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Caduceus stands up from the park bench. He has to push himself up with his hand because his legs shake and, just as soon as he is standing upright, the world shifts as he starts to faint.
His body feels immaterial, ethereal, and he is eager for it. The emptiness of his stomach gapes wider and seems to swallow up the rest of him, first a chill that runs up the front of him to his throat and then spreading. His vision spots out and he hears a rushing noise that muffles the surrounding sounds of Zadash that have been interrupting his meditation for days now. He is not a person for the time being, he is simply here to accept her message.
Every day since Caduceus has arrived in this strange city, he has gone out and walked until he found a new park or a tree or just a stretch of grass where he can sit and close his eyes and try to listen for the Wildmother’s next instruction.
Well, it’s a strange city to him at least. He’s never been to a city like this one at all.
Has he been to any city before?
He doesn’t think he has.
He hasn’t.
No, he hasn’t.
He feels the breeze drift not against him but through him and he does not know which way is up and which is down. It all tilts, swirls, his body prickles without substance.
And then it reforms when he hits the ground. He is used to feeling the Wildmother with his fingers in the earth as he works the soil, but here the dirt is dry and hard. Honestly, you couldn’t grow a thing in it if you tried. He hasn’t seen a single worm and he’s been here long enough to lose track of time.
His knee finds a rock which reignites that old injury Calliope caused a long time ago. He tries to listen in case that’s a sign too, that maybe he’s on the right path not just for the grove but for her as well, but it’s hard to hear with how many other noises are all around and how much his blood is rushing in his ears.
He can make out one voice though, calling his name. A woman’s voice. It’s the Wildmother—or it’s his mother—
And he strains to listen closely and that worsens the pounding in his head but it finally resolves and he hears clearly, “Caduceus!” And it’s Jester.
Jester and Nott, his new friends, are standing over him. They’re a little blurry but they look very worried.
“Oh. Hey,” says Caduceus. He tries not to sound disappointed.
“What the heck, man! You just fell over! We saw you from across the street.”
“Oh, did you?” He wasn’t expecting them out here, well away from the inn where they’ve been staying. He hadn’t seen them, as focused as he was on trying to listen.
It’s easy to listen for nature. Nature is everywhere. Just in the room he’s sleeping in, he’s already found two new types of mold he’s never seen before that he’s scraped off and added to his collection. There are birds and rats and grubs in the planks of the walls. He let his beetles dine on those. To get here, he walked through a crowd of more people than he’s ever seen in his life
The autumn breeze that finds them is a part of nature, because the winds of the Stormlord’s domain are just as much a part of the Wildmother’s.
It’s hotter than it should be, this late in the season, and the sun that beats down on his head without the canopy of the Blooming Grove to reliably provide him with shade is, as well as a part of nature, shared between the Wildmother and the Dawnfather.
There is very little in the world that does not fall beneath his goddess's purview.
Even with his new hat, the sun makes bright spots in the darkness when he shuts his eyes and the back of his neck grows sweaty as if he’s been out in the garden and tending the soil rather than just walking down a bunch of streets and sitting on a park bench.
“Are you okay?” says Nott.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine. You look sweaty and weird.”
“I am sweaty and weird,” Caduceus agrees. He’s been called this before. It’s familiar. It’s nice.
“Are you getting sick?” asks Jester. “The Traveler mostly showed me how to fix like… wounds and stuff but maybe you can do it. You know how to heal things right?” She puts her hands on either side of his neck and her palms are so cool and welcome that he sighs and leans into her touch. Jester rubs her hands back and forth. Then she tickles him with her fingertips. “I don’t actually know what I’m looking for, this is just what my mama would do if I didn’t feel good sometimes.” She says it like it’s a secret but she’s talking too loud for it to be a secret.
“Lymph nodes,” says Nott.
“You’re trying to tell if my glands are swollen,” says Caduceus.
“Oh, okay. Hmm.” She taps him a little more, right up under the jaw. “Caduceus, are your glands swollen?”
“I don’t think so.”
She tickles him under the chin and scratches at his beard like he’s a pet before she pulls back and wipes her hand on her skirt. “Whoa, you really are sweaty,” she says. “You maybe just got too hot then, you know. That happens a lot of the time in Nicodranas. Does your stomach hurt?”
