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Strange, to begin with: bright sun from sun-up, and a cloudless sky, a high fast wind. Spring, in Skyrim; Kynareth must be laughing. Faralda strides bridge and battlement with her collar turned down and her hair swept up, to feel the sunlight on her skin. The sea of ghosts seethes cheerfully at the rocks below the college. Gulls wheel and scream. The air is bright enough to see how bare and brown the main courtyard stands; a glittering chorus of icicles drips along their statuary... a few gaps, where prentices have knocked them loose with snowballs or sticks.
"You," Colette Marence barks from the great rime-frosted doors. "Hold! Hold right there!"
Their mistress of restoration is a font of unflagging energy; it is not past ten and she storms about the place like a stalking cloud of Aurbic lightning. The spring sunshine, weak as watered wine, draws roses from her tired cheeks. Her hair has already flown out of its tail in a curly brown-and-silver cloud. "I've been looking everywhere for you." A bony accusing finger waves around Faralda's face. "Have you seen the master wizard?"
"It's mid-morning," says Faralda. "She'll be beating Aren's carpets."
Colette gives her a look, a hairy look-- "She is not with the Archmage. I have already spoken with him; he has not seen her at all this morning."
"He wouldn't see the nose on his own face," Faralda grunts. "Well, and what do you want? Shall I shake him until Ervine falls from his pockets?"
"Your trouble, Mistress Faralda, is that no one boxed your ears when you were a young hellion. Younger," she amends. "I'm off to the lecture halls. I wish you'd see to her chambers."
"If there's a corpse, I'll summon you and Phinis."
"Mara mind your tongue!" Colette snaps. She's knitting her fingers guiltily together. "If you... I would owe you a favor."
"Don't be silly." Faralda claps a hand to her stooped shoulders. The wind is turning: pine and fresh snow, distant smoke. She tramps up salted steps to wander the College warren.
The master wizard's door is shut and locked. Faralda beats it until it rattles against the lintel. "Ervine," she barks. "Are you yet living?"
Magefire sputters on the wall. The long row of living quarters is otherwise quiet, at this hour; down in the common, prentices squeal and bicker. Tolfdir's reeling laughter rings from the stones. She's leaned against the doorway, lighting her pipe, when the lock sighs through a weak spell and clicks open. Ervine's door likes to jam in warmer weather; Faralda shoves it open with a shoulder, wood and hinges wailing, and slams it shut again behind herself.
The room is a tall dark cavern, smelling of herbs and burnt wax. From the lone window-- small and thin-- a bar of white sunlight.
"It is you," a voice croaks. There is a rattle of a cough, or laughter. "I thought I was dreaming again. What do you want?"
The darkness resolves into shades of grey and brown. A shrubbish shadow, buried in the bed, with a weary round face, grieved and pasty. The stump of a candle on the bedside table, a stack of letters, a stick of wax. A green jar of ink. An empty cup.
"What ails you, master wizard?"
Ervine breaks into true laughter, then. She has never heard the woman laugh before, and hates the sound of it at once-- sour and pitiless.
"I am perfectly capable of my duties. Come a little closer and see for yourself."
She does, with her fingers twitching for a long curved dagger she no longer carries. Over-tired, she imagines Colette's diagnosis, in her clipped tones. Over-worked. Hale, besides. Constitution of an ox.
Something in her eyes, she thinks. She's seen a few deckhands with that look, that dullish beady glint... "You are not prone to fits of melancholy."
"You do possess a lovely arrogance, Faralda."
"So you've taken after Aren." She casts a disgusted hand about the dark room. "Licking your wounds in a drab little hole."
Ervine's dark eyes flash when she lifts her face. "Go to Colette. Tell her I shall see her at noon for a tisane."
She should have directly ordered 'get out'. Faralda bares her teeth in what might pass for a smile. "I will not."
"Will you not?" Tired amusement.
The cup catches her eye. "I'll fetch your tisane."
"Never mind the tisane."
"Berries, then." She draws her bag from within her sleeve, cloudberries and a little elk jerky, and sets it on Ervine's blanketed lap, and pulls it open with a finger. "Eat. You look like death."
"I really couldn't," Ervine says, in the same stern voice she uses to admonish prentices and professors alike. "Put that away, if you would."
"Hemicrania."
"Of a sort." She ought to look shrunken and small, swathed up miserably like this. She's as grand and stolid as ever. The grave face. The firm steadfast mouth. "You can tell Colette I said so."
Faralda risks another long, searching look at the letters. The seal on the first is freshly broken. Ervine winces. Her thick hand knots itself in the blanket.
"Ill news, was it?"
No reply. She watches Ervine's face. The twitch in her cheek; the hair standing greasily on the side of her head. "I'm sorry," she offers, and Ervine looks up fast as a gannet, and her mouth twists, and she barks laughing.
"'Sorry'," she gasps, in between peals of barking bitter laughter. "'Sorry'. Yes. Of course."
Faralda reaches for her other hand, trembling atop Ervine's thigh, and feels her pulse rabbiting in the wrist. "It will pass."
"Ce jeu féroce et ridicule, quand doit-il finir?" She smiles. "As the poets say. Out, Faralda. You do not want to play nursemaid at my bedside, I think."
"Of course not." She lets Ervine's wrist fall. "I cannot leave without you, master wizard."
"No?" Ervine drops her smile to her lap, where her fingers are buried in the blanket. "No, she ordered you here. Most commendable."
