him?—that the heir, Shallyr Silvertongue, has been crowned hundredth Emperor of Astandalas. And, it would appear, the last, for sixteen days after the new emperor is bound into the fabric of the Empire, the Empire falls.
The poet feels as though he has spent his life underwater, and only just discovered that there is air beyond the surface.
For the first time, the golden net falls away, and only once it is gone does he notice how heavy it had lain on him. He had grown with it, breathed with it, followed its rhythms like the beating of his own heart. Now—
Once, when he was young, the poet descended the stairs of the tower and tried to open the door that he found there. The magic within it had howled his own fear right back at him, and he had gone back up the stairs and never ventured down them again.
Now that remembered fear is like a sigh, the merest wisp next to the freedom roaring in his ears. He does not know what it means, that the Empire has fallen, only that it has. The sprites in the tower, too, have been freed, and it is empty like a cavern is empty, a yawning, echoing, horrible place. The poet suspects it has always been that way, and the stillness is only allowing him to see it with fresh eyes.
He says aloud, “I am leaving.”
His voice is not rusty from disuse, like the books say it should be. He has taken to speaking, every now and then, and singing, more often. He hums to himself nearly constantly; the tower has always been too quiet otherwise. As he descends the steps of the tower, he sings to himself a song he wrote about a boy leaving home. Halfway down, he reaches a line about the boy picking up his rucksack, and says to himself, “Damn,” and turns around and goes back up the steps to pack.
He has never truly thought about leaving, not since the first time he tried the door. But nevertheless he has been preparing, just in case, as if the door lurked, always, just in the corner of his eye. He knows what he needs, he has a bag that can fit it all, and it takes him less than three-quarters of an hour to winnow sixteen years of his life into something that can be slung over his shoulder.
He sings all the way down the stairs, even when he starts running out of breath, and he is still singing as he walks out of the tower and goes to see what is left of the world.
For a time the poet wanders through what he thinks must be the Borderland. The landscape seems to change from moment to moment, here a merrily twittering forest and there a howling tundra, all shifting and eerie under a blanketing fog that seems to bounce the sound of his singing right back to him. He’s fairly sure that this is not how landscapes normally act, in any case.
When it doesn’t seem to be growing any darker, and his feet are more blister than skin, he decides to stop and make camp. He isn’t entirely sure what that entails—in the books they normally set up tents, or bedrolls, and he has neither—but he saw an illustration once of a campfire, made out of a little pyramid of sticks. He snaps a few branches and twigs off a nearby tree and sets about making what turns out to be more of a heap than a pyramid. Creating the fire is simple, of course, but he has trouble coaxing the wood to catch, and when it finally does it snaps and sizzles alarmingly before sputtering out. He frowns at the wood and tries again, and after a third attempt gives him a hacking lungful of smoke, decides it’s quite warm enough to do without.
The poet wraps himself snugly in a blanket pulled from his bag (after earlier attempts produced a medical textbook, two left shoes, and a broken compass), and goes on to have the worst sleep of his life, jumping awake at every unfamiliar noise. It’s also the most exciting thing he’s ever done. When he decides he’s slept long enough to consider it morning, he near springs up, gathers his things with an alacrity that would have shocked his old tutor into a heart attack, and sets off once more, with a breakfast of fresh fruit pulled from his bag as he walks.
He seems to pass from the Borderwood to a proper world in a single step. He knows it for Zunidh the moment his foot touches down, his own magic stirring to greet Zunidh’s like an old friend. But this is no part of Zunidh he’s ever seen—not that he’s seen much—white sand and the smell of salt, and sharp-winged birds crying overhead.
His first step into Zunidh has carried him between two tall, slender trees, with long fronds hanging high above his head, and onto a beach so blindingly white that he almost doesn’t notice the sea.
The sea! The poet has never seen a body of water larger than the pond near the Red House where he was raised. The sun glints off it in a million million places, and it goes on, and on, and on, until he is almost dizzy contemplating the sheer scale of it. In his wildest imaginations, he never knew anything could be so big.
