Work Text:
when I say love, I mean
I wait at the door for
you to arrive; I mean
the walls of my chest
are decorated with your
pictures; I mean it’s safe here
—“Where Dust Never Collects,” William Bortz
*****
“And you’ll come home?” Caleb pushed himself up, trying to stay awake. “The cats miss you, as I’ve said. And your orchids are suffering.”
“Well, if my orchids need me.” Essek kissed his forehead and pressed him back down onto the couch. “I will see you soon, Caleb Widogast. Be safe for me until I return.”
--to the last syllable
*****
a series of prepositions meaning proximity
…though I wonder if you would disagree with me on this point, I consider myself a patient man. Hard-learned with time, perhaps, but patient now, from necessity as much as experience. So when I say that orchids are the most frustrating, fussy, irritating flowers, mein freund, I hope you will appreciate the depths of my sentiment….
The chime of his alarm spell going off in his head made Caleb straighten so quickly that Beauregard hissed a series of whispered expletives at him. Given her usual badgering about his posture, it was a notable departure—but they were trying to be subtle, after all, in their mundane Vanguard disguises. Paint and glued-on whiskers could only carry one so far: further than magic here, on the dusty edge of the Malleus Key encampment, but one still needed to play the part. The brightness of the sun invited squinting; the long days in the heat, slouching. Caleb was being visible, unusual.
Notable departures—and notable arrivals. There was only one person who could Teleport through Caleb’s wards without needing to Dispel them first. One person who would make the spell alert with a pleasant chime rather than a klaxon. It was just that it had been over a year since he had done so.
“Ja, I know,” he muttered back to her as though it were just another day, as though his heart had not displaced itself abruptly to sit in his throat and tremble in his hands. He bent to pick up another crate and walk it away from the supply ship, back toward the rim of the crater where the guards were chatting, bored.
Numbing as the work was, to back and knees and splinter-ridden hands as much as to his mind for him, there was no denying that the gossip of the overlooked and underestimated was the best source of intelligence to their cause. He and Beauregard had been lurking, listening, ever since they’d received word from the Tempest of the Bells’ Hells’-orchestrated explosion on Ruidus. There would be retaliation, swift and brutal and exacting, and the united forces of Exandria would need to know where. How.
Important work, but Scheisse, Caleb could truly have used more mortal peril with which to occupy his mind since he’d impulsively gone to rendezvous with Essek in Zadash. Since then, Beauregard had had to threaten several times to punch him in the throat if he wouldn’t stop speculating on where Essek was, if he was all right.
Not that she knew, precisely, what had transpired between them. That there had been any occasion for something to transpire, even. But it was no secret that Essek was working for the Tempest in parallel to them, and that Caleb was, as she liked to remind him so often, “a total sad-sack,” so his fretting had not been entirely out of character. It was just… front of mind more, now, rather than something he had been trying to shelve out of sight.
Well. Now he knew where Essek was. It was… it possibly answered more questions than he had expected.
“If you know, then stop being so fucking weird,” Beau hissed, bumping his shoulder as she lapped him heading back to the ship. She hefted two crates to his one (showing off) and turned back with a frown. “You look like Jessie hit you with her smiles wand. It’s freaky, man; knock it off.”
He did his best, throwing a sack of rice or flour on top of the crate to make it heavier, to divert his mind to the burn in his arms instead of the warmth kindling in his chest. But he could tell from Beauregard’s face as he caught up to her that the attempt was not successful.
“Apologies, but it appears…” no, they were almost in earshot of the guards, even if there were not other means he’d yet found for the senior Vanguard to listen in on their peons. He would be circumspect, even if his cheeks ached and his footsteps felt lighter than dancing a gavotte. “Ah. Our friend Seth has stopped by the house today.”
“Oh shit.” Beauregard stopped dead in her tracks. “You’re shitting me. He came by? Oh shit!” she dropped her crates, freeing her hands to punch him in the shoulder. He almost lost his own grip, it was so hard; numbness flowed down from his shoulder to his fingertips.
“Not now—”
“That’s so fucking great! About godsdamned time, I mean, but great. Shit!”
“Hey! What’s going on over there?” One of the guards straightened from his slouched posture against a rock, apparently taking notice of her outburst.
“Focus, Beauregard,” Caleb hissed. Quickly, he stepped forward with his burden, in hopes that renewed diligence and the shadow of his hood, not to mention the accumulated dust of days ingrained in his pores, would continue to make him unremarkable. Unmemorable. “Sorry, sir. My friend is simply over-enthusiastic today.”
“Nah, c’mon, Ben! Look, he just got word that his ex stopped by their old place back in Emon,” she cheerfully confided in the guard as she scooped her crates back up and carried them the rest of the way. The story fell from her tongue as easily as though she’d practiced it time and again, casually tangling together the lies of their invented histories with deeply personal truths selected with an unerring ability to embarrass him. “My boy here has been hung up on this guy for years, right? And it’s been real ‘one that got away’ shit since they broke up. But now he’s, what, just stopping by to say hello? Borrow a cup of sugar?” She set her crates down, in the designated supply tent this time, and punched Caleb’s shoulder three more times in rapid succession. “You’re so back!”
Would the glue holding down his fake sideburns and bushier eyebrows make his blush patchy? Caleb’s face was burning, and he did not want to have to think about this. After weeks of wishing for a little more peril, he was actually quite content to do something tedious and unnoticed so he could be free to picture Essek in their kitchen, finding a cupboard full-to-bursting with his tea; or back in their workroom collating any notes he’d gathered in Aeor; or sitting in their garden with a novel, taking a well-earned rest.
Or in their bath. Or in their bed. Caleb was only human, after all, and he had missed Essek in so many ways.
But nein, Beauregard wanted to break all of their rules for this mission in order to tweak him some more. Caleb resisted the urge to pat his sideburns to make sure they were in place, that the warmth of his embarrassment was tangible through them, or to weave the somatics for a chronurgy spell to go back in time and hold his foolish tongue about his good mood.
“In any case, we will not allow this to disrupt our work,” he interjected over her gleeful violence, somehow managing to keep the murder form his words.
“I had someone like that, once,” one of the guards sighed. He sat down on the stack of crates as though the memory were physically heavy to conjure to mind, and leaned on his pike. “But I had to move to Yios to study, and she didn’t want to leave her parents back in our home town.”
“Maryna?” His companion laughed heartily as though he’d just heard a good joke. “Thought the two of you were already engaged, the way you blather on about her.”
“Oh, no, no, nothing like—it’s just that… you know, we grew up together, so of course my stories all involve her. It was a small town.”
“Yeah, of course,” Beau kicked the bottom of his pike. “Write to her, man. Don’t be a pathetic sad-sack for months like this idiot.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder at Caleb.
The other guard winked broadly at Caleb and lifted the sack off the top of his crate. “Sounds like you won’t be a sad-sack for much longer, huh? A little ‘the world looks like it’s ending and I want to be with you’ from him, a little ‘fear not, I’m bravely helping the people who will save it’ hero stuff from you…” he waggled his eyebrows. “Not a bad combo for a good reunion, friend.”
