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The fire had burned low in Qifrey's study, and the last of the evening light lay across the floorboards in long amber bands. Olruggio stood at the threshold with a pot of tea he had brewed himself—a mix of darkleaf and winter mint he'd discovered three winters ago that he rather liked.
Qifrey sat at the desk, his head bowed over a sheaf of papers, his quill moving in small and precise arcs. His hair lay flat on his head in that pale cascade that had always reminded Olruggio of something, birch bark, maybe, or the silk they imported from the eastern reaches. In this light it was the color of weak tea. There were shadows under that one good eye and he had that particular look about him. The one that lived somewhere behind his remaining eye, in the country of whatever he would not speak of, the place Olruggio had long since stopped asking to visit and never stopped wanting to reach.
He knocked his knuckles against the doorframe. "You'll ruin what's left of your sight, working in this dark."
Qifrey's quill paused. The smile came, that practiced, gentle thing that was both the most familiar and most foreign thing Olruggio knew. "Olruggio. I didn't hear you."
"You never do." He crossed the room and set the tea on the corner of the desk, away from the papers. Qifrey's workspace was yet another country unto itself, with borders that must be respected even by those who had earned the right to enter as he had.
He pulled a chair closer to him, noting the little peculiarities strewn around the other witch; the two empty ink vials, the unused logs for the fire, the plate still housing his half-eaten lunch. One caught his eye above all others; his staff lay propped by the desk’s edge, close enough to reach for at all times. Olruggio frowned. Qifrey only used it inside the atelier when his leg troubled him, which meant the damp had gotten into the old injury again, which meant he'd been standing too long at the window watching the fog come in off the marshes, which meant he'd been thinking.
The chair creaked and Qifrey reached for the teapot, pouring himself a cup before wrapping both hands around it. He had beautiful hands, if Olruggio was being honest with himself, which he tried not to be about that particular subject. Long and pale and always ink-stained at the tips. There was a small burn scar on the left thumb from an experiment that had gone sideways.
"The girls are asleep?" Qifrey asked. His fingers fiddled with the handle of his cup before putting it to his lip.
"Coco stayed up drawing. I told her the candle would burn down and she'd have nothing but moonlight and regret, that did the trick." He leaned back, stretching his legs out before him. His boots were scuffed, the leather cracked at the toes where he had knelt too many hours at the forge that afternoon.
"She reminds me of you, sometimes."
Olruggio blinked. "Coco?"
"That stubbornness, the way she pushes forward even when the path isn't clear." Qifrey lifted the cup to his lips and drank anew, and the firelight painted half his face in gold and left the other half in shadow. "You had that, when we were young. You still do."
There it was, that thing Qifrey did, where he offered a piece of himself wrapped in observation about someone else, like a gift hidden inside a gift, and you had to decide whether to unwrap the second layer or pretend you had only received the first. Olruggio had spent half his life learning to read these offerings and in doing so he had become the foremost scholar of a language spoken by exactly one person in all the world. Unfortunately, the irony of his mastery was that it had never once given him the words to answer in kind.
"I'm stubborn because someone has to be," he said instead. "You'd float away on your own mysteries if no one kept you tethered."
"Perhaps." The maddingly sad smile again. "Perhaps that's so."
The fire popped. A log shifted and sent a scatter of sparks up the chimney, and in the brief flare of light the room brightened enough that Olruggio could see the full scope of the desk. He did not try to read the diagrams and manuscripts scattered there. There had been a time, years ago, when he would have leaned over and asked what occupied him, to break into the privacy of Qifrey's skull and make a home there. He had learned otherwise—you could not pry open a door that had been sealed with grief. You could only stand beside it, patient as stone, and hope that one day the hinges would ease of their own accord.
"How long has the leg been at you?"
"Hm?"
"The staff's out."
Qifrey glanced at it as though he'd forgotten it was there. "It's nothing, the weather's been damp."
"The weather's been damp for a week. You didn't have the staff out yesterday."
"Didn't I?"
"You didn't." He knew the catalog of Qifrey's deflections like the back of his own hand; first the pleasant vagueness, then the gentle redirection, then, if pressed too far, the smile that closed any discussion like a gate. He had perhaps two more questions before the gate swung shut. "Have you been using the compress I made you?"
