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It was like looking at a ghost.
Gale shifted in his bespoke robes, a variation of one of the looks from the Ancunín label’s new autumn collection. Astarion had been experimenting with structure this season, sculptural forms achieved by specially engineered textiles and experimental foundational garments. “Silhouettes, darling, to complement the embroidery.” Gale couldn’t say he fully understood it, but with decades spent focused on his studies and missions almost immediately followed by self-imposed isolation he could hardly be called the most informed critic of what passed for fashion these days. Once, during the quest with the Absolute, he’d discovered the rather ludicrous Wavemother’s Robe to have the surprising ability to grow and shrink to fit its wearer, and the group had convinced him it was quite the look for the more sartorial of the wizardly class these days. Only when he’d grown used to all the exposed skin and the sway of the fabric against his mostly bare legs did they deign to admit that it was all a joke that had grown rather out of hand, and by then he had already made the robe something of his own.
So, not the best judge.
Still, he did have to give this new look its due. It certainly wasn’t the standard thing he’d worn as almost a uniform before his abduction, nor was it the gaudy utilitarian fare coming out these days with the attempts at emulating armour and the need to sear his retinas with the implied new imperative to incessantly glow to advertise their magical properties. Instead Astarion had found a way to create robes he could wear to several events and that made sense for him making the rare appearance at something as fashionable as a Trousseau, this plush velvet number accented with floral and celestial themed beading and applique, blurring the line between wizard and fashion model, and today he looked rather more like a wealthy patron than a supportive spouse, the way the cape flared around him like a statement and flowed behind like a shadow.
It was almost enough to feel at home in this strange new environment. Gale enjoyed the rare alignment in schedule and the chance to see all the talent on display. He’d clapped and whooped as hard as anything when Astarion’s turn came about to showcase his newest creations and take his bows, and somehow during the day’s festivities he’d made the somewhat fatal error of letting himself relax as if he weren’t some interloper who was simply lucky enough to enjoy an invitation to somewhere he didn’t belong.
But that was the thing about the elite: they always found ways to remind the outsiders of their place.
Gale stared at the woman flirting with his husband, and suddenly felt very small.
Astarion had never given Gale any reason to believe he’d be anything other than faithful, and to his credit had not done anything to shake Gale’s confidence in him in all the wine and finery of the past few days of the Trousseau so far. From his side of the cocktail table he sipped at his wine quietly as she spoke, flashing the two fused metals of his prominently positioned wedding ring with every raise of his goblet, stepping back with every attempt of hers to lean forward.
Gale had to say something.
He strode as confidently as he could across the pavilion, the sequins and beads of his outfit catching in the dancing lights as Astarion visibly searched for escape.
“Yes, well,” Astarion smiled tightly, a nervous giggle escaping from his lips, “that does tend to be my favourite part of the Trousseau, darling: coming home to my husband, whom I love.”
She laughed the way Gale always remembered Great-Grandmother teaching her, quietly and pitched to an elegant low, with her hand covering her mouth. “Is that an invitation, Mr Ancunín?” she just about purred. “How utterly munificent of him to share.”
Gale faked the most insouciant smile he could. “Everything all right, my love?” he said. “Lucina, dear, I had no idea you two had made your acquaintance. I’d have at least invited you over for tea.”
Astarion’s relief quickly gave way to confusion. You know her? the raised eyebrows and tilt in his head said.
Gale gestured that he’d explain later.
The woman—Lucina—however, looked equally surprised, though he had no idea why. She looked generally how he’d have expected her to look after over twenty years apart. Gale, meanwhile, well… faithless and false his father may have been, but there was no denying where the resemblance lay. He and Lucina even shared the same brown hair, the same tall and robust frames. Perhaps she’d forgotten.
Lucina eyed him up and down. The approval filled Gale with horror.
“I take it this is the fabled husband,” she said. Gale struggled to keep his soul from escaping when she traced her fingers along his sleeve and felt for the muscle beneath. “Lucina Dezlentyr-Irlingstar. Enchanted. And I admire your sense of adventure. I’m sure your generosity extends to many…” at this she glanced briefly down Gale’s front, “areas of life.”
