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Sunlight beat down on the festival grounds, sprung to life on the outskirts of Ketterdam. As people passed in a constant weave of bodies, Jesper stood looking up a brightly coloured tent, a forlorn expression on his face. He turned to go just as a hand reached out and grasped his arm, pulling him back and drawing his attention.
“Don’t you start pouting,” Wylan scolded, rolling his eyes. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it, just that I think it’s a waste of hard-won kruge.”
Jesper wasn’t pouting, but he did make a face. “It’s our honeymoon,” he said, eyes as wide as a puppy. “We have kruge to burn, and why not on this? Don’t you think it’s romantic that you and I might be soulmates, written in the stars?” He pulled Wylan against him, hands snaking around his waist. “A love written by Saints…”
Wylan leaned his head back to look Jesper in the eye. “I think it’s perfectly romantic for us to have met only several years ago in the worst times of our lives and survived it all so we could have this.”
“It’s a beautiful love story,” Jesper agreed, a fond smile playing at his lips, “but aren’t you at all curious if there’s a prologue to it all?”
“I’m more curious how lucrative this business of lies is…”
Jesper groaned and threw his head back, speaking skyward, “Ma, I’ve married a cynic.” He felt Wylan shove him half-heartedly and he laughed, pretending to stumble back. “A violent man, at that.”
Wylan scoffed, disguising his own laughter. “You knew what you were in for.” He reached for Jesper’s hand. “Come on, let’s go…”
They entered the tent, pushing past the heavy curtained door, and felt the temperature drop immediately as the sun was left behind them. Their eyes slowly adjusted to the candle-lit room and they began to look around. There was little to see here in the entrance apart from some chairs and a hand-painted sign set out in front of another curtain. “It just says to wait,” Jesper whispered to Wylan.
They stood there for a minute, the silence starting to feel oppressive, when suddenly, a voice called from deeper in the tent, “Come in…”
Jesper tightened his grip on Wylan’s hand as he took the first step forward, eyes bright with anticipation. He glanced at Wylan, who followed only a bit behind, and they both smiled at each other—
“Ah, a couple,” said the woman who was sitting at a circular table in the centre of the small room. “Recently wed,” she added, tapping a long, darkly painted fingernail against the large glass ball placed in front of her on a pillow. “You have come to speak to me of past lives, but I see the future ahead of you, as well.” Her red lips twisted up at the corners and she gestured for them to sit, causing the bangles on her arm to jingle. “What will you pay to see beyond, my ducklings?”
Wylan leaned into Jesper as he dug out his coin purse. “Never doubt that I love you,” he said almost inaudibly, then faked a smile for the fortune teller. “This should cover the hour,” he told her as he laid a few gold coins on the table, watching her smile grow even wider.
“It will, that,” she assured, collecting her payment. She placed the coins in her own purse, looking up through her lashes between Wylan and Jesper. “I see you are at odds in your belief of me.”
Jesper chuckled, squeezing Wylan’s hand affectionately beneath the table. “My husband is a man of science,” he explained. “He believes there is magic only as far as it can be tested and thus proven to him.”
“I have never known anyone to see outside time,” said Wylan. “That is, apart from our storied Saints.” He raised an eyebrow in challenge.
The fortune teller laughed, chin resting on one hand as she met his stare, unfazed. “I do not claim to be a Saint, but perhaps I have been blessed by one. Today, you will see for yourself. So, shall we begin?”
“Please,” said Jesper, nudging Wylan with his knee—a clear request to behave that Wylan answered with a harder nudge of Jesper’s knee.
“Very well,” said the fortune teller, leaning in across the table with a serious expression. “I should tell you first my name is Godelieve—” (This nearly drew a snort from Wylan.) “—and I am aided by seven spirits who will gather for me your memories. Past, present, and—yes, the future… for time, you see, does not run a straight course.”
“We have that in common,” Jesper whispered to Wylan, who let out a laugh that was worth Godelieve’s unimpressed look at them both.
Clearing her throat, the fortune teller spread her hands out over the table. “Let us form the circle of time between us.” She waited for them to take her hands, then placed their joined ones in view.