"I believe so."
"You believe so?"
"I may have... misplaced it."
Olruggio breathed out through his nose. The compress had taken him an afternoon to prepare, filled with nightmoss and bound into linen with a warming sigil he'd drawn and redrawn four times until the heat dispersal was exactly right, gentle enough for the scarred tissue but deep enough to reach the joint beneath. He'd tested it against his own forearm first, adjusting it until it would not burn sensitive skin.
Qifrey's skin had always been sensitive. This was something Olruggio knew and tried not to think, because the thinking about it opened a door to a room full of other things he knew—the shape of Qifrey's collarbone under his thumb, the soft sigh he gave when touched below the ear—and if he stepped through that door now he would not be able to have this conversation with any kind of composure.
"I'll make you another," he said.
"You don't have to—"
"I'll make you another." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked at the floor because it was easier than looking at Qifrey's face. The grain of the wood swam in the low light. "You'd tell any one of those girls to rest if they were in your state, you'd insist on it."
The argument must have landed, because Qifrey went quiet. He turned the teacup sheepishly in his hands while the fire muttered to itself. Outside, the wind had picked up, and the chime-stones Tetia had hung from the eaves began their small clear singing.
"You worry too much," Qifrey said at last, softly.
"One of us has to."
"I'm not as fragile as you think, Olruggio."
The laugh that escaped him was short and rough and startled them both. "Fragile. You think that's what I think you are." His hands hung between his legs, scarred and broad and utterly useless to him in this moment, though they could shape iron and bend metal and coax warmth from cold ore. "I have watched you skip meals for three days running because you forgot to eat. I have seen you walk on a leg that was swollen to twice its size because you didn't want to trouble anyone. I don't think you're fragile. I think you're careless with yourself, only ever with yourself."
Qifrey set down his teacup and his hand remained on the desk. Olruggio watched the firelight catch in the fine hairs on his wrist and thought that he had no right to find beauty in a man's wrist while he was angry with him. But there it was. There it always was. The looking. The helpless, ceaseless looking, as though some part of him had decided long ago that the purpose of his eyes was to note every detail of this one infuriating person and no force of will or common sense could reassign them.
"I don't mean to worry you," Qifrey said.
"I know you don't, that's half the problem." He sat back. "Let me look at the leg, at least."
Qifrey hesitated, then said: "All right."
He moved his chair around the side of the desk and Qifrey shifted to face him, extending the bad leg with a wince he tried to hide and failed. The trouser was loose enough to push above the knee, revealing the old injury that mapped itself across Qifrey's shin and calf.
He ran thumb across the ridge of the longest scar, remembering the first time Qifrey had allowed him to see it. It had been a different room, in a different season, when they had been younger and the distance between them had been smaller—or perhaps the same distance, only they had been braver about crossing it. Qifrey had been beneath him, or above him, he could no longer remember the order of it, only the feeling of Qifrey's hand on the back of his neck, the catch in his breathing, the way his composure had come apart wholly.
They had not spoken of it after, that was the way of things between them. The fumblings occurred in the margins of their life together, in each and every crevice they could find. An evening after too much wine when Qifrey had leaned into him on the walk home and the leaning had turned into something else. A gray morning when Olruggio had come to wake him and found him already awake and looking at him from the pillow. They had not left the bed for hours.
He was frightened. He was ravenous. He was a man dying of thirst and he held the ocean in his hands.
"You need to rest this properly," he said, speaking was safer than not speaking when his hands were on Qifrey's skin and his mind was full of rooms they had been in and sounds Qifrey had made. "A day off the leg entirely. I mean it."
"The girls need—"
"I'll handle the girls. Agott's nearly self-sufficient as it is, both Coco and Tetia mind me well enough. Richeh won't be any trouble." He let his hands stay on the leg a breath longer than necessary before retreating. "You can sit in the workshop with me if being idle will kill you faster than the leg, but you will sit."
Qifrey looked at him for a long moment, and whatever protest had been forming behind his eye, unspoken. He settled back in his chair and the line of his throat caught the firelight and Olruggio turned his gaze to the teapot—there were limits to what a man could be expected to endure.