Caduceus’s stomach is an empty well. It’s deep and aching, it’s the pond carried with him to remind him of home, toxic at the bottom like the lily petals.
Each night when he goes to bed, he hopes for a new message in his dreams. For the butterflies or the eyes to return. Or to see again the crystal he knows he needs to hold in his hands. But his dreams have been black and deep and shapeless and he’s awoken each morning by himself in a room designed for two people to the unfamiliar sounds of a city beyond and it’s been… hard to feel like he’s going in the right direction when so little has changed.
He is used to listening for the Wildmother’s voice in the breeze, in the rustle of the leaves in the canopy above. He feels for her embrace in the warm pockets of the pond. He watches for her hand in which insects choose to make their homes in the garden and how many squirrels have their kits in the safety of the grove as the corruption encroaches.
And when he finds it difficult to hear her clearly, he has become used to finding other ways to induce that connection.
None of the flowers or herbs that he and Jester have purchased so far will do the trick, but that had never been his first choice. The asceticism came naturally, after Clarabelle and Colton left. He’d look at the wok and suddenly it daunted him, just how round and black and empty it was. He couldn’t bring himself to fill it.
He feels closer today than he has on previous days because the pounding in his head and the sour ache at the bottom of his stomach muffle out the other noises. He listens to his own heartbeat, how it kicks against his chest, and the feeling of beetle legs skittering across his skull. He cannot find a pattern to them yet though. Something thick creeps up the back of his cracked throat but it takes no shape he can discern and only chokes him when he tries to swallow.
“You should probably drink something,” says Nott. She unhooks her flask from her hip and passes it over. “Here, try some of this. Don’t worry, I’ve got plenty to spare!”
The back of his mouth is sticky and his throat is dry in the places he can still feel it. Caduceus accepts the flask, unscrews the top, and then reels back from the pungent fumes inside.
“No, Nott!” Jester cries. “Like milk or water! Not your gross whiskey!”
“Hey, this is grade-A shit I’m offering here! This is ambrosia! There’s nothing this baby can’t cure!”
Bile rises up at the back of his throat and Caduceus’s empty stomach shudders at the stench of alcohol. “I appreciate the offer.” He screws the lid back on and passes back the flask.
Nott immediately unscrews the lid again. “It’s your loss, Mr. Sweaty Cowman.” She tilts her head back and swallows down a big gulp.
“You know, I really don’t think it is, but thank you anyway.”
“We were going back to the Leaky Nip anyway,” says Jester. “Maybe they’ll have some, like, juice or something that you like while we have lunch.”
“Sure, I can make us something,” says Caduceus.
Nott and Jester look at each other around the raised flask.
“I mean, they serve food there.”
“Do they?”
“Yes!” Nott stuffs her flask back away. “Downstairs! Where the tables are! Where there’s always food all the time! The people who work there make it and sell it to you.”
“I mean, I noticed the food, I just assumed…” There were often people sitting at the tables and eating as he passed through, but he never saw the coin. He’s never thought of a meal as something that would be transactional. “They’re making the food for them?”
“Were you going into the kitchen and making your own food this whole time?” asks Nott. “We’ve been here like a week! They let you do that? Just walk back in there?!”
“Well.”
“He wasn’t eating,” says Jester. She sounds incredibly sad suddenly and her face goes soft to match her voice. “Oh, Caduceus, what did we buy all those spices and things for then, huh? And the secret garlic?”
“What’s secret garlic?” says Nott.
“It’s garlic that’s a secret,” says Caduceus.
“It’s for keeping away vampires and also for eating!” says Jester.
“I have eaten.” Caduceus has been around dead bodies all of his life and he knows a fair amount about what makes them get to that point. He knows how much strain the body goes through when denied necessities, he knows how much it can take and how little it needs.
So he’s eaten. As much as he would have at home, less than he had on the road when the Mighty Nein sat around the fire all together like a family. Instead, back to bites here and there. Whatever he can just put in his mouth. The greens he harvested in the garden are starting to turn now after being in his bag for a week. What would have been a nice soup garnish, instead simply crushed between his teeth to ensure that he could make it each day to the farther and farther parks so that he can sit and listen.
“I just haven’t been cooking,” he explains.
“You cooked for us on the way here,” says Jester. “You’re really good at it.”