“Good,” said Godelieve. “Now, we are connected.”
Jesper and Wylan exchanged a glance as the fortune teller’s head began to roll on her shoulders, chants falling from her tongue—
“Hear me, spirits, and show what you will,” she began to whisper. “Fill the cup of this believer’s heart, and lead this stubborn horse to the well.” Wylan scoffed, but she pretended as though she hadn’t heard him, carrying on: “So may it be through me! So may it…”
Her head snapped forward so suddenly that Wylan jumped, and Jesper muttered, “Saints,” at the sight of how black her eyes were.
“Seekers,” came a raspy voice from out of Godelieve’s throat.
Nothing further was said, so Jesper ventured to ask, “Um, yes…?”
The fortune teller’s eyes narrowed and fixed on him, but then, her gazed moved to the glass ball at the centre of the table. “Look deep into my crystal with the eye of your mind and see now what I do.”
Wylan, only at a pleading look from Jesper to at least try and take this seriously, leaned in to stare into the crystal’s murky depths. He held in a sigh, unimpressed by the shadows that moved through the ball, clearly cast by the flickering candles set all around them in the small room. It would be a long hour, staring silently at nothing—
His eyes started to grow heavy, and he felt Jesper’s fingers slacken.
That’s when the room shifted to a time before language, and Wylan was a child in a wide open plain, crouching over a burrow. He had a stick in his hand, sharpened to a point, which he stabbed boredly at the hole. Nothing moved from inside, so after a while, he crawled back on his knees and collapsed onto his belly, quietly watching.
Soon, the shadows seemed to shift and Wylan’s eyes widened as a thin brown rabbit ventured out of the hole, nose twitching curiously.
When the rabbit’s eyes met his, a ring of white appeared around them in a show of fear. It froze only for a moment before it slipped back out of sight, and Wylan found himself regretful for having been the cause. He knew what he was meant to do, but seeing the rabbit—still alive, eyes shining, heart loud as the beat of his own hands on his thighs around the campfire at night—he felt not that he couldn’t, but that he didn’t want to. So, he was starving… the rabbit was, too.
Another time, and it was Jesper with a fox caught in a pit trap—his bow and arrow in his hand, poised to strike the killing blow as the fox pressed into a corner, teeth bared and growling at him. Vicious for its fear—but something more than that, Jesper started to realize.
He looked into the fox’s eyes and found there was a soul there.
Not something he could explain, and least of all could prove. He just knew it in that moment as he carefully lowered his weapon. Tonight, he would face the clan’s disappointment for his failure in the hunt, but the gods would smile upon him and know he had done right.
In a moss-covered temple deep in the woods, lighting incense at the altar while mumbling prayers, Jesper’s ears attuned to the sound of footsteps and he quickly whirled around. There was another boy in attendant’s rags, whom he had never seen before. He was beautiful with his doe’s eyes, staring straight back at Jesper, seemingly as full of wonder—though Jesper dare not entertain the thought. It was for them both to abstain from anything but the service of the forest god,
and yet—
Wylan ran until his lungs were stinging as if cut by every breath he took. The air was sharp with cold and his sweat made him shiver. He needed to keep running, but could he make it any farther?
Hounds bayed in the distance. He cast a nervous glance back.
The darkening woods wouldn’t stop the dogs from tracking him. He could find a stream and walk in it a while to try and throw them off, but with the winter setting in, along with the night, he might well freeze in his boots before he made it to Jesper—
At the same time, he thought, fear clenching at his heart, if he didn’t take the chance, the hounds would track him to his lover’s house.
They would never live, but only die together.
Jesper, rising like a crop from out of the soil, turned to look back down at his shallow, unmarked grave. He glowered at the sight, though his expression soon softened, seeing Wylan nearby—
“You weren’t waiting long, were you?” he asked, and Wylan almost seemed to jump, seeming to have been lost deep in his thoughts.
“Jesper,” he sighed out in apparent relief. “I was getting worried.”
