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Some hours after nightfall on the Day of Heart and Hearth, as a warm breeze greeted merrymakers on the streets of Nicodranas and the gentle glow of Catha trimmed the waves in silver, Fjord stood outside and waited for permission to enter his own home.
He was used to this. Sometimes Jester bought something weird in the market and felt compelled to prepare a grand reveal. Other times, she made a mess in the pursuit of her art, and she was still scrambling to clean it up when he arrived. As he could attest, nothing said “welcome home” like two gallons of vibrant pink paint splattered across a hardwood floor.
But today seemed different.
“Almost ready!” the tiefling sang out from inside the house. “Are you excited?”
“For whatever horrors await me? . . . Always, my love.”
Another minute passed. Then there was a patter of footsteps, and the door cracked open—but scarcely by an inch. All Fjord could see was one violet eye, and it was giving him a look of warning.
“Don’t be a humbug,” Jester ordered.
“A what?”
“I don’t know. I heard Caleb say that once, and it sounds like something you’d be.”
With a sigh, Fjord moved forward, but Jester stopped him. Close your eyes, she said, and he did. Give me your hand, she said, and he did.
Until finally, she allowed him inside.
Believe it or not, Jester hadn’t spent much time planning this surprise for Fjord—because she’d had other plans all together. They weren’t supposed to spend the holiday in Nicodranas. They were supposed to be with the Nein.
But then Veth and Yeza received word from an ailing relative—
—and one of Caduceus’s siblings unexpectedly returned home from her travels—
—and Caleb and Beau had another corrupt wizard to investigate—
—and in the face of these many mundane obstacles, the only choice was to postpone.
Though Jester had rarely felt so disappointed, she was determined not to show it. This sort of thing was bound to happen, wasn't it? . . . Why not view it as an opportunity? . . . If she couldn’t frolic with her friends, she could still caper with her captain.
“You’ve been up to something,” Fjord remarked warily, keeping his eyes shut as she closed the door. “I’m not sure why I’d expect otherwise, though.”
Jester grinned. Had he noticed that the house felt strangely cool and dry? Did he hear the fireplace crackling and smell the hints of pine, cinnamon, and cloves wafting on the air?
She was a genius.
“No peeking!” she said as she tiptoed past him. She had to retrieve his gift: a cozy crimson sweater embroidered with little white sheep. In her opinion, its softness and warmth could only be compared to the loving embrace of a yeti.
(Which she knew because she was wearing a matching one in forest green, and also because she’d once hugged a yeti.)
Now, her prize in hand, Jester crept forward as quietly as she could. She stopped before Fjord—and she gave him a loving look—and then, without a shade of warning, she pulled the garment over his head.
“Are you putting a fucking sweater on me right now?” Fjord said with alarm, trying to wriggle away from her.
“It’s part of the experience!” Jester insisted. “Besides, you’re going to complain about being cold if I don’t.”
“When do I ever—”
“Always. Every single time.”
Fjord gave an indignant huff, but he didn’t struggle any further. At the end, Jester turned and pressed her back against his chest, bringing his arms around her.
“Okay!” she said. “Now you can look.”
So, Fjord looked. And what to his wondering eyes should appear? . . . Their house, looking like a storage room for a Zemnian holiday market.
In truth, the effect Jester had probably been going for was “snowbound cabin in the Flotket Alps”—but she’d gone a tad overboard. All of the major landmarks had been transformed: The couch, now slung with knitted blankets and piled high with festive accent pillows. The mantel, dressed with an evergreen garland and alight with a dozen pillar candles. The kitchen—still an absolute disaster, but there was comfort in that consistency.
Strangest of all, there appeared to be snow piling up against the frosted windowpanes, and a sound like a winter wind was creeping in. It gave Fjord a chill, and in that moment, he appreciated his new sweater.
Not that he’d admit it.
“Did you force Artagan to decorate our house?” the half-orc asked, bewildered.
“I asked Artie to decorate our house,” Jester corrected him. “We only practice consensual divine intervention.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But it wasn’t all him! Look at what I added!”
All eagerness, Jester began to point out her contributions: the wreaths, the crystalline ornaments, and the tinsel they’d be finding around the house for months to come. She explained how she’d spoken to the Nein about their favored holiday traditions and taken inspiration from what they described.