He silently thanked Mystra he didn’t vomit right then and there, though truthfully, she probably found the moment too funny to interrupt with something as banal as a bodily function.
“Lucina,” he squeaked, “Lucina, stop, it’s me.”
“I’ll say.”
“Gale. Dock Ward. I used to come to the villa on Delzorin Street. I made friends with your hunting dogs. You laughed at me for asking for olive oil to dip my bread into. Gale.” He let her hand wander up his arm until he had to snatch it away as if she burned. “Your cousin.”
She actually did stop then, and took a moment to regard him.
They did look alike. If he had introduced them both to strangers as her brother no one would’ve batted an eye. He was a shade or so darker in complexion and much more prone to a lasting tan, being a combination of his father’s fairness and his mother’s honeyed amber, and his features did take after some of the general breadth and sharp angles he’d seen in his mother’s brothers, but she would’ve been mad to claim they shared no blood whatsoever.
“I don’t have a cousin by that name,” she said, which was close enough.
“Yes, you—” he stopped. “No, that makes sense. You all probably wiped that branch off the family tree.”
She searched her memory. “Gale Dezlentyr, Gale Dezlentyr,” she muttered. “The Dock Ward. The only relatives I know who lived in the Dock Ward were—”
And now her eyes widened, as she finally saw him true.
Recognition was soon joined by more complex emotions, little changes in her eyes and the corners of her mouth that spoke of the wheels turning within. She knew him, that much he could glean from her expression, but she’d been taught well, and whatever glimpse he had into the inner workings of her mind was quickly smoothed away by a practised and elegant calm.
“As I said,” she said, “I don’t have a cousin by that name. And if I did, he died young. An oaf, you see. Unfortunate. And if he didn’t, well, he’s certainly no noble, if you’re having any ideas, and my family don’t speak of my uncle’s youthful regrets.”
She stepped away from the cocktail table with a polite little bow.
“It’s good to see you, Gale,” she said. “I would’ve come to tea if I could.”
They both watched dumbly as she disappeared back into the crowd.
The trees were lovely outside of the confines of the Fields of Triumph. On this street in particular the sea winds blew through leaves in every fiery shade of autumn, the veiled sun glinting off the Spires of the Morning and dappling through the canopies down to generously shaded streets. Waterdeep could get unseasonably warm even this close to winter, but here where the great and the good held their interests the city planning made more effort than most towards comfort.
“Are you sure they won’t mind you leaving early?”
Astarion continued walking along with him, his pace unchanged as he scoffed at the very idea. “If anything, it’ll gain me a bit of a reputation,” he said. “Ancunín, mysteriously disappearing in the middle of prime mingling hours. He‘s still new, they’ll say. He should be desperate for clients. Ancunín should be in tears and stripping by the wine caskets, mewling for magnanimous passers-by to view his wares. Ha. I actually should’ve thought of this earlier. If I’m lucky I might even get a few imitators.”
Gale braced against a stray breeze and wrapped the shimmering cloak around him, grateful for its softness. “My husband,” he said, “ever the trendsetter.”
“Hmm. I still say you should’ve just let me kill her.”
“Oh? And with what weapon?”
He reached for a knife that wasn’t there and pretended he’d done no such thing.
“Details, details,” he shrugged. “I’d have done enough damage with Misty Step and a toothpick if you’d have let me.”
Gale stifled a laugh at the image of it. “My hero.”
“Anything to defend your honour, my sweet,” he grinned. His pointed canines glinted at the movement, much flatter than they once were but prominent all the same. He looked up at the falling leaves and grew thoughtful. “Are you all right, though? I’m sorry, my love, I got so caught up in this year’s commissions it didn’t even occur to me that an entire event for nobles would mean you’d… well.”
“Oh, I honestly forget I’m nobility,” Gale said. “Well, disowned nobility, technically, from the sound of it. But I’ve been a Dekarios so long that the reminder I was ever anything else is almost jarring.”
“She said they all just pretend that you’d died,” Astarion said.
“And I them,” he said. “It doesn’t bother me, truly.”