“So it was long, then,” Jesper grimaced. “I’m sorry for that, love. I would have thought they had more decency than to bury me alive, but…” He trailed off, glancing around the wooded area for a sign of Wylan’s own grave, but there was nothing. “Weren’t you with me?”
Wylan’s expression soured. “They were spooked by a brown bear…”
“Oh, love,” said Jesper, “tell me you weren’t—”
“I don’t remember it happening, I only saw what was left of me.”
Nothing, nothing left—and nothing left to live for without him.
Wylan was gone, burned alive in their bed, and here was Jesper in his armour, alone in the ruins of what had once been their home—the home he had promised to Wylan he would defend. And he had.
He had, but for what?
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Wylan laughed through the phone. “It’s only for the summer, and then I’ll be back. I think you’ll survive.”
“The summer is a lifetime when you’re our age, you know that!”
“It’s a lifetime with phones—you know, the things we’re using to talk about this?” said Wylan, and Jesper could practically hear him rolling his eyes. “Anyway, you’ll be busy at the feed shop, so—”
“Don’t make it sound like I wouldn’t have made time to see you,” Jesper interrupted, but Wylan only snorted. “What? I would have!”
“Oh, I know. Isn’t that why you were fired from your last job?”
Wylan stumbled as he was shoved across the threshold of the door, out into the busy, cobbled street. He flinched as the door slammed shut at his back without so much as a yell for him not to return—
It didn’t have to be said, really. He knew.
Had been waiting.
It was over the first time he had pocketed two small buns from the family’s leftovers, made brazen for the fact he had managed to do it without the cook finding out. He had, for weeks now, brought bread to the table at dinner, enjoying the lie that it was a luxury they could afford. No, more enjoying the way Jesper moaned at the first bite…
The flower’s stem tickled as the butterfly landed, its long, delicate legs moving gently further down, to the delight of the flower. This butterfly was its favourite—a regular visitor, a familiar sensation.
Where other insects found appeal in the flower’s poisonous nectar, they rarely survived long enough to spread its pollen. This butterfly, though—it drank daily of the poison, like it were only morning dew; afterwards, just lingering, wings flexing in companionable silence—
The flower, as much as it could think, sometimes thought it might like to speak in those moments. But if it could, what might it to say?
“I owe you my life,” said the traveller, wiping nectar from his chin. “What did you say your name was?” he asked with an apologetic smile. “I know you only just told me, but my mind was in fog.”
“Wylan, sir.” He paused, and then added, “Who might you be?”
The traveller chuckled. “My name is Jesper, and no one calls me ‘sir.’ Where I come from, the typical address is ‘your highness.’” He said it in a teasing tone, but Wylan’s eyes widened. He was already on his knees—now, he dropped into a bow, prostrate on the sands.
“Forgive me, your highness, I couldn’t have recognized you—”
“No, no, of course not,” said Jesper earnestly, a little dizzy as he leaned forward and placed a hand on Wylan’s arm, trying to urge him up out of the bow. “Please, as I said, I owe you my life. I won’t have you bowing to me like some pigshit nobleman praying mercy.”
“You shouldn’t say words like that,” said Wylan, standing with his arms crossed in the middle of the sand box. He had come over here at his mother’s insistence that he ask to play with this other child—
Having heard what he was playing, though, he could only think to scold him, and now the other child was glancing up at him over his shoulder, looking unimpressed as he replied, “Why? It’s what the adults say.”
“You aren’t an adult,” Wylan told him matter-of-factly.
The other child rolled his eyes—not that Wylan saw it, but he was sure that he had—and then twisted where he sat to better look up at Wylan. “They are adults,” he declared, holding up two homemade ragdolls, “and they do adult things, like swearing and fucking.”
Wylan let out a gasp, scandalized to a degree that he considered running to his mother. Instead, he bent to whisper harshly, “You can’t say things like that. If your parents hear, they’ll whip you.”
“I can handle my own lashes,” Jesper murmured to Wylan, seated behind him on his bedroll, rubbing salve into fresh wounds. “You don’t have to keep defending me over every mistake I make…”
Wylan started to speak, but broke off into a soft hiss. He took a moment to recover before he replied, “You never let me take a beating when I joined the crew, small and stupid and frail…”
“You were never stupid, and that wasn’t the same.”