Finally, she brought him to the rare jewel of their holiday décor: a tiny tree with silvery needles that glinted in the candlelight. When Fjord asked if it was also an archfey’s doing, Jester looked guilty.
“This? No. I, uh . . . I had this imported.”
Fjord watched the tiefling rock on her heels and fiddle with one of the fir’s branches. Hmm. Where had he seen one of these trees before?
Oh, right.
Xhorhas.
“. . . You had it teleported,” Fjord realized aloud. “Jester, you can’t use our wizard friends as a delivery service! Also, bringing in foreign plants is incredibly illegal.”
With a roll of her eyes, Jester took his hand and pulled him toward the couch. “Like you know anything about that!” she said, and Fjord turned his nose up at her.
“I do, actually. I run a business called Stone’s Throw Shipping—maybe you’ve heard of it.”
His haughty tone made Jester laugh—a sweeter sound than any of the music Fjord had heard on his walk back from the docks. He was surprised that Jester wanted to be here, alone with him, rather than crashing a party somewhere. Wouldn’t she prefer to be whirling him around a dance floor, or better yet, painting something pornographic on a nobleman’s carriage?
Instead, Jester sat him down and retrieved their refreshments: a glass of mulled wine for him, and a cup of hot cocoa for her.
“I see you've bought a bear skin rug,” Fjord remarked as she placed the drinks on the coffee table. Jester nodded, making the bells on her horns jingle brightly.
“Yes! We’re going to have sex on that later.”
“Is that . . . also a tradition?”
When the tiefling shrugged, Fjord didn’t question the idea any further. She knew best—and far be it from him to deny them a new experience.
Now, with visible excitement, Jester revealed the evening’s special activity. It would call upon her dexterity and creative talent, along with his decisive nature and keen sense of spatial reasoning. In fact, she said, it would test their very compatibility as a couple, as they ventured to achieve a shared artistic vision.
“This sounds a little intense,” Fjord said, feeling like a man in peril. “Couldn’t we just enjoy these drinks and—”
“No, Fjord.”
“—play a game, or—”
“No, Fjord,” Jester said again, just as sweetly. “We’re going to build a fucking gingerbread house.”
It seemed to take Fjord a moment to place that terminology—“gingerbread house”—and make sense of what she was suggesting. Jester knew that he’d seen these elaborate confections on their travels, though he probably hadn’t paid them any mind, and he’d certainly never dreamed of making one.
Alas, here he was, passionately in love with a woman who had a passion for sweets—and now, she was arranging all the necessary supplies on the table before him.
“You know you can’t eat the house at the end, right?” Fjord pointed out.
“No, but I can eat the broken parts now!” Jester said, popping a piece into her mouth.
As the tiefling settled down onto the floor, she could see Fjord taking stock of what she’d brought. There were pieces of gingerbread baked into particular shapes: the framework of the house and other accessories. There were the various candies for decoration—from gumdrops to sprinkles to thin strips of fruit leather—and there was frosting in a half-dozen different colors, most of it already stuffed into piping bags.
When Fjord picked up one of the larger pieces of gingerbread, Jester caught a look of worry in his eyes. He glanced at her—started to say something—and then, he appeared to change course.
“Did you melt sugar for the windows?” he marveled. “That’s very clever.”
“I am very clever.”
“And humble,” Fjord agreed in amusement. “Where do we start, then?”
Jester moved an empty platter between them to serve as a base, and then she picked up one of the piping bags. Wasn’t it obvious? . . . They had to begin with something that every home must have: a strong foundation.
Fjord hid it well enough, but he harbored some doubts about this activity. For one thing, he could tell that some of the gingerbread pieces that ought to have matched just . . . didn’t. Which meant that whatever they were building wasn’t going to be structurally sound.
Which meant that the likely result of their efforts would be a pile of crumbs.
“It’s crooked,” Fjord said, hesitating to lift his hands away as they finished fitting the walls together.
“It’s meant to be! Now, time to add the other room.”
Fjord watched as Jester pieced together the rest of the house, almost afraid to breathe on it. She’d made such a valiant effort to preserve their holiday cheer, and he didn’t want to see her disappointment if it all fell apart—literally or figuratively.
But Jester was nimble, and the next thing Fjord knew, he was being handed a piping bag filled with icing the color of terracotta.
“What if I work on the sides and the front while you do the roof?” Jester suggested.
“And . . . how do I . . . ?”
“Like this!”