Facial expressions never exactly came easy to Gale, but it was always easier than most to decode the shifts in Astarion’s bearing, the slightest hints of tension or doubt that hung in the air between them.
He sighed. “All right, it does a bit.”
“I wasn’t going to ask.”
“They’d all so thoroughly erased me and Mum that my own cousin forgot my existence and offered me a threesome,” he said. “Technically a second cousin, or a third, but still, she did know me, and now I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
“Oh, I know her type,” Astarion said. “All right and proper in public but once you get all the layers off it’s all bosom piercings and some creative uses of straps. Handsome woman she may be but I’d have declined regardless. I mean, all that work—”
The wince ran through the whole of Gale’s body. “Really not how I want to picture my cousin, dearest.”
Astarion guffawed. “Sorry, pet,” he said. “My point is, nobility’s not all that great. You were noble, I was noble, and honestly, after two hundred years luring nobles to bed, I’m afraid the appeal grows rather stale.”
“Not stale enough to stop designing for them, though?”
“Gale,” Astarion smirked, “I never said I tired of their money.”
Gale’s exhale of amusement misted in the cool air. Astarion always did know how to lighten the load when his thoughts grew too heavy to carry alone.
His husband’s fingers laced around his, and autumn became just a little warmer.
“Anyway,” Astarion said, “this may be the first autumn I’ve had since I’ve moved here that I’ve gotten a moment’s peace from these nobles and their petty little airs and intrigues, and that first one hardly counted because I seem to recall I had that rather unfortunate little sun allergy.”
Gale considered it. He was right. When Astarion had first come along with him to Waterdeep, he was adjusting to life free of Cazador and back in the shadows, occupying himself with whatever little diversions he could until his skill at dressmaking and embroidery had attracted the attention of a wizard of noble blood forced to attend the Vernal Trousseau on short notice. He was still a vampire when he’d started his life in the fashion world, and had only grown busier since, worrying about the next Trousseau or Fleetswake or wedding gown long after his curing, and most harried in the days before autumn gave way to the snow and his client base fled the city to winter in warmer climes. They were able to share the cold and dark of the winter together, but as their marriage went on Gale had all but given Astarion the entire fall to worry about work.
He squeezed his hand back. “And what are you thinking, now that you’ve the day free?”
“Well,” Astarion said, “what do the filthy common folk do, when they’re not busy serving their betters?”
“And that’s us, is it,” Gale said, “dressed like this.”
This being, well, dressed for a Trousseau. They walked hand in hand in the finest haute couture and just about glittered together, in the light of the dappled sun.
“Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve stolen fine clothes,” he said. “Now come, Gale Dekarios and only Dekarios, of the Dock Ward and nothing else, show me a good time.”
Gale always thought The Market was a terrible name for a place that deserved at least some effort in its nomenclature. For one thing, Waterdeep had several markets, being a city of this size with a good deal of smaller populations to cater to. It irked him almost purely on the principle of semantics. For another, “market” only described a fraction of its functions in practice. The area was so large it also served as a performance space, cafeteria, makeshift informal childminding service, public speaking platform, artisan workshop, and general community centre, so really it probably also just annoyed him on a different front of the field of semantics.
Still, he was no stranger to the labyrinthine nature of it all, and had no trouble leading Astarion down the winding paths of caravans and stalls, weaving past piles of fruit stacked high or spices piled into towering cones, children sleeping in empty cartons tipped to the side and hastily covered with repurposed cloth or paper, the calls of sellers advertising their wares and customers haggling down to the cheapest they could get. They had come here together on occasion, when there'd be word of a good deal on a fresh delivery, but never this far deep into the thick of it, away from the fresh produce and tourist souvenirs, accosted on all sides by sellers of trinkets and various portable foods.
“Are you sure you're not suffering for my sake,” Astarion asked after one too many turns, “because we can leave if it's all too much.”
The concern for his peculiar unexplained sensitivities was routine at this point, banal even, but for all Gale's love of predictability and need for a baseline of certainty he could never bring himself to take any of it for granted.