"Do you know something, Ervine? I woke impatient this morning." She folds her arms. "Are you unwilling or unable?"
"You are a keeper of confidences, Mistress Faralda. I think you might keep this one."
"I might not."
Ervine crooks a finger, still smiling; of all things Faralda sits at the side of her bed, and feels the heat of her bulky calf and thigh. "He is dead a fortnight now. A week for the letter to sail to Skyrim-- half a week to Daggerfall, half from Solitude to our little holding. I cannot fathom why it was written. But he is dead."
Faralda eyes her. She cannot tell, from the wretched stillness in her face, or the trembling in her hand, who or what or whether to commiserate. "Why wouldn't it be?"
"I myself am dead in those lands."
"Then the world has ended."
Ervine wrings the blanket in her fist. "I don't know that it has."
"It ought to."
"Yes," she says, eventually. "Yes, it ought. I don't know that it has."
"If the world hasn't ended," Faralda says, "and you aren't abed with pain or disease-- you can take a turn with me in the courtyard."
Ervine, smiling, shakes her head.
"Don't go to seed here, woman. Won't sort your mind any faster."
"What did you call it... licking my wounds?"
"Lick them outside in the fresh air."
"You may leave."
She turns to watch the unmoving sunlight. Her eyes glint in the shadows; the tip of her long, thick nose, the curves of her chins and soft jaw. Neither overly stern nor discernibly friendly. She ought to have been the sort of woman that Faralda liked, very much.
"Who was he to you?"
Ervine's face stills, save her mouth; the mouth trembles. She covers it with a hand.
"He was good to you, I hope."
"Not to anyone. Not to himself. Now he is dead."
"That much," says Faralda, "ought to be celebrated. Come down with me, master wizard. I'll buy you a drink at the Hearth."
Her dark eye is turned to the light, and glassy.
"Come down with me."
She wheels on Faralda, implacable as the polar night. "Why should you ask such things? Why should I give them to you?"
"You shouldn't," Faralda agrees. "I was born with my foot in my mouth, and I'm a scoundrel besides. But come down. Come down with me and have a little air." She offers a hand.
Ervine shuts her eyes and composes herself, with some trouble. Her throat pulses. "Very well," she says, in a thin voice. "Very well."
The hallway is chilly and quiet. Mirabelle Ervine, now dressed in her robes, carrying pen and paperwork, trails Faralda out through the back entrance, along the shortcut to the crumbling stargazers' walk. She stops stunned when the door opens to clear sunlight, and the breeze blusters noisily in, lifting her hair from her cheek.
"What day is it?"
"The tenth of Rain's Hand."
"Sun," she puzzles, and pushes past. Noonday strikes bronze and a few shining greys from her hair. She winces at the light, raising a hand to her eyes. "What beautiful weather."
It is startlingly beautiful. The starkness of the bay; glittering snow and rock, foam and current, the city of the dead beneath the falling tide. Mirabelle Ervine's hair sparkling in the stiff breeze.
"Show me your shield," she says, to clear her head. This, too, she dislikes about their new master wizard; the woman has a remarkable talent for snarling up thoughts. Ervine raises an eyebrow, searches Faralda's face.
"Here?"
"Here and now."
Ervine studies her another moment, then twitches a fragment of a smile and stands wide-legged, just as she addresses the assembled collegium. She claps her hands together and slowly pulls the palms apart, fanning a thread of magic between them, up and out into a ward, full and fuller, warping like hot air as it goes.
Faralda tosses four spiraling mageflames, sharp as darts. Ervine swears viciously under her breath, but the ward holds against them.
"A little much, this early in the day," she comments. She looks less like a solemn corpse, Faralda decides. "Another."
Popular among mages of her persuasion to toss a few icicles, but Faralda has always favored claws of frost. The shield sputters.
"Passable work," Faralda allows. Ervine lets the ward drop, shaking her fingers as the spell dissolves wetly into thin air, and regards her with a bit of resigned amusement.
"Satisfied?"
"Not in the least."
Ervine laughs. It is unlike the rest-- deep and pleased. Faralda grits her back teeth.
"You should cast in a radial instead of a flat axis, master wizard."
"Should I." She comes up, smiling, to squeeze past Faralda's side. "I suppose a scholar of destruction would know."
Down in the courtyard, a gaggle of prentices are lunging about in the fine weather, chasing each other with wisps, turning cartwheels. The rest sun themselves under a few of the leafless trees, passing what look like scraps of paper back and forth, conferring in low, urgent voices. Young Brelyna paces at the gate, declaiming to herself. The wind carries most of her speech away.
Colette's eyes are huge and happy when Faralda leads the master wizard into the infirmary. "Mirabelle! How good to see you today. Let me make you a tisane. Put some color in those cheeks."
"I'm perfectly well, dear Colette."
"It'll only take a minute." She vanishes into the stockroom, rolling up her sleeves. "Tincture of..."
Ervine catches Faralda by the cuff before she can duck out and flee to the bridge. In the dim ring of blue magelight, her temper is unreadable. "We have our differences. I trust this will not be one of them."
"Peace, Mirabelle Master-Wizard," Faralda sneers. "I would not betray a colleague."
Ervine's fingers dig hard in her arm a moment; then she steps away, light calving over her face. "Very well."
The day is clear and crisp on the broken bridge; down in the Winterhold square, people come and go. She can feel where Ervine gripped her, even through her coat and robes. Absently, she rubs a thumb along the skin.