He stands there for a time, marveling. He is considering how best to convey the enormity of it on the harp when his gaze follows the waves in to where they paw at the shore, and he notices for the first time that he is not alone.
A boat is pulled up above the tideline, of a design he doesn’t recognize with two hulls and a platform in between, and a large triangular sail crumpled and torn on the sand. Beside it, looking as battered and defeated as his boat, sits a sailor in nothing but a grass skirt, knees pulled up to his chest. He’s facing out towards the sea.
The poet goes very still. He hasn’t seen or spoken to another human being in sixteen years. His throat closes, and for the first time in his life, no words come.
A squat brown bird swoops, cackling, so close over his head that he can feel the wind from its wings, and he stumbles out from between the gateway of trees onto the sand. The sailor turns, the almost comical look of surprise on his face at odds with the tears streaking his cheeks, and the sailor and the poet stare at one another for what feels like an age, caught in mutual bewilderment at being in the presence of another person.
At last the sailor stands, revealing himself to be not tall, but broad and well-formed, with a plain and quiet strength evident in his legs and shoulders. His black hair hangs straight and ragged past his ears, and his eyes glint like a banked fire. The poet thinks he could write a hundred songs about those eyes.
The sailor tries three times before he speaks. “Do you live here?”
The poet starts in surprise at the thought that anyone could live anywhere like this, with the sun and the sand and the water, and a person to talk to. He says, “No. Do you?” He doesn’t say, If you lived here, I could live here.
The sailor looks at his boat with a kind of bitterness. “No.”
“Where do you live, then?”
The sailor’s chin jerks up; his stance shifts. He says, “My island is Loaloa, in the Vangavaye-ve.”
The poet says in surprise, “I’ve never heard of it.” In surprise because he has pored over every map he could find in the tower, memorized every place name, spent hours imagining himself in any and every place on the nine worlds.
“It’s in the Wide Seas on Zunidh,” the sailor says, a little sourly, and the poet thinks he might have been rude.
“Is that where we are now?”
“Somewhere,” the sailor agrees. He scowls out at the water. “I got lost.”
“Where were you trying to go?”
“Anywhere.” He picks up a length of rope, frayed at one end. “When the Empire fell, we were cut off from the rest of the world. I wanted to know if it was still there.” He drops the rope. “It was stupid. My mother was right, I should have stayed home.”
The poet does not say, But then I wouldn’t have met you. People don’t say that to people they’ve only just met, even in stories. He says instead, “If you were going anywhere, then you can’t be lost.” He smiles, meets those sharp ember eyes. The sailor softens a little, looking back at him, then frowns, a crease marring the line of his brow. (The poet wants to smooth it away with a touch, wants to sing until he knows what those eyes look like smiling.)
The sailor looks at the poet, takes in his clothes—scarlet tunic, sky blue mantle, trouser knees grass-stained—and says, “Where did you come from? You don’t have a boat.”
The poet gestures at his tree gate. “The Borderwood.” He studies it for a moment. “I think it’s closed, now.”
The sailor raises his eyebrows. “What would you have done if no one was here?”
The poet shrugs. “Something would have come up.” It always did in the stories. They wouldn’t be much in the way of stories otherwise. He gestures towards the boat, makes a little bow. “May I beg a ride on your boat? I can offer songs, or labor, though—” he eyes the sailor’s arms, strong and golden-brown in the sun “—I may not be much more than a pair of hands, in that regard.”
The sailor smiles for the first time, like the earliest rays of dawn stretching over the horizon. “If you could fly off this island on your own wings, I would still have asked you to sail with me. I’ve been alone a long time.”
The poet says, “You’re the first human being I’ve spoken to in sixteen years.”
The sailor gapes at him. “Not that long.”
The poet has never before met anyone without magic. He has not met very many people—a bare dozen, which he thinks is probably unusually low—but they all had at least a flickering spark of magic, enough to perform the handy little cantrips of light or lifting stains. (He has also never met anyone with as much magic as he has, even the priests that bound him.)