An oaf, she'd called him. That was Dad's word for it, too, when Gale showed the slightest hint of struggle or general oddness. Gale never really liked the family villa, if he had to be honest. The space was almost hostile in its sterility, the rules and norms of nobility as opaque as they were obtuse. Relatives in fine clothes and refined manners had no issue bringing Mum to the verge of tears as long as their barbed comments had the veneer of elegance, or joking with him within earshot that he must have been taken as a baby and replaced with a pretender, doomed to be exposed any day now on some unfortunate winter morning as a rotten log or a bundle of sticks.
No wonder she was shocked to find him alive.
He shook his head smiling, grateful even if he probably shouldn't have been. “I’ve been coming here since I was a boy,” he said. “The chaos is worth it for the rewards in the end.”
Astarion's entire face lit up with the joy of the promise of intrigue. “You really are just full of surprises.”
The general food area was a cornucopia of activity, smells and cuisines from many of Waterdeep’s cultures and communities clustered into an assortment of stalls run by often generations of the same family specialising in a small selection of dishes. They'd had some refreshments at the Trousseau, but nothing with actual spice and nothing filling enough to ruin all the efforts of a tightly laced corset or a vest leaving little to the imagination.
On other days he would've gone for a good stew or something deep fried and battered, but Astarion was never around for the seasonal goods.
“Gale!” the merchant cried as he approached the stall he sought. Kallias Malis had finally removed the tooth he'd been complaining about the last time Gale had visited this side of the market, and the lack of pain evidently only enabled his love of food. A healthy glow had since blossomed on the merchant's full cheeks, and he wiped at the sweat on his brow as he beckoned Gale closer.
Gale couldn’t help a little smile. “Well met, Mr Malis.”
“Ah, you stand too much on ceremony, boy,” he said. “What's the occasion, then? Blackstaff function? Finally getting married?”
“I told you, several times now, I have a husband.”
“I'll believe it when I see him,” he said. “So come, fresh delivery of walnuts just came today, and you caught me just finishing up the toppings on the latest cake.” He turned to Astarion, finally noticing that they had in fact arrived together. “This one tends to show up just when I’ve set out a new cake to display. It’s spooky.”
“Ha!” Astarion said. “He learnt that habit from coming here, did he?”
“Oh, Gale’s been snacking on these cakes and pastries since he was old enough to wander off and complain about his mother gossiping too long with the fruit sellers,” he said. “It’s how I know I’m good: decades-long customers.”
The familiar scent of spiced walnut cake soaked in a rich honey syrup and topped with sugar and chopped walnuts made him think of autumn in a way few things could. Walnuts were best at this time of year, freshly coming into season along with quite a few other things Gale loved to fill his baskets with, and as much as he enjoyed them in the warming stews characteristic of the season, there was nothing like a good treat, and he could already taste that comforting blend of cloves, cinnamon, and vanilla just looking at it. Kallias allowed himself a proud little smile at Gale’s expression and handed over two little plates with nary a word.
“Decided to bring a new friend, then?” he said. “He’s handsome. Another wizard?”
“Eugh, perish the thought, darling!” Astarion mimed disgust as best he could. “No, dear, I’m afraid this ‘friend’ is going to be rather permanent. You see…” At this he held up his ringed hand and gestured at Gale’s own matching ring. Waterdhavian custom called for both their engagement rings to be cut in half and then fused together with the other to create the final wedding rings. The often mismatched metals and designs left no doubt as to the identity of the owner of the literal other half. “Gale’s an awful liar, as I’m sure you know. And he didn’t lie about this.”
Kallias audibly gasped. His large hands clapped around his mouth as he took in this information and only released when he was ready to speak again. “Gale!” he said. “Oh, Gale, he’s real! You did get married!”
“Well, I did tell you!”
For a man of his size, it took no effort for him to dash out from the back of his stall and sweep him into a hug. “I never thought this would happen for you, Gale,” he said. “Never!”
Astarion nearly missed the plates of cake Gale almost dropped in the embrace, so palpable was his struggle not to double over in laughter.
“Astarion, was it,” Kallias said, “the artist? I thought it was too good to be real. You made these clothes?”
“Well, me and my little team,” he said. “Oh, why not. Yes, I did. I made it all.”
