Work Text:
The Widower
Each choice you open reveals what follows. Once opened, a passage remains so that you may walk back along the road you have taken. Three endings await; at the foot of every road there stands a link by which you may begin again.
I. The Path
The mist which has lain upon the upper hill since the breaking of dawn begins to lift just as you come round the last bend of the path from the watch-post to lift, and what it reveals stops you in the road as if a hand had been laid flat against your chest.
A tall figure stands at the wrought-iron gate of the Chudomirovich manor. Clothed head to foot in black, one gloved hand lies upon the topmost spike, the other lifted to hold above their head a parasol of black silk, though the morning sun is so faint that no shade could fairly be wanted. A veil falls from the brim of the small mourning hat, stirring a little in a wind unknown to you; a silver pin at their throat glints in the thin gray light. He turns his head, lifting his free hand, and waves.
You stare. The two men of your squad coming up behind you—Valdis and Egle—have not yet seen the figure at the gate, and are still speaking in a low voice of last night's supper. For now, at least, this gesture belongs only to you and to the man on the hill.
—What do you do?—
You wave back.
Your hand lifts almost with a mind of its own. The man watches you motionlessly; then, he turns and walks up through the damp grass toward the face of the manor, and is swallowed by the shadowy entrance before you even lower your arm.
You shoulder your pack and walk on. On the way down the hill, you don't look back, though you think of the line of the throat under the high collar, the manner in which the parasol was held, the wave above all. Selfishly, you speak nothing of the man to your squadmates, keeping the wave hidden in your heart.
II. Starshyna
You take supper that evening in your father's kitchen, across the small wooden table from Nikita, who's propped his bad knee on the spare chair and is eyeing you suspiciously.
"Illuga," he finally says.
You set down your spoon. "Father."
"You waved at the widower of Kyryll Chudomirovich this morning. So Yegor has told me; he is a good man and a friend to this family, and he has done me today a great service."
You sit with that. Your father picks up a loaf of the days-old bread and tears a stale piece from it for himself.
"I haven't climbed that hill," he says, "nor has my father, nor my father's father, and you know perfectly well why. We've told you the stories. Our village voted in my great-grandfather's time to leave the hill alone, and the thing that lives on that hill has left us alone in return; and now, this morning, you have reciprocated his greeting! Illuga, he is in you already."
"I haven't yet climbed the hill, father."
Nikita sighs, massaging his furrowed brow. "But you will, Illuga. No mortal man that walks under Kuutar's light can truly pierce the tricks of fae."
You frown. "You don't know that."
"I know it as I know the weather over the southern fields when the sky dims. I know it because I've been watching you today, and you've been far quieter than usual." Nikita reaches across the table, settles a warm palm on your shoulder. "I ask you, Illuga, as your father—not as your Starshyna—what you will do."
—What do you tell him?—
You promise him you will not climb.
You say it, that empty promise, and Nikita searches your face like a fisherman watching for storm clouds. Eventually, he gives a stiff nod. The promise sits in your mouth like a leaden stone.
III. The Market
On the fifth, which happens to be market day this month, you go down into the square at noon. You've come on the pretext of standing on the courtyard steps and watching the carts come in—a perfectly legitimate part of the duties of a Squad Leader on market day and one you have performed faithfully every market day for six years, but today you have come down with your throat dry and a strange certainty that you are not really standing on the steps to watch carts and merchants and wares go by.
The widower of Kyryll Chudomirovich drifts down the path at the bend by the dead apple tree at five minutes past noon, alone, with a basket dangling from his left arm and the same parasol shading his veiled face from the late summer sun. He moves among the stalls in silence, conversations hushed, actions paused wherever he passes. He buys bread from the baker's wife, who takes his coin without meeting his eyes. He buys herbs, one red wax candle, and counts the coins left in his coin-purse. Then, he inclines his head and turns, and that is when his eyes—at least, where you think his eyes are under the veil, for you can't quite at this distance see his eyes themselves—find you across the square,.