Smiling, the tiefling demonstrated how he should “paint” the roof, tile by tile. Then she left him to it, and she began to add siding onto the house. By some miracle, the structure stood firm, and they spent the next half-hour chatting idly as they added detail to it. Now and then, Jester would guide his hand in drawing a slipped tile—and all the while, Fjord stole glances at her, enjoying how the firelight wreathed her in a glow.
“I'm sorry that it’s just the two of us this year,” he remarked after a time, and Jester knitted her brow.
“What's there to be sorry for?”
“Well, you always like a good party in the Tower. And I know you’ve missed being with the Nein.”
Jester made a dismissive noise. “We’ll see them all for New Dawn—probably—and that’s right around the corner!” she reasoned. Now, she offered him a small, rectangular piece of gingerbread. “Fill this piece in with blue, okay?”
Fjord reached out, but instead of taking the gingerbread, he caught her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. Jester looked up, and slowly, her expression changed.
Her shoulders slumped.
Her voice grew quiet.
“. . . I do miss them,” she finally admitted. “And I’m scared sometimes that— . . . you know, that eventually we’ll all grow apart and be too busy for each other? And it won't ever be the same as before.”
Fjord frowned. “I’ve thought about that, too,” he admitted, and she squeezed his hand in return.
“Mama said that you can have friends like that. You’ll be super close for a while, and then things change and you go your separate ways.—And that happens.—And that’s okay.”
Fjord watched as Jester went back to what she’d been working on. From this angle, it was hard to tell exactly what she was doing, but she appeared to be applying a design in a truly unappetizing brownish-green color.
He picked up the blue icing, and he colored in the gingerbread as she'd directed.
“But,” the tiefling now continued, beginning to smile again, “Mama said that some friends are different. You might be apart from them for a long time, doing what you want to do—but when you see them again, it’ll feel like no time has passed at all.”
“Like coming home?” Fjord supposed.
“Yeah,” she replied warmly. “Like that.”
Saying this, Jester set aside the piping bag and carefully turned the tray so that she could work on the back of the house. This brought the front to Fjord’s view for the first time since they'd pressed the walls together, and what he saw startled him.
The wild colors.—The crooked eaves.—The occasional missing roof tile and the ailing plants in the window boxes and the slanting picket fence.—The part of the wall where there’d once been a second entrance, but it had been closed up, and the paneling was shabbily mended.—And of course, the turquoise blue door that he held in the palm of his hand.
“Is this our house?” Fjord said in disbelief.
Right then, all he could see were Jester's smiling eyes. She'd leaned in to add a gob of white to the roof—not snow, but evidence of a visiting seagull.
“Took you long enough to figure it out!” she scolded him, and Fjord started to laugh.
“Why did you want to make this? We could have made something fancy and perfect.”
“I didn’t want something fancy and perfect,” Jester replied matter-of-factly. “I wanted something that was ours.”
And with that, the tiefling returned to her art, seemingly unaware of how her words had affected Fjord. He gazed at her for a time, and when he next looked at their work-in-progress—not just the one before them, but the one all around them—he saw it differently.
For all its flaws, this home was the first that he’d truly considered his own. And it was hers, too. What else in his life had felt as right as that?
A few moments of quiet followed, and in that time, the couple wore similarly pensive expressions. The only difference was that while Fjord was privately reckoning with a host of new and wonderful feelings, Jester was deliberating on where to add another splatter of faux seagull shit on their gingerbread house.
The chimney?
The front door?
Anywhere would work, really.
“You should, uh . . . You should put more over here,” Fjord said, pointing to the southern side of the house. “They’re always hanging around that part of the roof.”
“Oh, you’re right! They totally do, those assholes.”
Jester leaned in close again—and as she did, she was startled to see the little house begin to glow from within. It took her a moment to realize that Fjord had cast an illusion inside of it, and when she eagerly peered through one of the windows, she saw . . . the two of them, going about their day.
Bringing dinner home and spreading it out on their wobbly table—
Sitting together on the couch, her legs in his lap—
Walking from one side of the house to the other, deliberating on where to display her latest masterpiece—
Dancing clumsily around her art supplies and his maps—
Fumbling to close the door while their hands were busy with undressing one another—grasping at one another—leading one another along, past the couch and the kitchen and on toward the bedroom . . . .
. . . until Fjord made it so the house’s windows fogged up, and it was impossible for Jester to see what happened next.