“Your work is splendid,” he said. “Such a change from his plain little robes, robes anyone could wear. And he expected us to believe him when he said he studied at Blackstaff, under Elminster. Could you imagine? Dressed like that?”
“Ha ha, all right, Mr Malis, he gets the picture.”
“I asked Morena, begged her to let me teach him some recipes so he could stop finding a new little friend every tenday and settle down,” he said. “The agony when I learnt he can already cook! Then I knew, I could not help him. But look at him now!”
Astarion had given up on restraint by the time his turn came for enthusiastic congratulations, laughing openly and heartily at Mr Malis’s impassioned recountings of Gale’s whirlwind student life making his way through first his school and then others, a saucy bard from over at New Olamn’s and a fine young Gondian he’d struck up conversation with at a Day of Wonders exhibit.
“He thought he was very stealthy, finding some quiet corner to fumble around with that poor girl,” Kallias said, “but I was bringing in eggs for my egg washes, see, coming round the back away from the foot traffic, and I heard the crack of his knees from behind a delivery cart.”
“As a student?!” Astarion practically squeaked.
“You see why I worry!”
His daughter, Melitta, wheeled a dolly of wax paper and delivery boxes into the general stall area, her voice unhampered by strain. “Gale! Ooh, fancy today. What’s going on?” she said. “Dad made a new friend, then?”
Kallias held up Astarion’s ringed hand. “Gale has brought his husband!”
The contents of the dolly nearly spilled onto the floor. “Gale!” she said. “He’s actually real! Oh, Gale, I’d have never thought this would happen for you!”
He couldn’t begrudge her the joyous hugs, the kisses of congratulations all over his face.
He thanked the shade of the marquee above them, hiding the full extent of the blush creeping up his neck and blooming harshly all across his countenance. “Thanks, Mel,” he said. “I’d have loved for you all to believe me the first time round, but better late than never.”
It didn’t take much to attract the attention of the other vendors of the food stalls, people who’d known him since he was a boy and watched him grow up. He was Morena’s boy before they could believe the tales of him being anything else, and after his disappearance to work for Mystra in earnest, followed by his year of self-isolation and further absence to deal with the Absolute, they had apparently worried something quite wizardly had happened to him when he returned all long-haired and bearded and battle-scarred, reluctant to speak of what had happened to him other than he was back now. There were worries that the husband was some sort of euphemism, some coping metaphor to deal with the horrors of the road. Astarion was code for something, the more neurotic of them speculated. Perhaps he had lost someone in the quest, the poor dear, and Morena had indulged in whatever truth she needed to keep him tethered to this life.
“But he’s here!” Kallias cried. “Gale is all right, and Morena’s sanity remains intact!”
Cheers from all round, to Gale’s delighted mortification.
“It really is good to see you, Gale,” Melitta grinned, and this time he could actually believe it. “Come round during our break sometime, yeah? Bring Astarion. We’ll all catch up. Coffee and snacks on me—but just for the first round, then you’re a paying customer like everyone else.”
Astarion practically melted at the first taste of cake, not that Gale could fault him for it in the slightest. He could just about taste the honey soaked bite of cloves and cinnamon just looking at him.
“Oh,” Astarion said, savouring his first bite of actual food in hours, “oh, I—Gale, was this our wedding cake?”
Ah. He knew he was forgetting something.
It wasn’t a long walk to the City of the Dead, being barely a few minutes longer than the walk from the Fields of Triumph to the Market, but the burden of baggage continued to plague them long past their adventuring days.
“A small token,” the food stall vendors had taken turns saying to him, as they foisted yet another small fruit or treat upon their table, “for the newlyweds.”
Soon enough they’d finished their coffees and polished off their cake slices flanked on either side by a small pile of gifts, and Astarion held back new waves of laughter as Gale produced none other than his little mesh market bag from within the folds of his embroidered velvet cape.
“Really?” he said. “Your first time actually wearing designer to the Trousseau, and you hide this in your bespoke clothes?”
“A good wizard never knows when they’ll come across spell components—or in my case, refreshments to bring home to Mum and Tara,” he said. “I was rather hoping the spread would actually have something I could furtively carry off, but I’ll take this veritable bushel of fresh fruit any day.”