The glance he graces you with is short, maybe three seconds at most, but you feel it in the back of your neck, a faint chill at the base of your spine and along the inner skin of both your forearms—feel it as you felt cold water poured into the collar of your coat. You can see the mouth just barely peeking out from beneath the veil, the playful curve of his lips as he smiles at you.
—What do you do?—
You meet his eye.
You stand on the steps and don't look away. Rather, you let him look at you. The widower holds the index of his free hand over his still-curved lips. Then he turns and walks back toward the path, a shadow slipping out of reach. Egle, beside you, murmurs: Squad Leader, your mouth is open. You shut it.
IV. A Letter
On the morning after the market, a small black envelope sealed with lilac wax is found on the desk in the front room of the Lighkeepers' headquarters. No messenger brought it. The seal bears the letter K, pressed deep; the address reads: To the Squad Leader of the Nightmare Orioles. By his hand only. You take it into the back room, making sure to shut the door tightly, and carefully break the seal. No arcane curse leaps from the now-broken enclosure to seize your life force, no sudden bewitchment ails you.
Squad Leader Illuga. If it would not trouble you, I wish to discuss a matter of the upper hill: the boundary stones at the eastern edge of the estate are in need of repair, and I can't address the matter myself while in mourning. If it suits you to come to the manor on Tuesday evening, I shall expect you then. The bell at the gate will work for you.
Yours in good faith,
K. Chudomirovich.
You read it twice. The boundary stones are perfectly sound; you walked their line yourself just a few days ago, in the dry week before the rains. The widower had to write something as an excuse, you assume. The paper is heavier than ordinary stationery and smells very faintly of cold air and wood smoke, undercut by something you can't name that smells vaguely familiar.
—What do you decide?—
You will go on Tuesday.
You fold the letter and tuck it against your ribs in the inner pocket of your coat, where Nikita can't find it. On the two intervening nights, your sleep goes neither well nor badly, but passes seemingly in the blink of an eye.
V. The Bell
The bell at the gate does actually work, much to your surprise. It's a decrepit old thing, half-eaten by rust, its opening almost completely obstructed with cobwebs.
You were prepared for it to not work, for the wrought copper to remain silent under your hand, but the bell works. You tug the ragged rope once more, and a deep brassy tone rings out. After some pause, the front door opens, and in the shadowed threshold stands the widower with his veil down and his gloves on. Both of you know he has no real reason to be asking for your presence.
"Squad Leader Illuga, thank you for coming. Please, come in."
The hall is warm when you step inside. Somehow, this is surprising to you. You had been expecting perhaps the cold of an empty house, the smell of disuse pervasive, but the hall is warm, the brass lamps polished, and the rugs swept; on the side table stands a vase of white asters, the stem-ends still wet with dew. The widower closes the door behind you, sets the latch.
Up close, with only the mourning veil between you, he stands about a head taller than you. You watch the way his throat beneath the high collar moves when he swallows. "You may leave your coat here," he says. "The hook is there. I understand the oath lantern is sacred to your order." You hang up your coat, but you keep your lantern clipped to your belt.
"This way, young master."
Shouldn't you be the one calling him young master? Nevertheless, you follow. Perhaps it's simply one of his peculiarities. The hallway is filled with portraits, eight of them, in their gilt frames, running the length of the wall toward the open doorway at the end. Eight men in eight slightly different coats of eight slightly different fashions, the earliest in the ruff of a long-ago century, the latest in the high collar of the present. Unlike the village stories, they aren't quite identical; they're similar like brothers are similar—the same hair, the same eyes, the same fine jaw, but each painter has caught a different mood. For a moment, you pause and examine the first in the series.
This is the first Kyryll Chudomirovich, the one your great-grandfather once wrote about in the locked journal at the post. He has the pale yellow eyes and dark blue hair and slight, teasing lift at the corners of his mouth. He is nearly identical to the man who has just shut the door behind you. The portrait's eyes almost seem to house a ghostly glow, perhaps some trick of the pale light. The painting's gaze is oddly piercing.