“Oh, well,” Caleb fell into step with him toward the tent. “I would not call myself a ‘hero’ for moving some boxes back and forth.”
“Of course you are!” the seated guard insisted, at the same time as the one helping Caleb sniggered a, “Do you have to tell the truth to get laid?”
Both burst into laughter. Crate placed into military-precise order, sack tossed rather more haphazardly on top, the guard threw his arm around Caleb’s shoulder and steered him back outside to the rock where he’d been leaning for most of his shift.
They were all just people, Caleb thought as he smiled stiffly at the jokes and innuendo. They were all just people, which was what had made this all so much worse than any fight against Cognouza or Uka’toa. It was so very, very close to home.
“Well, ok, but you know as well as I do how short that rebound window is.” Beau dropped down onto the sand and stretched her arms over her head, for all the world like she was arguing with Jester or Veth in the Tower. “So, help a guy out who definitely hasn’t gotten any in, like, a year: is something kicking off soon? Are we gonna have a chance to get some, heh, get some shore leave with exes and almosts? Figure you two would be in a position to know, you know?”
Caleb exhaled loudly. He could not fault Beauregard for finding a more direct in to the information they’d been seeking, he just wished she hadn’t leveraged his personal life to do so.
He knew what the Nein thought of Essek. He knew what they thought of him and Essek as a couple. He knew, in excruciating, oft-repeated detail, what they thought about him breaking up with Essek. It was why he always made sure he was alone before he Sent. It was why he’d told Beauregard he had an urgent check-in with Keyleth rather than admitting he was headed to Zadash. He… he wanted to be settled, certain, before he reopened those wounds.
He may have succeeded, were it not for one brilliant, beautiful, verdammt drow surprising him to his core by returning to Caleb’s home. Their home.
“We are getting ahead of ourselves. He may simply have wanted to return some books,” he pointed out, as much to himself as to the others, “or pick some up, for that matter. He left several things behind when we parted.”
Beauregard snorted. “Sure; he desperately needed a book now that he’s done without for a year and somehow couldn’t buy anywhere else.”
“Messy breakup?” The guard sitting on the crates clicked his tongue sympathetically.
“Ah, we are still… we have remained friends.” His backstory for Ben Emdrang had not included a love interest, and he was clumsy with the half-truth.
“Mmm. Yeah, friendship is great when his ex actually wanted to get married,” Beauregard said pointedly.
“Ooof.” The guard leaning on the rock next to Caleb winced and shifted his weight, putting a fraction more distance between them.
Caleb walked away. Back to the supplies ship, his steps rather more grounded on his return journey, where he could fuss with crates and sacks, stacking and sorting them with the appearance of being very busy without actually returning to the three gossip-mongers.
After a good ten minutes (11 minutes, 13 seconds, if he were being precise), Beauregard jogged up next to him again, more smug than a cat that had just found a nest of baby rabbits. She hefted a few of the sacks had had just finished painstakingly squaring off.
“So, Ilyan and Brunner think you’re kind of a tool, but Ilyan’s gonna write to that girl of his now, so that’s something. You’re a cautionary tale, Ben. But more importantly, they don’t know the details, but something big is coming soon—like, tonight or tomorrow kind of soon. Something from the moon. They were acting kind of cagey about it, but I think it’s just that they don’t know any more details than that.”
Caleb glanced over toward the sword of vivid light stabbing up through the leylines. “I’ll need to let our breezy friend know.”
“Bullshit. You’ll need to let me let her know so that you can go spend time with your boyfriend.”
“He is not—” Caleb sighed. It was an old argument that would not gain any new traction with her; but, moreso, he did not want to say what Essek was not when, for the first time in a year, he was nursing the small flame of hope of what he might be again. “We broke up over a year ago, Beauregard,” he said instead, patiently sticking to the facts. “Let us not count our chickens, ja?”
“There’s a joke about cocks in there somewhere,” she mused, settling the bags higher on her shoulder. “Come on, loverboy, we move the rest of this shit, we finish our shift, and then, huh, how about it, two people just mysteriously swallowed up by the desert and the storm.”
She was not listening to him, Caleb knew. But… he thought of Essek turning his ring around and around his finger. Of a promise to say ‘yes’ when Caleb finally gathered the nerve to ask for what he wanted, longed for. Of the orchids he had tended to with anxious obsession over the past year, fretting over every brown-edged leaf or dropped flower in hopes of keeping them in good order should their owner ever return for them.
…once again found myself buying that tea of yours. The shop is still thriving somehow even without your regular patronage. One wonders if it’s a Myriad front—if she knows, Jester won’t say. (I’m sorry to say that she does not care for the tea herself. ‘Not enough sugar in the world, Caleb,’ she put it. ‘It’s almost as bad as his pastries.’) I shouldn’t make fun, though; even if only to preserve my cupboard space, I’ve started drinking it myself. It still takes like a mixture of the ashes my father would shovel from our fireplace and the potpourri my mother made from her garden. But I know I’d miss it if I stopped...
He hurried down the path in Beauregard’s wake with another crate, laden so high with sacks that he could barely see over it. He ignored her smirk.
19 minutes, 12 seconds to move the remaining supplies.
15 minutes, 45 seconds of entertaining Ilyan’s earnest good wishes for him and anxieties about what to write to Maryna.
3 minutes, cumulative, of Brunner’s crude jokes and interjected “suggestions” for them both.
25 minutes and 6 seconds to return to their shabby camp on the far side of the pit, weaving between tents and other supply lines, greeting the other work crews and slipping silently past mages, Ruidians, and other higher-ups with appropriate deference.
47 minutes even for Caleb to find an unobtrusive spot far enough away to evade notice but still with a good view of the encampment so he could cast the Chronurgic Encapsulation spell on a carefully balanced stone, and twin its view to another. Essek had taught him the spell, in happier times. Casting it still made his heart skip a beat, even now. Especially now.
“This will put out an arcane signature once it’s activated,” he warned Beauregard as he handed over the second rock. “Let the Tempest know to be, ah, choosy about when she decides to look. But once she does… it should keep a record everything that is happening here, until the effect is Dispelled or until she has encapsulated more than three hours.”
“That’ll mean more to her, right?” Beauregard asked, tossing the rock anxiously from hand to hand. Perhaps doing so calmed her nerves; Caleb could just see the physical manifestation of his highest-level spell being used like a pigskin ball.
“Ja, she knows. It’s why I’ve been the one here putting up with you. Please do not drop it.”
“You gonna go to Essek looking that hairy, Caleb? Maybe he’s into it, but muttonchops are not really your look.”
No. He would not take that bait now. There would be a few minutes in Vasselheim to make himself presentable again, and that would be better than trying to rip away glue and taking patches of his skin with it. Caleb held out a hand to her.
“Come, Beauregard. To cooler climes for us both.”