He took him to the row of stalls and caravans of used chapbooks and pamphlets nearby, where he’d grown up browsing the piles of only vaguely organised books for hours before finding a small pile to bring home to the tower or his dorm room.
“You practically lived at an elite magical bookshop, darling,” Astarion pointed out.
“Ah, but there’s nothing like a good obscure find or light read by the fire,” Gale said. “It can’t all be magical study and historical tomes, you know.”
Astarion had his doubts, until he came upon the rather extensive piles of erotic chapbooks a good way into the row.
He struggled not to collapse into another fit of giggles when Ms Candle, the erotic chapbook merchant, greeted Gale as an old friend.
They sat at their usual bench in the City of the Dead watching the leaves flutter in the gentle autumn breeze, a mosaic of bright and festive colours ere the coming of the winter chill. They leaned against each other, sitting in comfortable silence, as off in the distance were children playing in the grass, lovers meeting in the shade of the trees, an artist trying to paint—here a serious business meeting, there a group of friends catching up over wine.
Astarion snacked on a pomegranate, and Gale let himself indulge in some secret pride that Astarion had been a Dekarios long enough that he had finally learnt the trick of how to get the seeds out without much effort.
“You know,” Astarion said, “aside from our anniversary, I don't think I really have any autumn memories with you—at least, not during the day.”
“Well, I’m not one to push,” Gale said, “and it’s a busy time for us both. I know I’ll have you in the winter.”
“But a whole season, Gale,” he said. “Tendays on end—months on end—it’s just villa after villa when I’m not at the boutique. So many parties, and all those rules—when we could be… sitting here, enjoying the view. I forgot how quiet it gets outside of the pre-winter rush. It’s like a whole other world.”
His exhale of laughter fogged in the air. “You like how we filthy commoners enjoy the season, then, do you?”
“Is there more?”
Gale stole a few pomegranate seeds from his husband’s unguarded hand. “Well, there’s always the Song of Dawn, at the Spires of the Morning. Bit of music to ring in the season.”
“Oh gods no,” Astarion laughed. “Something I don’t have to get up early for.”
“Feast of the Stags, at High Harvesttide,” he said, and luxuriated at the first taste of those bright seeds popping in his mouth. “Free food, and those roasts are spectacular.”
He nodded much more approvingly, and then a thought occured to him that filled his eyes with a mischievous mirth. “Tell me about the Gondian girl from the Day of Wonders.”
Gale nearly choked on his bite. “Gods.” He swallowed. “I should’ve let Mr Malis keep talking.”
“Were your knees just always this bad?”
Whatever attempts he had at putting up some front of annoyance were quickly undermined by the heat spreading across his face and the shake of his shoulders. “Stop it.”
The laughter spread, as it always did, almost instantaneously. “Poor young Gale, given away by the snap of his brittle joints.”
“I was sixteen!”
“Oh, now I definitely see why Kallias worried about you.”
They had always known how to make each other laugh.
Astarion was warm against him, here in the dappled sunlight. One arm wrapped around the other, plush velvet against fine wool, and their hands found another, as they always had.
They watched the sun dapple through the fiery leaves, as life unfolded all around.
“You never needed them, you know,” Astarion said. “Even less now, now that we’re our own family.”
Gale glanced fondly at his mesh bag, laden heavy with figs and pomegranates at the peak of their ripeness, a small mesh bag of walnuts and slices of cake wrapped in wax paper from the Malises, a small pile of chapbooks to read by the fire. Mum would be happy about the fruit, and he could pick up a little skewer for Tara on the way home.
Not bad at all, really, for a commoner and an oaf.
“Tell you what I do have over my father, though,” he said, “I’m not afraid to talk about my youthful regrets.”
Astarion's entire face lit up with the joy of the promise of intrigue. “How much trouble did you get into for the Mount Melody Walk incident with the bard? Tell all.”
He kissed his husband, and savoured the taste of autumn on his lips.
“This close to getting arrested.”
And they laughed together in their fine clothes, feeding the other fresh fruit, as the leaves fell gently around them.