You stand a moment in front of the portrait, examining its features. A bit further on in the hallway, the widower stands silently, waiting for you, and you hurry to catch up. You follow him to the room at the end of the hall.
—You enter the parlour. How shall you carry yourself?—
You ask him, almost at once, to lift his veil.
"Will you take off the veil?" The question is out of your lips before you realize how rude it is, but the mourner doesn't seem to take offense.
"Oh my. How forward of you, young master." He lifts the veil from his face, and folds it back over the crown of the small black hat, and lets his hands fall again to his lap as he lowers himself into his own armchair across the rug.
VI. The Parlor
The face beneath the veil is of a man, narrow and fine-boned, with a long straight nose and a slight lift at the outer corners of the eyes that lends the whole face a slightly amused expression, even at rest. His eyes are a clean, cold, inhuman yellow. His hair is dark blue, lighter at the very tips, and wound into a tight bun tucked into the hat. You try to pin down an age, to anchor the widower's unearthliness in something human, but the eerie perfection of his features evades you.
The widower tucks a stray wisp of hair behind his ear, clearing his throat. "Illuga," he says, very softly.
"Squad Leader Illuga, please. I'm on duty right now."
"Squad Leader Illuga, then. Forgive me for my misstep." He clears his throat. "Would you like some tea?"
You think Nikita might have an aneurysm if he finds out you drank something the widower gave to you. You shake your head no, and he smiles.
"So vigilant, Squad Leader!" He claps, his silk gloves muffling the sound. "And yet you were so bold as to ask me to remove my mourning veil, so soon after my dear husband's untimely passing. Truthfully, I hadn't expected you to ask so soon."
"How soon had you expected me to?"
"By the third visit. I'd thought you might humor me for three visits, at least." The flickering fire in the hearth casts a warm glow over his face, though he still looks worryingly pale.
"I might consider it," you say carefully. "You've done nothing to offend me yet, sir widower. But I must ask you to find better reasons for meeting with me; the Lightkeepers have very important duties to attend to in town, you see."
"I understand fully," he nods cheerfully, though his eyes remain still pools of pale yellow. "My apologies for taking up your time, Squad Leader Illuga. Tomorrow at the same time? I fear my chimney is about to become clogged, you see."
In the weeks that follow, you climb the hill.
You climb it three times in the first week and four in the next; you climb it on every evening you are not on patrol, and on several evenings that you are, always careful to ensure your absence will be covered. The manor, by your fifth visit, has become known to you. You know the warm hall and the eight portraits, the parlor beyond the doorway at the end; you know the second chair and its perfectly soft cushions. The widower grants you his name in the privacy of the parlor, whispered against your ear like a secret, and he laughs when you shiver at the feeling of his cold breath across your skin. Flins runs cold all the way through, his unnatural chill seeping through his gloves when he touches you.
Another peculiarity: Flins doesn't eat. He sets out a plate for himself every evening—bread, cheese, a small bowl of stewed lamb—and lets it sit untouched while you eat yours; at the end of the evening, he carries the dishes together to a silver lantern that rests on a carved stand by the window, lifts the small lid at the top of the lantern, and scrapes his food into it. After he closes the lid, the food is simply not there. You watch the lantern often, its elegant curves and steady blue flame. You don't ask about the food or the lantern. You knew before coming up the hill that Flins wasn't human, not by a long shot, and your host has been more pleasant than a lot of humans you've met in your life.
By the fourth visit, he stops wearing his gloves indoors. By the fifth, he forgoes the small black hat with the veil; and his hair falls to his waist when he unties it. It suits him. By the seventh visit you have begun to suspect that Flins doesn't have a habit of breathing when he's not talking.
—On the night you come to a conclusion about his breathing (or lack thereof), what do you do?—
You take his bare hand.