*****
He teleported directly into the garden. It was getting weedy now, overgrown around the edges after a few months of neglect—Frau Steward was good about and the indoor plants and the cats she minded in her home (and collecting the ripened produce and bouquets of flowers in the back before they faded, dropped, or rotted) but her knees were not up to weeding. And his students who’d volunteered to come by… ach, well, they were young. There were so many more pursuits in this city that were more exciting, more pressing. The plants would survive another season.
Still, Caleb trailed his fingers apologetically along the arching, grasping tendrils of a honeysuckle vine that had sprawled far away from its trellis, trumpeting pink in all directions. It was too far grown to be gently trained back; he would have to prune it, later. Let it have its freedom for now. The bees certainly seemed content with the change.
Caleb shook his head, and picked his way carefully along the path (careful not to tread upon any of the opportunistic flora colonizers of his paving stones) toward the back door of the house.
For a time, there, he just stood and watched. His heart was too full for anything else.
Completely preoccupied with his work to the point that he had not noticed the back door opening, Essek bustled around their work room. He looked worn around the edges in a different way than he’d been in Zadash, sleeves shoved haphazardly up his forearms, no gloves in—ah, no, there they were, peeking out from under the heavy, fur-mantled cloak folded over a chair, incongruous scarf still wrapped around his neck. His hair was either half-up or half-down, depending on whether he’d gotten frustrated and decided to push it up out of the way, or had gotten distracted while in the process of doing so; the length was still new enough that Caleb could not be certain, but the asymmetry of it was less polished than it would have been were it deliberate. He looked beautiful. He looked tired.
Essek being Essek, his visible weariness did not impede his focus as he directed an arcane symphony around him: a mage hand plucking through the component drawers and jars mounted on the north wall; dunamancy holding four different tomes aloft at eye-height for easy reference; wristpocket disgorging pen, ink, spellbook, parchment.
Apparently satisfied with what he’d found—or unsatisfied, and needing something wholly different—Essek snapped two of the books shut and waved them over toward the bookcase. Stopped, frowning, when he realized there was no room for them to slide into place there.
“Light’s sake,” he muttered under his breath, and arrested the other pieces of the intricate dance mid-air to go stand in front of the object of his frustration. Caleb bit his lower lip and leaned against the doorframe, watching as Essek peevishly shoved carelessly piled books back to standing, moved the detritus of parchment scraps and empty ink bottles (he’d liked that colour and had been meaning to buy another pot) over to a table, then set about trying to organize what was left.
That was just one shelf, of course. A small, tidy beacon in an ocean of chaos.
By the way Essek’s shoulders sagged, he apparently had reached the same conclusion. He shot a glower toward where Caleb knew their portrait hung, tucked neatly out of sight.
“How do you remain the most irritating man, even when you aren’t here?” he demanded rhetorically of the air, before sinking down on the low couch (just enough of one cushion free to permit it). He let his head fall back tiredly, and draped one hand, one hand holding the end of the scarf, Caleb’s scarf, across his face. Breathed in, deeply.
Not cold, then, oh nein, oh schatz, but lonely, perhaps. Longing.
Pearl has not forgiven me, you know. The other cats have adjusted, however reluctantly (though they have demanded additional food and treats in exchange for the indulgence of overlooking your absence) , but she knows better. She has placed blame, and it has landed squarely on my head. Or, rather, my books. My cloaks. My shoes. I’ve had to learn Prestidigitation out of sheer self-preservation, lest I show up to class reeking of upset cat piss every day.
We have something of a detente at night, I admit. She circles your side of the bed, hops down, comes back a few times, as though confirming what she already knows. But she eventually presses herself up against my side to sleep. I suppose even I’m better than being lonely….
Caleb’s tongue was too big for his mouth. His heart was too big for his chest. This space, cozy as it was, was designed for two people, and he had been rattling around in it for months, bruising himself on the exposed edges. Now Essek was here, filling that negative space, slotting back into their home and Caleb’s life like he had never left.
He should say something arch. He should be witty, quick, show some of the intelligence that had first caught Essek’s eye, a decade ago and a kingdom away. He could take the opportunity to woo him again, try to win him back once more, for good.
“E-Essek—” he stammered instead, because the word was also too large with importance and love for his clumsy mouth to make light with it.
Essek startled up, expression rapid-fire shifting, surprise-fear-caution-recognition. Then, a smile. Wan, thin, but genuine. Exasperation. Welcome.
“You have taken up being a voyeur, Caleb Widogast?”
“I thought it best to hold my tongue until you decided whether to accept the, ah, disarray, or burn everything down and start over,” Caleb joked. But he found himself lingering in the doorway still. Strange, to feel a vampire in his own home, unable to cross the threshold without a clear invitation. Stranger still when he had just held this man in his arms, drank the sweetness of his orgasm from his mouth, only a few nights ago in Zadash.
But Zadash was neutral territory, even in Essek’s tower. Here, they tread on the site of old fractures. There were scars under their feet.
“I am very pleased to see you are well, mein freund,” he continued after a few moments when Essek just watched him in turn.
“Ah, indeed,” the edge of Essek’s faint smile curdled. “I suppose that remains to be seen. But I am unharmed yes. I was under the protection of some very powerful, experimental magic, you see.”
He still wore the ring. The ring, and Caleb’s scarf, and their home all around him. Caleb breathed in deeply. Slowly. “It will need recharging soon.”
“Yes,” Essek agreed. “I was wondering if you might assist me in that.”
It was enough to pull Caleb across the threshold into this room of research and possibility, of long stretches of intense silence, of frenetic, excited kisses. The space where they had spent more time than anywhere else while together, and where Caleb had broken Essek’s heart. Their space, even when occupied by one alone for so long.
There was not enough room on the couch to join Essek properly, so Caleb knelt in front of him instead, feeling the colder, damper weather here compared to Marquet in his knees. Feeling again the morning’s work of hauling heavy supplies. But pain was an easy enough thing to compartmentalize when he wished to focus, and at present he was very focussed on those familiar, elegant hands, on drawing them to his mouth to rain kisses over them.
“You ought to have messaged me. I was worried.”
“Yes.” Caleb felt some of the tension drain from Essek’s posture with the repetition. “I promised, but we had very little time to rest.”
Aeor tended to go that way, as well they both knew. But there was another layer under Essek’s words, catching like a splinter at Caleb’s perception. A… tightness, or an exhaustion, or a grief of some shape of which he could not yet perceive the whole.
Time was, back at school with Astrid or Eadwulf, he would have asked about it directly, his words a blunt instrument to the nuance of secrecy. It would have either satisfied his curiosity or had it beaten out of him, which was a kind of satisfaction in itself.
Time was, in his early days with the Nein, he would have filed the information away for later until he’d gleaned enough pieces to see the shape of an answer. A magpie, collecting fragments of secrets against the day he had to spend their coin for leverage—or silence.
He had come to learn Essek’s secrets like cats: given enough attention to be friendly, then given enough space to establish trust, they came around to his hand in their own time.