“Oh, thank you.” He smiles. His lower lip cracks. He smiles anyway. It’s nice to hear a compliment like that again. “I’m glad it’s appreciated. Yeah, no, yeah, cooking is great. I love cooking.”
“But you’re not doing it.”
“Nah.”
“Caduceus!”
“It’s different when you’re by yourself,” says Nott. She looks at him and he can see she knows. She and Caleb both. He could see it when they came climbing over the wall of the Grove, the hollow look to their faces that ran deeper than the grief across the rest of them, the way their clothes didn’t hang well off their frames. They’ve known hunger for a long time but they also knew something before that. “It’s more work when it isn’t for someone else.”
“Well, you’re not by yourself now,” says Jester. “And you don’t even have to cook! I never cook but I’m really good at ordering food, actually, so don’t you worry.” She takes him by the arm and pulls, surprising him with her strength. He must be at least two feet taller than she is, but she tugs him into standing easily.
He loses balance and has to steady himself against her shoulders. Blackness overtakes his vision, first in spots and then entirely.
The breeze runs through him freely once more, no longer impeded by the actual physical shape of his body. He feels untethered. Not himself, but instead something that can listen freely and follow the direction of the Wildmother’s will.
Jester’s arm tightens around his waist to help hold him up and he comes back. “I’ve got you.”
Himself, but part of something.
“Thanks.” He squeezes her shoulder and straights up without letting go. He’s unsteady but standing.
They walk back slowly, which is better for his knee anyway, and he matches his strides to her shorter ones while Nott stays a few paces ahead of them with her hood drawn up. His head pounds in time with each step.
“So what were you doing out here by yourself anyway?” says Jester.
“Oh, I was asking for guidance. I was reaching out to the Wildmother so that she could tell me what she wants me to do next.”
Caduceus is happy to share a meal with his new friends, but he knows that his meditation is going to be harder after this. He’s going to have to go very far tomorrow to find some place quiet enough that he can hear her instructions when he is no longer lightheaded and empty.
Nott gasps. “That’s what we were just doing!” She turns around and walks backwards so she can smile and point between them. “Jessie here has also been feeling cut off from her god and is also trying to get in touch with him again. Wow!”
“Is that right?” He looks down at Jester for her to confirm but she doesn’t answer.
“We’ve been going to the Platinum Dragon’s temple and just sitting there for like three days now! So boring. All so that she can talk to a totally different god.”
“We have a few of the Dragon’s buried at home. It’s not that unusual to communicate through one god to another. This is your Traveler that you’re wanting to speak to?”
Jester lowers her head a little. “Yeah. I just want him to, you know, like me again.”
“Everybody likes you!” says Nott. “I keep telling you that.”
“I’ve only known you for a week and I already like you,” says Caduceus. “Who wouldn’t like you?”
“The Traveler, I guess. Because he didn’t come to save me.” She’s losing the confidence and boisterousness that she’d had a minute ago, already going back to her time in the cage. “I tried calling for him the whole time but he never came.”
The ground under Caduceus feels solid again. He straightens up all the way and his head has never felt clearer. “I don’t think that that’s true,” he says. His voice comes out steady. His vision clarifies and focuses so that he can now see the tightness in Jester’s shoulders, the lowered tips of her ears, the way her tail hangs limp. This is someone who needs help, he realizes. Even if she’s very good at pretending otherwise. “I’m not familiar with the Traveler, but I live my life in service of the gods. One god in particular, or three really, but one in particular and there are many who have been laid to rest in the Blooming Grove who have walked many different paths and followed many different gods. And all of those gods have one thing in common: they can’t be everywhere all at once. That’s why they have us. You asked for help and help came. How do you not think your prayer was answered?”
“It’s a pretty good trick,” says Nott. “You think he’s not there and he is? I’m just saying. That sounds like the Traveler I know.”
Jester laughs. Not her usual laugh but one that is breathier, softer. Still sad but she’s heard what he’s saying. “Yeah, I guess it would be. I still really want to talk to him, but I guess he got me pretty good, huh?” She lifts a hand and wipes her eye with the back of her knuckle. “Thanks, Caduceus.” She turns and looks up and smiles at him. “I’m really glad you’re here.”
“Aw, thanks. I’m glad I’m here too.” For the first time in days, the ache in his stomach resolves into a definitive hunger pain. It’s startling and welcome. And finally Caduceus knows exactly what he’s supposed to do next.