You rise from the second chair, cross the rug to him, and you sit down on the rug at his feet. You take his bare hand from the arm of his chair and fold it between your warm palms. It's like holding a frozen corpse's hand. The fingers close, slowly, around yours.
VII. Asking
"Mister Flins," you say, "you don't breathe, do you?"
"Astute observation, young master. No, I don't." You still haven't been able to train him out of calling you young master, and you're beginning to suspect he takes pleasure in watching you try to change his ways.
"Why?"
"Because I don't require it. It's a novelty to me, really." He sets his book on the tea table. "Do you suspect me of being something other than human?"
"Honestly, Flins, you're not very good at playing human." You look up at him from the rug with his cold hand still folded in yours, running your thumb over his knuckles. "The way you act, the way you intentionally spook the townspeople, and the rumors you let run wild in the village...it's almost like you want to be found out."
The cold hand in yours tightens, and the other hand comes up from the arm of the chair to cup the back of your skull. Flins bows his head and presses his cold forehead to yours.
"And if I do?" he asks into your hair. "I am six hundred and seventy-three years old, give or take some years I have lost. I am the man you have called Flins all summer, and I am the man whose grave is in the vault on this hill; I am Kyryll Chudomirovich and his widow. The eight portraits in the hall are eight portraits of my own face. What will you do with me then, Squad Leader Illuga, if I do want to be found out?"
His face is very near yours; his yellow eyes are bright and piercing. In this moment, he reminds you of the first painting. The lantern in its stand flares brighter than you've ever seen it burn.
"I suppose I'll have to keep coming here to see you," you answer.
—"What are we?"—
You ask him.
"Flins. What am I to you?" His yellow eyes close. For a moment you think he won't answer, that he'll evade with crafty words and clever misdirections as he has in the past. But Flins opens his eyes, lifts the hand from the back of your head, caressing your jaw, and tilts your face up the smallest fraction so that you are looking at him.
VIII. The Answer
"You are Illuga, someone I know very well. I knew him a long time ago. In the four hundred years and more since he passed, I haven't loved any other. I have had one love in this life and I have since his death been the keeper of his absence. That is all I, Flins, have been."
He breathes. It feels almost strange to watch him breathe deliberately; he hasn't breathed all evening except to speak. Now, he breathes between sentences, uneven and deep, as if to give himself the mortal rhythm a man needs to confess.
"Once, you came up the path on a dreary morning. I had been at my upper window. Before that morning, I hadn't had a good look at you; you'd been a figure at a distance, no different from your father at that age. I came down to the gate because I had thought I would get some fresh air. When you came around the bend, I thought for a moment that my lover was coming home."
You blink. "How did he die?"
"He died in the spring of his twenty-fourth year, four hundred and twenty-one years ago, of an injury taken in a fight that wasn't his to fight and that I had warned him not to walk into. He died in my arms in a barn outside a village in another country, and he asked me to bury him on a hill where we had thought, to build a house one day. I buried him here and built the house. I have been on this hill since."
The lantern, on its small table by the window, burns a steady blue. "The portraits in the hall," you ask.
"The first is an old thing from when I still dallied at the fae courts," Flins shook his head dismissively. "When the fiance trick required a portrait of an ancestor, I hung it and renamed it, and let the village believe what it preferred to believe. The other seven are simply me in seven different costumes."."
You think you should be afraid. You think a sensible man, sitting on the rug at the feet of a six-hundred-year-old creature in widower's silk who has just told him that your face is the face of a dead lover and his chair is a dead lover's chair and your presence in this parlor has been awaited for four centuries—you think a sensible man would, at this moment, be afraid, but you are not afraid.
"Flins," you say. "Look at me. I don't remember him. I have no memory of his life. I cannot give you back what was lost in him."
Flins meets your eyes. The expression he wears now is not one you've seen from him before. "I don't ask you to be him. I ask you only to let me love the part of him I find in you, and the part of you that is not him at all, and not to ask me which is which, because I can't tell you."