“Achm ja, these Bell’s Hells struck he as a handful even in the few hours of our acquaintance.” He finished kissing the backs of Essek’s hands, and worked his way further to the tender underside of his wrists. “Did you bring them here also?”
“Resting upstairs,” Essek sighed. “Or drinking upstairs; I am not quite certain. They are quite taken with you, Caleb Widogast. The small Ashari, Orym, in particular.”
“We have exchanged a handful of Sendings since the Solstice. He puts me in mind of Fjord, tasked with playing straight-man to the others’ chaos.”
“‘A handful of Sendings,’” Essek huffed, lifting his head from the back of the couch to peer down at Caleb, archly. “Indeed? Well, perhaps his crush will be sufficiently quashed by seeing how you live, hmm?”
The ribbing made Caleb blush, but he grinned good-naturedly as he sat back on his heels. “Are we feeling possessive, mein freund?”
“Irritated,” Essek corrected. He rubbed the corners of his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose. His sigh was soul-deep. “Your mess, and yet I am certain to be held accountable for it, since I brought them here.”
With a chuckle, Caleb rose to clear away some of the scrolls and books and—ah, that was where Mitzi’s mouse toy had gone—other detritus off the spare couch cushion so that he could sit next to Essek.
“One can tell your touch has been missing here, true, even if I still know where everything is.”
“Do not leverage your memory as an excuse for laziness,” Essek groused, but condescended to rest his head on Caleb’s shoulder regardless. Soft, precious weight. “Entropy is inevitable on the universal scale, Bren, not as a reason not to re-shelve your components properly. You had bat guano stored under ‘Onyx,’ for Light’s sake.”
“Bren was a neat-nik,” Caleb laughed. “It is entirely Herr Widogast who is the disaster, particularly without you.”
He had thought himself mindful of the unspoken thing prowling silently around the edges of their conversation. If he did not look directly at it, eventually it would come to his lap and let itself be known.
But no, the casual remark set the thing to flee. Essek launched back to his feet, warmth snatched from Caleb’s side, and returned to the desk.
“So I have observed. It is making accomplishing anything this evening exceedingly difficult.”
A diaphanous sense of guilt prickled along Caleb’s hairline, and he too rose from the couch. Scooping up the books he’d displaced to the floor, he ferried them over to a shelf (not necessarily the shelf where they belonged—he and Essek had bickered often about their arcane library’s organizational principles—but a shelf, at least, which was an improvement. Or would be, if they fit there. Caleb frowned at the little fairy-ring of abandoned teacups that adorned the wood, barring entry and refuting order. Shifting the books to one arm, he hooked a finger through their handles and made the swap, shoving the books into place with a little puff of dust.
That left him with his fingers full of teacup handles, however. Grimacing, Caleb looked around, trying to determine where to deposit this new set of detritus. The kitchen, obviously, but ah, nein, he was loathe to rouse the Hells or to leave Essek alone when he was in this kind of mood.
For his part, Essek had gone with the much more straightforward approach: anything inessential to his current focus had simply been shoved to the edges of the desk, all a-jumble like the tideline after a storm.
It had all the vehemence of a storm too, Caleb noted, as Essek set down a bottle of ink with enough force that stray droplets leapt free to spatter the back of his hand. Worrying weather indeed, from someone who was usually the inexorable pull of gravity rather than the transient bluster of the wind.
Well, any port, &c, though (ha, ha) best hope for one not filled with pirates. Caleb opted for the low table, setting mugs like lighthouses atop the various book towers that adorned it.
“Perhaps I can be of some assistance to you?” He ventured.
“No. That will not be necessary.” Essek produced his spellbook once more, along with a faintly glowing purple gem, from his Wrist Pocket, set them down firmly on the desk, and turned to the right-hand bookcase. His lips moved soundlessly as his fingers danced across spines, seeking, seeking—
He scowled at the collection as though its inadequacies personally offended him.
“Come now, Essek, clearly my organizational system is causing half the headache here,” Caleb cajoled, moving to peer at the gem with hands folded behind his back. “‘Arcana shared means hours halved,’ ja?”
“I said I am fine.”
Caleb blinked, stung. “Es tut mir leid, I was not trying to suggest you are not. Simply… I know things have been, ah, fraught between us, but I thought perhaps a new spell—”
It had been what had first truly brought them together a decade ago. He’d missed it quite a bit these last long months: that singular excitement of weaving together threads of arcana with an expert, someone who knew his mind and his craft as well as he did.
Essek’s jaw flexed like it did when he was angry, but under the long fall of his hair, his ears were angled back, like they did when he was hurt. And he looked so, so very tired under his stiff posture and rigid expression.
“This is something I can solve myself, Caleb Widogast,” he said finally. “I need you to trust that.”
The comment made no sense that Caleb could see. “Of course you can manage yourself, Essek. I merely meant that…” he trailed off at the clouds building in Essek’s expression. That you don’t have to, was how he would have liked to end that sentence, but he changed course. “You remain the most brilliant arcanist I know. I have faith in you.”
Essek’s shoulders slumped, what fight he’d had building in him momentarily dispelled by Caleb’s confidence.
“I wonder that you should,” he said, and turned back to the bookcase.
Ah, now that was something Caleb could not abide. Much as he preferred Essek’s fears and upsets to come twine around his ankles when they were ready to be acknowledged, scooped up, soothed away, there were still times for Bren’s brand of directness.
Essek was tense when Caleb gathered him into his arms, pulled him back against his chest.
“Caleb, please.”
“I found you in our home, wearing my scarf to keep me near you, schatz. Allura has a workroom, as does Shaun. Percival likes to pretend his is adequate for things other than artificing. You know these things as well as I, you know what the wards on this house do, yet you came here. Why seek this comfort if you were not planning to accept it?”
“I was simply cold, and this was the most convenient destination with what arcana I had remaining to me.”
“Liar,” Caleb nosed a strand of hair back out of the way to kiss the tender skin just behind Essek’s ear. “Sweet, wonderful liar. You need to rest.”
“No, I need to work.”
There it was, the sharp, tense note of stress in Essek’s voice that presaged a break. Caleb just held him tighter, even as he offered a meagre struggle to pull free.
“Enough! I cannot fail at this too, Caleb.”
And there it was. Caleb relaxed his grip enough that Essek could twist away, but caught his hand before he could go far.
“I have not known you to fail at much, Essek.”
Essek’s ears flattened back further, his mouth a thin, unhappy line. “Shall I enumerate them for you?” He yanked the scarf from around his neck and shoved it against Caleb’s chest. Drifting away once more, he moved from bookcase to bookcase, both searching and expending anxious energy. “It took me a half-dozen attempts to transport us to Eiselcross—I had to trance for four hours in the middle while the Bells’ Hells occupied themselves. Thank the light we did not end up in the middle of a frost giant’s castle when I was out of arcana, because we certainly made a detour there. Once in Aeor, I managed to injure two of my charges in a fight against some abominations. I transformed into a goat in the middle of a quite deadly battle. I used my most powerful spell to the effect of, oh, nothing at all,” he spat, “and I let Ludanis Da’Leth walk free and unharmed, despite all that he has wrought.