“Why not?”
“You didn’t deserve it.”
Jesper hated himself. He hated himself. Hated. Hated. Hatred.
Not Wylan, though. He had never hated Wylan. Never could. He loved him too much. Loved him so much. Enough that he could be sick with the feeling. But it wasn’t that sickness that had landed him here. It wasn’t that sickness. It was the hatred. The hating himself—
But there was Wylan.
Wylan, who loved him. Who loved him—why? But he did.
And there was medicine in that. A medicine for the hatred.
Wylan burrowed his head in the crook of Jesper’s neck, breathing in his scent as he closed his eyes contentedly. Jesper, in turn, wrapped his jacket tighter around them both as he rocked them in time to the distant sound of music. “I’m still sorry we couldn’t go,” he said to Wylan in a low voice, though neither could have afforded it—
“This is better than the concert,” Wylan mumbled, warm breath on Jesper’s skin. “I keep telling you, you don’t have to try and impress me. I just want to be with you, like this… it’s really that simple.”
“Whatever makes you happy,” said Jesper, gently placing a kiss on the side of Wylan’s head. “That’s everything I want, besides you.”
Wylan reached up, cupping Jesper’s face, tracing the lines much less defined than his own. “My heart is yours and always will be, Jesper Fahey. You have given me the feeling of a hundred lifetimes in one. I would spend a hundred more with you, but this body is tired. I need to rest. Maybe there is something… after death…” He smiled up into Jesper’s tear-brimmed eyes above him. “If there is, I will find you…”
Jesper stood up abruptly from the fortune teller’s table, breaking the circle as his hands slipped out of her and Wylan’s both. His chair fell behind him from the force with which he stood. He made no move to pick it up or apologize, barely even aware of the room anymore.
“Jesper?” he heard Wylan’s voice, speaking as though through water. “Jesper, can you hear me? You need to breathe. Jes…”
“He may yet be having a vision, dear. Be mindful of the spirits—”
“That will be all today, Ms. Godelieve,” Wylan interrupted sharply. “You have your kruge, I believe?” He didn’t wait for an answer—
Jesper felt him pressing close, one arm tight around his waist, the other reaching for his hand to guide him, as if in a dance. He still couldn’t breathe, still couldn’t keep his heart from racing wildly.
He nearly choked with relief as they exited the tent.
It all suddenly seemed so dream-like—
So impossible.
Jesper twisted in Wylan’s hold and tightly cupped his face, framing an expression of surprise. “Promise me, promise me you’ll never die.”
Wylan lifted his hands, gently touching Jesper’s wrists. He looked concerned, seeing tears spring to Jesper’s eyes. “You know I can’t promise you that,” he murmured, and then— “Oh, don’t cry…”
“I’m sorry,” Jesper choked out, throat tight with emotion.
Wylan shushed him and gathered him up, pulling him down into a grounding hug—arms wrapped so tight, his muscles had to be straining, but he didn’t let go. He just kept holding Jesper.
“Did you see everything I saw?” Jesper whispered, after a while.
Wylan was quiet for a moment, then slowly loosened his grip on Jesper, stepping back just enough to look him in the eyes. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I think I may have been dreaming…”
“Maybe that’s what it was,” said Jesper with a soft sigh. “Just a nightmare of having you to lose you again and again and again.”
“You’re not losing me,” Wylan assured. “I’m right here.”
Jesper smiled, one last stray tear coming down his cheek, which Wylan reached up to swipe away. “I don’t know what it would take—science or magic—but if there was a way we could simply freeze time…” He trailed off, looking thoughtful as his eyes went to the sky. “Do you think I’ve lived too much to aspire to sainthood?”
Wylan shook his head, though not exactly in answer. He bumped his head against Jesper’s chest like an affectionate cat, then wrapped his arms tight around his waist. “I think I love you is what I think…”
Breaking into a grin, Jesper replied, “Enough to marry me again?”
“Why would I marry you again? It’s only been a week.”
“In a year, then?”
“I doubt it.”