"More tea?" he asked, but the pot had long since gone cold.
"Please."
He poured for both of them. The tea had turned dark and tepid, the mint sharpened past pleasantness into something bitter, but Qifrey took his cup and raised it and drank as though it were the finest thing he'd ever tasted. A drop of the brew clung to his lower lip after he drank his fill, dark against the pale skin, and he licked it away without thinking and Olruggio longed for nothing more than to press his mouth to the place where the mint had been.
He looked at the fire instead, which was much safer. The coals had collapsed into a bed of shifting orange, and the last true flame had retreated to the back of the grate where a stub of log still held its initial shape well enough.
"You should sleep," he said. "Whatever's on those pages will still be there in the morning."
Qifrey's eye had drifted half-closed and the firelight made his lashes into small crescents of shadow on his cheek. "I will soon." A yawn overtook him then and he pressed the back of his wrist to his mouth. "You're welcome to wait, if you like."
That was an invitation as only Qifrey could give one. Not stay, which would have been too much like a desperate need confessed. Not I want you here, which would have required a sort of honesty that Qifrey had never possessed or had surrendered long ago. But you're welcome to wait. As though it were a matter of convenience. As though Olruggio had not walked every road of his life toward this room and this chair and this maddening, self-neglecting, beautiful man who could not say stay without making it sound like if it's not too much trouble.
What a woe it is to be tied to a man that holds people at arm's length not because he does not want them close but because he believes his closeness is a kind of poison, and the nearer you stand the more of it would seep into you, and he would sooner cut off his own hand than let that happen to someone he—
"I'll wait," he said.
He rose and put two more logs on the fire. He settled back into his chair and let the new warmth of the flame find his boots, his shins, the aching muscles of his thighs. His body was heavy with the day's work, it would have been easy to sleep.
Instead, he watched Qifrey's right hand move across the page. The left lay idle on the desk beside the inkwell, palm down, the fingers slightly curled, and the firelight played across the knuckles and the pale skin between them and the old burn scar on the thumb. It was just a hand. It was everything.
Olruggio reached across the distance.
He did so without deciding to, or perhaps he had decided years ago. His fingers were twice the width of Qifrey's and his palm dwarfed his fine-boned one. He could feel the ink stains and the small ridges of old scars, and beneath it the warmth of him, the live pulse that Olruggio had once searched for in terror on a dark night when Qifrey's lips had been blue and his skin the color of tallow.
Qifrey did not pull away nor did he did speak. He turned his hand beneath Olruggio's so that their palms pressed together, and his fingers curled around the edge of Olruggio's hand, and he held on.
The quill rolled off the desk and clattered to the floor while Olruggio sat still with Qifrey's hand in his, feeling the grip of those ink-stained fingers and understood that this, too, was part of his language.
Next, Qifrey's forehead came down to the desk, to the place where their hands lay knotted together. Olruggio felt the dampness of his lashes on his own hand and realized suddenly that the other witch was crying.
His free hand rose and found Qifrey's hair, letting it move through it slowly. He felt the fine and pale strands through his fingers, felt the curvature of his skull, the place behind his ear that made Qifrey shudder beneath his hand. The grip on his other hand tightened, fingers pressing hard into bone.
After a long while the trembling eased and the grip on his fingers softened from desperate to just tired. Qifrey's breathing deepened and Olruggio realized he had fallen asleep right there, his face damp, his forehead on Olruggio's knuckles.
And so he spent his night sitting in the ember-light with Qifrey's hand in his and Qifrey's hair under his fingers. He would make the compress in the morning, before the girls woke. He would fry eggs and set a plate in front of Qifrey and stand there until he ate. He would take Coco and Tetia through their exercises and send Agott to practice her linework and give Richeh something quiet to do, and he would make Qifrey sit in the workshop as promised, bad leg propped on a stool, and he would not mention this night or the tears or the hand-holding. The staff he would take quietly to the workshop to reinforce the handle where the wood was wearing thin, because Qifrey would never ask and Olruggio would never need him to. He was, after all, fluent.