“So, what does your supposed confidence in me say to this, Caleb Widogast?”
“Ach, Essek, have you and I not managed much the same litany together in Aeor? I crossed the Astral as a sheep and landed us on the wrong side of a mountain range before. You have been a trout. My Wall of Fire has become apple-scented smoke. You had a difficult time,” he cajoled, when Essek still did not look at him. “A difficult time in a notoriously difficult place. None of us could face Da’Leth alone.”
“Liar,” Essek echoed his earlier accusation, though where Caleb’s voice had been warm, his was hollow. “You attempted just that on the Solstice.”
“And what did that bring me? Your Bells’ Hells must have been quite impressed by my showing of casting no spells before I ended up with a collar around—”
“Why did you not ask for my help?” Essek interrupted.
Caleb sighed. They had had this fight only a few days ago, and while he had not expected one argument would heal a long-festering wound, he had hoped it would at least help them progress to new aches.
“No, I do not mean…” Essek gestured at the space between them. “I want to know why you did not seek my aid, Caleb. Not against Da’Leth, though I’ve known him as long as you’ve been alive. Not against Trent, though I, too, have cause to hate him. Not even against Uka’toa, though the Nein claim I am part of their company. I want…” his voice wavered. “I want to know if—”
“I am a coward when it comes to those I love,” Caleb replied. “My own life, ja, that is coin I spend cheaply, and you may yell at me again for that if you wish. If I’d thought speaking to Astrid would mean going to Aeor, I would have moved Catha and the Teeth to ensure it was me who took the mission instead. I offered you because… well, I thought you might enjoy tweaking Asa a bit, but also that it would be safe. Close by. Finished quickly. I wish you to be safe, Essek, and content, and… and surrounded by soft things. Kind things.”
“I do not wish your faith in me to be misplaced.”
There were some wounds that would forever leave a scar behind. Caleb’s nightmares were of the slide into amoral justification, of self-serving power. Essek’s were of betrayals that could not be done. Of losses. Of failures.
“Come,” Caleb said, offering his hand. “The magic is yours to weave, Essek. But at least use me to source whatever tomes I’ve carelessly misplaced.”
…Somehow I manage to forget it every year, even after a decade. But there is no more chaotic power in the universe than a new transmutation student given access to spell-grade components for the first time. One of them managed to invert her own gravity for hours today; we had to keep her indoors until I could tease it apart….
*****
The spell, when finished, was an elegant, violent thing.
Caleb ran his eyes over the runes, charged with blood and sealed with power, tracing again the deft inversion that made the binding flow from the power of the bond itself rather than an external, breakable thing. The harder Delilah struggled against her captivity, the more tightly it would grasp her. He whistled.
Essek, reclined on the couch now in the perfect picture of exhaustion, raised the arm draped over his eyes to give Caleb a look.
“You have comments.”
“Just admiration,” Caleb shot him a reassuring grin. “The looped chronurgy and addition of graviturgical runes to modify the soul gem’s binding effect are especially inspired. Vicious, but inspired.
“I do not care for the creature being bound,” Essek said darkly, settling his arm back over his eyes. “Therefore, I do not care about her comfort. What matters is that it will serve Laudna well.”
“It will work,” Caleb ran his fingers over the edge of the parchment, feeling the tingle of powerful magic, banked and ready to be cast. The lines of deep violet across the parchment shimmered. Essek’s arcana was spare, refined in its equations, without a single rune extraneous to the deft equations he’d woven. As stylish and restrained as the man himself. Caleb thought he maybe fell a little bit more in love with him every time he read one of his spells. “It’s exceptional, Essek.”
“Hmm. The proof will be in the casting.”
“It always is,” Caleb agreed, “but the arcana is sound. It will hold.”
“I hope you are right.”
Caleb began to put the books Essek had referenced away—to their proper places, now, rather than back to the piles that served as memorial to his lassitude of the past year. Again, the process took some shuffling, with the pile of items-to-handle-later growing on the low table until it was almost invisible. Cleaning always seemed to involve making things worse, first.
“Now that you have successfully reinvented a piece of major arcana, perhaps I can tempt you upstairs into getting some sleep?”
“The thing that was Delilah Briarwood will not be quiescent long. No, I should…” Essek stifled a yawn against his hand and sat up stiffly. “I should go rouse the Hells. I am certain they will wish to aid Laudna in this ritual.”
“And what arcana do you intend to use to steer it?” Caleb asked, pointedly.
The look Essek shot him was significantly reduced in its effectiveness by the faint fabric creases across his cheek from the couch arm. He was uncommonly rumpled, was Essek, and Caleb had to hide his smile at the sight, knowing that would spur him back into activity like nothing else if it was caught.
There had been an armchair in here at one point… ah, there, under a pile of scrolls sticking out of… was that Jester’s picnic basket? The broken umbrella he’d been meaning to Mend, too, hiding behind it all. Caleb carefully wiggled the throw-blanket across its back out from under the precarious stacks, brushed what dust and cat fur he could from it, and crossed back over to the couch.
“Indulge me for one hour,” he said, tucking the blanket around Essek’s shoulders and drawing him against his side as he sat down. “You can recover some high-level arcana in just an hour, enough for this ritual.”
“I do not need to be handled, Caleb Widogast,” Essek groused, but when Caleb shifted to stretch out along the couch, he obligingly settled against his chest.
Caleb set about counting the minutes, counting Essek’s breaths, counting his heartbeat. It was in some ways a greater intimacy than sex, getting to have Essek sleep with him, next to him, against him. For elves who rarely slept at all, it was a higher level of trust to let themselves fade from consciousness with another, a subtle declaration of it’s safe here.
That Essek was even willing to entertain it these days… well. It signalled a potential for forgiveness far beyond their night of arguing and sex. It meant that Essek might, in some way, consider trusting Caleb again. He would count time’s passage, and he would wake Essek precisely when the hour came due, and he would prove himself worthy of that trust. And he would hoard each breath, each sigh, the sight of each freckle and eyelash, the fall of his hair, as little gems in his memory’s trove in the meantime.
Ten minutes passed.
Fifteen.
Eighteen.
Essek’s breathing was even, but his body remained too tight to be in a trancing state, much less true slumber. It was though he were braced against some fear or phantom ache that Caleb could not perceive.
Twenty-five minutes, and Beauregard’s voice filled his head.
Hey man, we need you in Vasselheim. Shit’s starting to go down back in Marquet.
Resolute, if apologetic. Beauregard knew what she was asking him to leave behind, what the stakes of where he was needed were. A balancing act, and there was no one so steady as he.
Caleb considered the cost, chest rising in a gusty sigh. Essek cracked his eyes open and looked up at him, expression neutral. Reserving his thoughts for another moment. One more barrier between them.