You take his face in both your hands. "Alright, Flins. Love the parts of him you find in me, love the parts of me that you don't recognize. Don't tell me which is which. I'll do my best to be the man you are loving. Whichever of him is in me, that man can have. Whichever of me is not him, that man can also have. I have only the one body to give you, and I am giving it to you. Take it."
Flins' forehead comes down against yours, slowly, and his mouth comes down against yours after; you kiss him with both your hands at his jaw and his bare fingers gripping the front of your shirt as though to keep himself from falling. You taste salt, and you help him wipe the tears from his face with a handkerchief.
On the Sunday after, you bring Flins to your father's kitchen. Nikita begrudgingly gives his blessing, though he hugs you too tightly after dinner and glares at Flins all the while.
Autumn comes, then winter, then spring in the blink of an eye. You climb the hill on every evening you can, and you sleep there on every night you don't have a morning patrol, always waking up with your limbs draped over Flins' under the covers. The village watches all the while; Nikita ages, Flins stays the same as he has for centuries. In the second year, you start to understand that you will outlive your father long before you outlive your lover; you carry that understanding with you like a stone in a coat-pocket, light enough most days to forget about, heavy enough on certain evenings to remember.
You marry Flins in the small chapel in the village in the seventh year, by candlelight in a ceremony of which the village's governing office has no record of. Afterwards, you go on as you have been. He calls you, in private, my love.
Ending I The Widower's Lover
You don't ask. You let it lie.
You bring his cold hand up against your mouth and press your lips to the back of it; after a moment, he draws the hand gently away and stands, helping you up from the rug, and pours you another cup of tea. Your visits will continue, on this footing, indefinitely.
IX. Tension
You can live like this. You can live very happily this way. Many men have lived in worse ways.
You go on as you have been going, climbing the hill in the evenings to sit by the hearth across from him. You take his hand sometimes; you let him kiss the inside of your wrist, lay his head against your knee. He doesn't press. He has waited longer for less. But the matter, in the next weeks, is what you do with the unspoken question, the hidden tension between you.
—What do you do with it?—
You let Nikita see it.
You stop hiding it. On the Sunday after, you bring Flins to your father's kitchen; and the meal that night is excellent; Flins doesn't eat any of it and apologizes gravely for not eating any of it.
X. Years
Autumn comes, then winter, then spring in the blink of an eye. You climb the hill on every evening you can, and you sleep there on every night you don't have a morning patrol, always waking up with your limbs draped over Flins' under the covers. The village watches all the while; Nikita ages, Flins stays the same as he has for centuries. In the second year, you start to understand that you will outlive your father long before you outlive your lover; you carry that understanding with you like a stone in a coat-pocket, light enough most days to forget about, heavy enough on certain evenings to remember.
You marry Flins in the small chapel in the village in the seventh year, by candlelight in a ceremony of which the village's governing office has no record of. Afterwards, you go on as you have been. He calls you, in private, my love, though sometimes he glances at you like he sees someone else.
Ending I (variant) The Widower's Lover
It's all too much for you.
"Flins. What am I to you?" His yellow eyes close. For a moment you think he won't answer, that he'll evade with crafty words and clever misdirections as he has in the past. He speaks of a man he loved a long time ago. He speaks of the line of your shoulders coming round the bend. He speaks of a portrait in the hall which is not Kyryll the First, first of eight, and which has never been Kyryll the First, and which has instead been—
IX. The Stranger
You let go of his hand. You don't mean to be cruel, only to ease yourself up from the rug and go to the small carved table by the window to look more closely at the lantern, in order to do something with your hands. You mean nothing by it, but it's still the actions of a man recoiling, backing away from the truth.
Flins stops speaking. He stares at his bare hand on the arm of his chair where you have set it down.