Nevertheless, the sailor has no magic. The poet had always somewhat romantically imagined that magic was a necessity for life. But here is the sailor, very much alive, without a drop of magic to speak of. The poet thinks that the quick, easy movements of his hands as he lights a fire or twists grasses into rope is a kind of magic, anyhow. From nothing, something. From something, anything.
The poet learns that dead and dried plants make better fuel for a fire. He learns which of the living plants growing under the trees will soothe his blistered feet. He learns that a fire can be made without magic, with nothing but sticks and rocks, and spends an eager half hour trying to replicate the technique as the sailor scatters embers across the beach in careful patterns that feel like music.
The sun dips towards the horizon like a burning coal. The sailor is waiting for something, standing so motionless that the poet has to remind himself to breathe. With a feeling like a sigh, like a song, like a beginning, the sun touches the sea, and the sailor begins to dance.
To say that the poet has never seen anything like it is so misleading as to be a blatant untruth. The poet has never seen anything like the ocean, or the two-hulled canoe, or the squat brown bird that sits in a nearby tree and cackles, and yet these are mere trifles in the shadow of the sailor’s dance. The poet thinks perhaps he should fear that the sailor’s grass skirt will catch fire, that his feet will blister and burn, but such things seem impossible in midst of the timeless, breathless solidity, the careful turns, the angle of wrists and elbows, the hiss of the embers under the sailor’s song. The poet can feel the rhythm of it, like the heartbeat of the world, and without meaning to finds himself keeping time.
The dance is not impressive in its speed, which is steady and strong and slow; nor in its acrobatic feats, which are few. There is no magic in it, neither wild nor Schooled; nevertheless it contains magic in a way the poet has never known. He sees the map take shape on the beach, islands and currents and winds and the vast stretch of sea. He thinks the sea, the dance, might go on forever.
But of course, it doesn’t. The last lingering rays disappear below the horizon, and the dance ends as it began, with the sailor’s feet planted solidly in the sand. His breath comes in great heaves where he stands with his back to the water. The poet is able to hold on to the sense of the map for a moment longer, two, and then it slips away like wind, and the sailor walks to the edge of the tide and plunks himself down in it.
The poet goes to sit beside him, wiggling his toes in the damp sand. "That was magnificent," he says, though the words feel inadequate.
When the sailor has caught his breath, he says, “It’s never been so clear before. I think I know where to go now. Once I’ve mended the sail, we can leave.” He sighs, all the strength and energy of the dance bled out of him. "But not tonight." When he lays back on the sand, the wavelets creep up to play with his hair.
“I can help with that, I think. The sail.” The poet scrambles to his feet and skirts around the smoldering stretch of embers, which seems much smaller now than it had before. He finds the sail, now draped forlornly over the side of the canoe, and brings it back. “May I?”
The sailor, still supine in the tide, nods, and turns his head towards the poet to watch.
The poet probes at the rend with his fingers and his magic. He can feel the fibers reaching for each other, and coaxes them gently, gently, encouraging them to remember when they were once whole. He doesn’t set the sail on fire even a little. When the sailor sits up, the poet passes it to him with a thrum of pride.
“That’s incredible,” the sailor says, running his hands over the spot where the tear had been, now nearly invisible, even had it not been dusk. “You’re incredible.” He looks up and meets the poet’s eyes over the sail, an easy smile on his face, and they’re both still gripping the cloth, their hands nearly close enough to touch. The poet grins back at him, almost giddy with the magic and the dance and the nearness of those fire-spark eyes.
The sailor’s voice is low, and hums with a meaning the poet longs to uncover, when he says, “What is your name?”
The poet has a name. No one has ever spoken it but him, whispered and sung and screamed in the hollowness of his tower, only ever coming back to him in echoes. The poet says, “My name is Fitzroy.”
“Fitzroy.” The name falls from the sailor’s lips like it’s nothing, like it’s everything, like he’s found an unexpected treasure. The poet could cry, but he doesn’t; he doesn't want to look away. “My name is Kip.”