“Not now, Beauregard,” he replied.
He had promised an hour. He had won the acceptance of an hour. He would keep his word.
Though she could not reply to him directly—their Sending Stone only worked once a day—Caleb imagined he could feel her irritation with him across continents.
“I do not wish to keep you,” Essek said quietly, after it was clear that three words were all Caleb would bother to send in reply. “There are more urgent tasks required of all of us.”
“I am comfortable,” Caleb objected, tightening his arm slightly around Essek’s back when he made to rise. “And I am waiting for the cat.”
It took a moment for that phrase, admittedly nonsensical outside of the context of his own mind, to sink in. Caleb realized what he’d said only seconds before Essek raised his head properly to peer at him.
“The cat?” He inquired, though whether he was exasperated, confused, or simply tired was not immediately clear. “The cats you assured me Martha is looking after?”
“Ah, never mind, it is nothing….” He tried to wave the comment way, but Essek just narrowed his eyes further. Powerless in the face of that patient irritation, Caleb sighed, admitted, “…I am waiting for you to tell me what is troubling you.”
“Which… is akin to a cat in some way,” Essek laid his head back down with a thoughtful sound, gears turning in his head. “Ah. A matter of avoidance, yes? Is this a common Zemnian idiom?”
In lieu of reply, Caleb rested his hand on the nape of Essek’s neck, thumb stroking back and forth, back and forth. He waited.
…a bumper crop of green beans this year. I have pickled and preserved and harassed the neighbours with bushels, quite apart from my own meals every evening, and yet they keep coming. Short of setting up a stand outside of my office door at the Academy and begging my students to relieve me of this burden, I do not know what else to do with them. My knees feel it, certainly, and my back. Ach, but it is no surprise to you that I do not feel as young as I once did. It is still a good thing, to see such growth come from my hands….
“In truth…” Essek curled his fingers slightly against Caleb’s chest. The start of a somatic, perhaps. The need to hold on. An uncertainty about either approach. It was unclear. His breath was warm through Caleb’s shirt, in, out. In, out. Thirty seconds ticked by, measured in breathing, in the inexorable counting in Caleb’s head.
“This is a cat you should leave stray outdoors, Caleb Widogast,” he continued at last. “It is all claws and teeth. Even Jester would fail to find it appealing.”
“Even Jester?” Caleb repeated gravely, although it warmed his heart that Essek would play along with the fanciful conceit. “This is a heavy thing indeed then, schatz.” Back and forth. Back and forth. Trying to smooth away the tension he could feel building between Essek’s shoulders. “You are afraid to share it with me?”
He chuckled, humourlessly. “Very.”
It was a rare thing indeed, even in all their years together, for Essek to bare his vulnerabilities. From the resignation in his voice, it seemed Essek thought the result he feared was a foregone conclusion. He had even said it earlier, and Caleb had not listened properly: I do not wish your faith in me to be misplaced.
(As though Caleb would not cross fire and ice for him. As if he would not learn to wrench the moon from the sky if Essek wished one day, as a passing fancy, to wear Catha as a bauble. He had learned from his mistakes, ja; the last year—thirteen months, two weeks, and three days, but who was counting so closely other than him, always him, no matter what he wished—had set them in stark relief.)
“Oh, my love,” was all he could manage to say. His throat was too tight, his heart too full—of love, of regret—for more.
“Indeed? Reserve judgement on that point,” Essek retorted. He was board-stiff against Caleb now, braced for hurt, braced to flee. But he had not pulled away—he did not pull away. Hold fast to that truth.
Caleb kept him in the circle of his arms like the circumference of a spell.
“I have let you down, Caleb. As I said, we encountered Da’Leth in Aeor, and I did not move against him. Even knowing what he has done, or permitted to be done, even when his arcane reserves were reduced from battling a grand demon, I stayed my hand. At first, perhaps, I could justify clemency with the responsibility I had for my charges, but in truth….”
“You are persuaded by him?” Softly, evenly, so gentle as not to scare away the skittish animal of Thelyss honesty with the leaden feeling dragging down in his guts. Essek Thelyss, noted and vocal atheist, made to stand with the gods. It had always been something of an absurd premise. And had he not collaborated with the Assembly before for the sake of power, of knowledge?
No. No, he would not be the worst version of himself here, now. He would not be Bren, always seeking motive, assuming corruption, poisoning everything he loved with his suspicion.
Back and forth, went his thumb. Back and forth.
“No,” Essek replied with flat emphasis. “He remains quite odious, Caleb. There is nothing he could offer me now. But it is not what Ludanis offers. What I saw… what I was… we will all see it soon, and Light I fear, for your sake, when that hour comes.
“He’d found… it was down several more floors, Caleb, from what you and I ever managed. A relic that preserved the final days of the Age, almost like a Chronurgic Encapsulation but so much more real. It held a… a lengthy vision off Aeor at its peak, and I—”
This time, the silence was long. To his shame, Caleb was unable to find any words of comfort around the growing mass of his fears.
As though sensing that new, cold thread that wound its way, poisonous, through Caleb’s professed love, Essek withdrew. He was very small, sitting with the blanket clutched loosely around his shoulders at the far end of the couch. Small and worn, with one knee drawn up against his chest and fingers plucking at the loose threads at the end of the blanket, slowly unravelling the fringe of its weave. But he did not try to avoid Caleb’s eyes from shame or an attempt to dissemble. No, Essek looked at him straight-on, unflinching, forcing Caleb to wrestle with the devastation he saw there.
“It was beautiful, Caleb, more than you or I had ever theorized. A dream made manifest. They were given a world of broken earth and ruined skies and chose to fly—in repudiation, in celebration, of all they were and all the gods had not touched. A mortal power. A mortal genius. The gods had slaughtered their kin, their children, in a fight of which mortality had no part, and so Aeor looked to immortality itself and dared—”
Essek stopped abruptly. His gaze, fixed on Caleb’s still, was terrible, weighted with horrible understanding. He did not cry. It was worse that he did not cry. Caleb had experienced grief beyond tears himself in his life; he knew the depths of pain that caused it.
When he continued at last, Essek’s voice was almost wistful at first. “The things they had made, Caleb; the brilliance there. Some of it reminded me of… when you first cast Cat’s Ire, yes? A spell modification made for the joy of it, for playfulness more than efficacy. The echoes of that were still there, below the fear. Below the anger. I wish—
“But the gods would not countenance any arrogance but their own. I saw them. I was them. They looked on the children they had made, abandoned, and pushed to the brink of survival, and they… they aligned with the Betrayers, because they were family. They decimated Exandria between their warring factions to win supremacy over each other, and they joined them again. They—everything, they just—They had worshippers there, in the city, even in those last few days, mages who wept for mercy, who explained their desire merely to help. They had used their gifts to help with what the gods had wanted, and even they were swatted down like insects.
“The Knowing Mistress watched knowledge be crushed from existence with only a token protest, because mortals had devised it—little matter that she and her brethren also sought to kill other gods in their Calamity.