You stand on the rug between the chairs and you feel properly, for the first time, his coldness. "I'm sorry," you hear yourself say. "Flins, I'm—I can't. Forgive me," you say. "Forgive me." You take your coat from the chair where it has hung the last three hours. You don't look back at him as you go down the hall under the eyes of the eight portraits, and you don't look back at them, either. You open the front door for yourself, the unfamiliar knob oddly warm under your touch. The air is crisp and wet, though it is summer, and you don't quite remember how long it took to reach the village.
You won't climb the hill again. He will be at the gate the next morning, and you will be on patrol; you will round the bend with Egle and Vlaicu at your back, and you will see him there in full mourning with his veil down and his parasol against his shoulder, but there won't be an exchange of waves. You'll pass him every morning the rest of that summer, and every morning the autumn following, and every morning the year after that, over the distance of strangers.
Ending III The Stranger's Face
You wait for him to lift it himself.
Flins offers polite small talk. You speak of the southern patrol, of the autumn coming, of the price of lantern oil and beeswax this year. He answers each thing, through the veil, but by the time you have risen to leave, he's neither lifted the veil nor taken off his gloves. You're going to have to be the one to ask. He will not lift the veil until you do. You will be choosing him, in a sense the village does not have a name for. You will return tomorrow, and the night after, and in time, perhaps, you will cross the distance between you.
This branch leads to the same end as the one in which you ask outright. The path is slower, gentler, but the destinations are the same.
You remain strictly formal.
"Mr. Chudomirovich. You wrote to me of the boundary stones." You sit in the second chair with your hands rested on your knees, the perfect image of a Lighkeeper Squad Leader making an official visit. You decline his offer of food and drink, and reassure him you will walk the eastern line tomorrow morning and report to him in writing. There shall be no need, you say, to trouble him further this season.
VI. The Report
You climb back up the hill with the boundary-stone report. He receives you, again in full mourning, again in the parlour set for two; this time he hasn't bothered to lay out the bread, nor the cheese, nor the wine. The second cup is missing. You read out the report, standing, bow, and leave.
He doesn't write to you again. You see him at market on Tuesdays for the rest of that summer, but he doesn't look at you, and you don't look at him. By autumn he stops coming down to market; you understand that he has read your formality as a refusal, and that he is accepting it. You can be content like this. You won't, for the rest of your life, climb the hill. You might pass it on patrols, and you might look up at the gate, and you will sometimes, on certain mornings in the spring, when the upper meadow is full of wet grass, see a figure standing at the upper window. The both of you have decided, by the smallest courtesies, what shall pass between you for the remainder of the years you have on this earth.
Ending II (variant) The Path Not Taken
You burn it.
You take the letter to the small stove in the back room and you open the grate, dropping the letter in. The wax of the seal catches first. It blackens, and runs, and the K with its careful curl distorts and is gone. The paper takes a moment longer. You watch the elegant curling script brown at the edges and disappear into ash; you watch the signature go last, the heaviest ink the slowest to surrender.
V. Burned Letter
When it is ash in the stove, you shut the grate and go back into the front room. That day, you do the work you've been assigned, and you do it well.
You don't see the widower at the next market, nor at any market thereafter. You dream, sometimes, of black silk and a hand at a gate.
Ending II The Path Not Taken
You leave the square.
You step back inside the Lightkeeper's quarters before his eyes can find you.
IV. Silence
No letter arrives the morning after. Nor the morning following the morning after that. He has understood your stepping inside the post as you intended it to be understood: the door has been closed in his face and yours both by the only one of you in a position to close it.
Ending II (variant) The Path Not Taken
You let your hand fall.
The hand that rose to wave, half against your will, falls back to your side. You turn your face deliberately toward the village and walk on. Behind you, on the hill, the figure remains a long moment at the gate.
II. Refusal
You tell yourself it's merely a declined courtesy, nothing more and nothing less. Even so, the line of his throat under the high collar won't leave you. But you have already made your choice. You don't climb the hill that summer, nor the next, nor the autumn following, nor any of the years that come after.
Ending II The Path Not Taken
The Endings
I. The Widower's Lover
II. The Path Not Taken
III. The Stranger's Face