At this, the tiefling made a sound of profound disappointment. Then she grinned, and she motioned for Fjord to join her on the floor. The half-orc readily obliged her, sitting near enough that she could lean into his shoulder and borrow his warmth.
“Did you notice this?” she asked, curling her tail about him so he’d see the sprig of green that she’d tied onto the end.
“I did,” he acknowledged. “I thought you just got it stuck on you in the market."
“. . . And you didn’t say anything?”
“Well, it’s a little funny. I always enjoy seeing what you drag in.”
Jester narrowed her eyes. She could see a dimple appear in Fjord’s cheek as he restrained a grin—a sure sign that he was fucking with her, and an invitation to tease him in return. She usually would have accepted the offer, but right now, she had other plans.
“It’s called an ivory fen thistle,” Jester said as she removed the flower from her tail. “It’s from the Zemni Fields, and it only grows in the winter. Do you know why it's so popular?”
“No?”
“Because it never, ever withers. You can trim off a piece, and it’ll always stay green.”
Fjord watched as she tucked the flower into the pocket of his sweater and arranged it just so. Then she smoothed the fabric and let her hand rest on the firm plane of his chest, right over his heart.
“You’re supposed to exchange them with someone special,” Jester concluded. “It’s a way to say, ‘I’ll love you forever’ . . . but like, with a dead plant.”
“Is there a better way to go about it?” Fjord teased her. The tiefling gave a little shrug.
“I don’t think so," she said, "but you can certainly try.”
Jester raised her eyes then, meeting Fjord’s gaze, and she found his every tender feeling for her in full view. He used to get embarrassed when she caught him looking at her like this. He used to blush, and he used to look away.
But not anymore.
“I’ll love you next year,” he said, kissing her brow—
“And the year after that,” he said, kissing her cheek—
“And every single year after, for a long, long time,” he said, nearly against her lips. “So don’t ever get tired of me, all right?”
The mere notion of it was so unthinkable that it made Jester giggle. Fjord just watched her, waiting for her to nod—and then he closed the distance, and he kissed her.
Slowly, Jester's eyes drifted shut. She could feel his lips form to hers, smile meeting smile, the purest form of comfort she knew. She could feel him thread his fingers into her hair to gather her in. And when he pressed against her, trailing kisses down her neck, she could feel her heart run apace, and she knew exactly how their evening would unfold.
However.
“Fjord—” she said distractedly.
He slipped a hand under the hem of her sweater, fingers spread wide to touch as much of her as he could.
“Fjord, hold on—”
. . . And he reluctantly withdrew, if only enough to blink at her in confusion. Jester gave him an apologetic look.
“The glaze I made is going to set up,” she said in a small voice, “and then, um—and then I won’t be able to finish the fence . . . .”
Fjord squinted at her for several seconds, his head still held at an odd angle from the attentions he’d been paying to her neck.
“Are we going to try out this fucking rug or not?” he asked, and Jester heaved a dramatic sigh.
“Okay, okay, okay,” she grumbled—and then she planted both hands on his chest, and she pushed him to the floor.
Fjord was already grinning again by the time she clambered over him, his handsome face cast half in shadow, half in firelight. Jester stole one kiss—and another—and in feeling his hands run the length of her thighs, she forgot herself so thoroughly that she nearly whipped the gingerbread house clean off the table with her tail.
“Isn’t this what we ended up doing when we tried to paint our actual fence?” she teased, trying to distract him from what she’d almost just done.
“We’ll get around to finishing it,” Fjord insisted as she sat up and better arranged herself over him. She plucked the thistle from his pocket again, setting aside where it wouldn’t be lost.
“For sure! Next year.”
“Eh, let’s not get too ambitious. That’s—”
All of the sudden, Fjord fell silent. He stared at Jester for a moment—glanced down at himself—and then looked back up at her, his expression one of abject horror.
“Are we wearing matching sweaters?”
“Yeah!" Jester said, drawing the bottom of her sweater forward so that he could admire its pattern. "Aren’t the little sheepies on them cute? I got them at—”
“Take it off,” Fjord said briskly.
The tiefling’s eyes went wide. It wasn’t often that Fjord issued her an order, but when he arched his eyebrows in a look of challenge, a smile dashed across her lips.
“Yes, captain,” she said—and as a gift to them both, she obliged him.