“The Archeart looked at this pinnacle of achievement—of art, of architecture, of the magic he gave to us that caused the fucking Schism to begin with, and ground it to dust under his boot heel. I felt the Archmage die, sobbing, in his arms.
“The Wild Mother encouraged the fall, let Eiselcross, like the rest of Exandria, be permanently scarred, its creatures broken and decimated.
“What makes them so worthy of our protection and aid now, Caleb Widogast? Why should I risk you, risk my love, for a pantheon who will neither see nor care if I fall in that service? Caleb—”
He wavered then, voice creaking like old ice. His eyes flickered to a middle distance, something beyond his plane that Caleb could not perceive.
“I watched them die. I killed them myself, and I watched, and I could not prevent it. They only wished to defend themselves and they all died.”
Prime, Betrayer, or nature itself, there was no power in Exandria that could keep Caleb from embracing Essek when he was in pain. Caleb held him tightly, feeling the strained hitch in Essek’s breathing that did not, would not, transmute into tears to offer some relief. Felt the new cracks that Essek’s grief opened up in his heart. Doubt poured in to fill them.
“I am sorry. I am so sorry, Essek. I cannot stand with him, you know that I cannot, but, schatz, but if you…. I will not try to sway you if you need….” He could not say it. He meant it, but he could not say it. It would betray Keyleth; it would betray all of them, if Essek went to the Vanguard’s side.
Caleb would not stop him though, no; he loved Essek enough to let him do as he must and raise no alarm for it. But it would break something in him, he knew. It would break something that could never be repaired.
He would do it regardless.
“Maybe I want to be swayed,” Essek said, muffled, miserable, against his neck.
Caleb closed his eyes. Pressed his nose deeper into Essek’s hair. Where was the line between one’s ethics and one’s desire? How many atrocities could one witness and still hold that line with equilibrium?
It was the gods at fault, but they were fighting for people. He thought of saying it aloud, injecting it with a conviction he did not wholly feel. Had he not been wrestling earlier that day with the fact of all the ordinary, everyday people Da’leth had convinced of his righteousness? It was a thin pretence at gallantry, to claim a moral superiority for all Exandrians and ignore the fact of the spell-and-sword fodder thousands that Da’leth had recruited to his grand design.
And what there they on the other side, conscripted by their fears and old hatreds and the gods’ pleas?
He did not know. He had unapologetically taken his stand against Ludanis, but it was not for any love of the gods. It was personal: he knew, he knew, that for all his rhetoric, Da’leth did not care about people. But it was still personal, more than any noble conviction. He suspected much the same of Keyleth.
Not much to hang an appeal on. Essek was not merely neutral on the subject of divinity, after all, even before his recent sojourn into Aeor.
“Do you want to see your orchids?” He asked at last, rising from the couch. If Essek’s approach to concerns or upset was a cat-like slowness of approach, Caleb’s response to deep emotional wounds was no less feline at times: venturing close enough to signal affection, without permitting touch.
It was something he needed to work on, he knew. Better than he was, better than the days of shoving things down and trying to pretend they were not there (as though they were not all meticulously counted and accounted for in the recesses of his mind). Given time, given another chance, he would work on it. But for now, when words all felt so hollow without the knowledge of magic to heal, this was what he could offer.
When Essek did not reply, just looking at him with bone-deep weariness, Caleb took his hands and tugged him up from the couch, using a Mage Hand to keep the blanket draped around his shoulders. Fall had reached the city now, and the nights could be cold and damp.
Essek shot a glance, quizzical, at the deep window ledge where his flowers had once lived as Caleb guided him toward the back door of their workroom. Empty now, it had become another repository for dust, though had largely escaped the shifting book-tides that eddied around the room from sheer inconvenience of location.
Miming keeping his lips locked in the way that children so liked to do, Caleb grinned at him and yanked his boots back on. He left them unlaced for now—it would not be a long trip. Essek’s smile in response was thin, very thin, but it was there, like the first wisps of green in the long, grey, icy springs of Rexxentrum.
For his part, Essek did not bother with his boots, heavy, winter things lined up neatly just next to the door like they belonged there. His robes and his blanket whispered against the floor as he drifted along to Caleb’s touch, but his feet never touched.
Caleb took his hand, and tugged him out into the garden.
The night was alive with crickets, their clicking and whirring having replaced the soft drone of late-season bees and the last, buzzing calls of the cicadas once sunset had arrived. It smelled like earth, like sweet grass and dead leaves, like the autumnal night-blooming vines Caleb had planted the first year after Essek had moved in with him officially.
New flowers in the garden. Boots by the door. Robes hung in meticulous order in the closet. Jewellery adorning the surface of the dresser (and the floor all around it, siren call that it was to the cats). All the little things that made stone and wood and earth transmute into “home.”
His dresser had been very bare, this past year.
Essek spotted it immediately, of course—the garden not terribly big and his vision better adapted to the dark than Caleb’s.
“We never had enough sunlight in Rosohna to make greenhouses practical,” he mused. There, again, that small green shoot of a smile pushing up through the heavy snow of grief and hurt. “But I am not convinced, Caleb Widogast, that Rexxentrum is any better suited to them.”
“You are acting as though this is Vasselheim!” Caleb protested. “We get plenty of sun… ah, in some months, at least.”
“Indeed, I have long found the climate quite accommodating here. Rarely have I been homesick.”
Ignoring the sarcasm, Caleb opened the door and ushered him inside to the much warmer interior. Here, the orchids lined the shelves (rather wobbly), that he’d constructed with Veth, having left the heavier lifting of the greenhouse proper to Fjord, Yasha, and Beauregard. They were—ah, well, they had not all been thriving, true, even after some assistance from Caduceus, but they were all still alive, still mostly in bloom.
Essek drifted a slow turn around the space, reaching out here and there to touch a leaf, glide a finger along the line of an arching flower spike. Caleb watched him move in the dimness before he caved to selfishness and cast his globes of light to softly illuminate the space.
Essek looked at him thoughtfully, a glance back over his blanket-clad shoulder, and then returned to Caleb’s side.
“You have been overwatering them.”
“Is that the problem? Ah, and here I thought they were suffering from neglect.”
“No. It is simply… possibly to love things too much,” Essek murmured.
Caleb gave the comment due consideration. “Hm. No. No, I do not believe that to be true at all.”
“Says the man who built a greenhouse for someone who doesn’t even live here,” Essek’s tone landed somewhere between amused and wistful.
Perhaps the comment was just about flowers and Caleb’s over-compensating approach to gardening. Perhaps. But Caleb knew Essek, whether he wanted to be known or not, and knew his habits when it came to being vulnerable.
…if you will never actually read these. I am being a coward, I know, wanting to share my day, my thoughts, with you when you are gone and not planning to return. I have been too angry with you to Send. Or too sad. Or too ashamed. Ach, Scheisse, Essek, with you only I find I do not know my own mind. It should frighten me more.
No more excuses today. It has been months. I am going to finish my grading, and then I will reach out.
Please reply.
The first time Essek had returned Caleb’s “I love you,” (technically speaking, at least; he did not, in fact, say the words themselves for several more months, but merely ventured a tentative, “and I as well.”) he had immediately fled to Vurmas and had not replied to any Sendingsfor a month. Caleb had been forced to Teleport there himself and risk an international incident just to kiss some sense into him.
When Caleb had asked Essek to stay, to rest at last and make Rexxentrum his home, it had been like living with a ghost for months. There was never a mug or a book left out of place from where Caleb had left it (apart from the dishes being done in a rather more timely fashion, a notable reduction in the dust on the shelves). Essek had jumped guiltily whenever Caleb caught him at the mortal sin of making himself tea or using a piece of parchment.
What had it cost Essek, then, to be the one to ask for Caleb’s hand? To be the one to take a new step forward in their relationship? What, then, had refusal sounded like to him?
You may love me this far, and no farther.
Caleb folded his arms around Essek’s slight frame. “Ja, well, no one has ever accused me of not being a fool. A lovesick fool, though. A hopeful one.”
Essek sighed. “I should get back. Delilah, or the remnant of her, will continue to regain power every moment we do not work to contain her.”
“A moment, bitte, Essek. I am not quite done with swaying you.”
The tension that had slowly left Essek’s frame as they’d crossed the garden snapped back again in an instant. “I was being childish before. There is no need.”
“I am sorry, schatz, but on this point we must disagree again.” Caleb gave him a reproving look as he stepped away. With a gesture of his hand, the Dancing Lights bobbed down the greenhouse once more, and Caleb followed. He knew without looking that Essek would wait for him.
It took a few moments to find what he wanted, after close evaluation of a few over-loved orchids. Essek squawked in startled protest when he broke off a spike of three blooms from one plant, but it wasn’t the Dendrax lidenii or the Vanda coerula, either of which would have cost him his head to see harmed (and deservedly so; those were Essek’s prized favourites—ones that Caleb had fretfully sent to Caduceus more than once just to make sure they continued to live). But the orange Cymbidium had defied even Caleb’s ham-handed attempts to care for it; it would be fine.
“For one,” he said gravely, as he returned to Essek’s side. “I clearly cannot be trusted around your plants.” Smiling in the face of Essek’s frown, he carefully threaded the spike into Essek’s long hair, admiring the glowing orange against his dusk colouring.
“Two,” he continued, reaching past Essek to push open the door to the greenhouse for him once more, “I am clearly not to be trusted to my own devices with our house; you have seen the state of things here.”
“As I am understanding this list, I am to be your housekeeper and gardener?” Essek asked archly. “Most persuasive. Am I also to ensure you eat regularly?”
“Jester does a good enough job there,” Caleb grinned. “So long as my meals all involve pastries. Nein, nein, three,” he scooped Essek up in his arms then, prompting another startled cry. And ach, his knees truly would feel all of this lifting tomorrow. But Essek was lighter than a Vanguard supply crate and far more precious, and Caleb wanted to carry him across the threshold to their home. “Three, I have been writing to you, but the book is now getting too long for its holster. Besides, I have found I am not nearly so witty as you when I try to imagine what you would think or say in response to my very boring little life; it would be far more convenient just to ask your opinions directly.”
“You have been—? Caleb, for Light’s sake, put me down.”
He did, bending to set Essek back on the couch and kneeling in front of him. From the left book holster, he removed the other book, the new book, dozens and dozens and dozens of pages spent on saying I’m sorry and I miss you and I love you in a variety of circuitous ways.
He pressed it into Essek’s hands. “One for every day you’ve been gone, or near enough. 395 letters, if you wish to be precise.”
“Caleb.” The destruction of the world at the gods (and his, through the Aeorean vision) own hands had not moved Essek to tears, but this small act of love did. Caleb felt his own eyes grow hot in response and he quickly moved on past the thick feeling in his throat.
“Some are quite short, of course; I do not wish to exaggerate my epistolary prowess. And I confess I have written less in recent weeks, between Da’leth’s plots and our Sending more often. But let me finish.
“Four, and this is the most important one, four,” he gathered Essek’s hands in his own, book cupped between them.
“Four, I love you, Essek Thelyss. I do not love the gods, I do not love magic, I love you. And I will fight against Da’leth and Predathos and the Vanguard because I believe it to be the right thing to do, because that is where I see the most safety for the people of this world… or at least for the people I love. But…” he sighed, smiled. “Ah, Essek, if we fail, if the gods are destroyed and the Archeart’s gift leaves this world, there will still be green beans and pastries and cats, ja? I can try my hand at farming properly, perhaps. You could raise prize-winning orchids.”
“It seems I come out rather the better in this vision, no? You would not trust me with your crops?”
“Well, the details are not so much important,” Caleb rubbed the back of one hand over his eyes to brush away the drops gathering thick in his lashes, and offered him a watery smile as Essek urged him back up onto the couch. He pulled Essek in against his side. “What matters is this: you are world enough for me.”
Wordlessly, Essek turned to press his face into Caleb’s neck. HIs hands gripped the book of letters tight, tight.
Slowly, one hand pressed between Essek’s shoulder blades to bring him along, Caleb shifted to recline against the couch once more.
“This is where you tell me how irresistibly charming and persuasive and handsome I am,” he prodded, voice still husky.
Essek snorted damply against his neck. “I have found you charming and persuasive and handsome since you showed up half-naked in the Bright Court. That is precisely the problem.”
“Ah, so I should add a fifth reason to sway you to my list: bondage gear on demand.”
Essek smacked his chest firmly and sat up. “Enough. I have work to do, and you are being charming and handsome at me now.”
With a grin, unrepentant, Caleb toed off his boots and settled more deeply into the cushions. “I was promised an hour of resting, Herr Thelyss. Persuading you is quite another task entirely: by my count, I have 35 minutes left.”
Essek narrowed his eyes at him, as though evaluating Caleb’s logic. His ears twitched. But slow, catlike, he melted down against Caleb’s chest once more.
“I will keep count,” Caleb murmured, as though his mind could let him do anyhing else. As though he did not plan to hoard and treasure every second of this (soft weight, warmth of body and breath, solid under his hand on his chest, tea-and-pearl-dust scented, ozone arcana Essek).
“There is time, love. I swear, there is still time.”
Thank you. It was. I’m. Thank you for answering.
*****
Let us be ocean and coast, a taking
into and over one another:
shifting sediment, a breaking down
of rock: dredge and deposit. A series
of prepositions meaning proximity,
although the most of us extends away
from one another. Once, in winter,
I ventured far inland, forgot the crash
of gravity pulling you over me
and away—forgot there is a place
where we meet and retreat but never let go.
Let this be a moment of remembering,
my love, as I stand at the edge of myself,
cliff and sea grass and the screaming gull above,
sighting your breadth to the horizon.
—“Love Poem,” Donika Kelly