Chapter Text
The idea arrives much the way most of Qifrey’s ideas do, which is to say it arrives already half decided and is then offered at a truly obnoxious hour of night, when Olruggio is at his weakest.
The atelier has had, by its own standards, a pretty tolerable month overall. There have been no Brimmed Caps or forbidden spellwork dragged home under Qifrey’s hands, and not a single night that has ended in blood or that particular silence Qifrey gets when he’s done something utterly disastrous.
Coco’s circles have grown cleaner and then become worse and then become downright strange, which is the most honest shape learning can take, Olruggio thinks. Agott has perfected a glare sharp enough to cut even the most winsome of ideas down, and Richeh and Tetia have put on no less than three plays of varying intensity. The house itself has been absolutely moulting small repairs, from a sticking window to a cracked hinge and a series of wobbly stools. Olruggio has been chipping away at it steadily, finding relief in the honesty of the way wood gives under his hand in comprehensible ways.
People are less accommodating, he’s learned, and Qifrey is perhaps the least accommodating of all. This is why, when Olruggio finds him still awake long after the children have retired to bed, Olruggio makes the very sensible decision not to look at him. That decision lasts around nine seconds, which is a personal best given the circumstances: Qifrey is unfairly beautiful at night.
Olruggio glares down at his commission before his own face betrays him. It’s a child’s toy, though an elaborate one, and he’s grateful for the distraction lest he start staring at the other man’s mouth like some kind of overzealous spurned lover.
Qifrey, on the other hand, seems utterly oblivious to any of this. He looks up from a letter he’s writing and says, mildly: “Badurel is holding its lantern festival this weekend.”
“Good for it,” Olruggio returns blankly, attention too snared on the way the seal keeps lifting alongside the ridge of the toy, and not nearly snared enough on the mischievous glint in the other man’s eye.
“The girls have been studying very hard,” Qifrey continues calmly.
“They have been studying like people trying to outrun their heads, you mean.”
“Which is a kind of hard, certainly,” Qifrey allows, his mouth curving into a little smile. “I thought it might do them good to be somewhere that is not a desk, just for a night.”
The little wooden bird stares up at Olruggio with black beaded eyes, innocent of all suffering. “Right. Well. You —”
“You could come with us, if you would like.”
His hands go still. It’s such a casual invitation, offered like some kind of courtesy or something, and not like Qifrey’s just popped a small candle inside Olruggio’s chest and left him to burn around it.
come with me, says the stupid, traitorous part of his mind, stripping the sentence down to what he wants to hear. He presses the brass pin into the toy too firmly and the bird makes an offended clacking sound. His throat feels oddly tight, which is ludicrous because he’s a grown-ass man. “You don’t need me there.”
Qifrey doesn’t answer immediately, which is the second sign of trouble. He makes a humming sound instead, leaning back in his chair. “I suppose we don’t need you there, no. But we would like you there.”
Olruggio glances up, startled, which is another mistake because Qifrey’s expression has gentled into something impossible to bear: quiet and fond, and less like the impossible mystery Olruggio’s spent years asking and more like someone asking, very carefully, for company. Olruggio has no defence against that. He sighs. “Fine.”
He tells himself he’s agreeing because it’s probably his duty to make sure nobody dies, and because the girls need watching and festivals are full of hazards. He tells himself he’s agreeing because Qifrey should not be trusted alone with anything that glows prettily and asks for a wish. He agrees because the alternative is staying behind in a quiet atelier and spending the night aware, in every room, of the absence of Qifrey’s voice and because Qifrey said we would like you there and Olruggio has never been able to withstand being wanted.
The girls receive the news with absolute joy, so much so they wake up at the crack of dawn on the day of departure with no fuss. The road is dull for the most part, made up of dust and hedges and the girls trading seats and arguments in equal measure, while Qifrey answers questions about the towns they pass on the way. When the first canal appears, silver between its stone lips, it has been raining for nearly forty minutes, needling drops that soften the hills into smoke and turn the world beyond into a messy wash. It taps at the roof for the better part of the afternoon, thickening the mud underneath. Tetia declares the rain romantic while Agott huffs about mildew. Richeh watches the rain slide down the glass in thoughtful lines, one finger tracing the movement without touching it while Coco sketches and sketches.
By the time Badurel actually appears beyond the bend in the river road, the rain has thinned to a shining mist that the town rises out of in layers. Even from a distance the festival is visible, as a molten glow trembling through the wet air.
Tetia presses both her hands to the window, gasping. “Oh! It’s beautiful!”
“It’s wet,” Coco sighs, looking none too pleased about it.
When they do finally reach Badurel, the canal road is shining slick despite the impossibly blue sky overhead. Bright festival awnings flutter from iron hooks dark with rust, lanterns strung between rooftops in long, trembling chains. Each lantern has been painted with tiny silver curls and, to Olruggio, they look like rain the way they turn and tap one another, paper skins whispering as the painted silver catches the light in brief, wet flashes.
He folds his arms as they slow, frowning at the humidity already clinging to the inside of his sleeves. Qifrey makes a small, thoughtful sound across from him, the shadow over his face making a gentle darkness of his eyelashes. He looks relaxed, which means absolutely nothing because Qifrey could look relaxed while bleeding out in a hail storm. He could look relaxed while lying to authorities or children, himself or the weather or any soul foolish enough to ask for honesty; he wears ease the way other people wear coats. Here, his hair look less silver than wet pearl and Olruggio thinks, wearily, that he looks like something the town might’ve invented for the festival itself, pretty and, well, little cursed. Unfortunately for Olruggio, Qifrey is perfectly real and also sitting within arm’s reach, close enough that their knees press together and close enough that — if Olruggio were a braver and much stupider man — lean forwards and find out whether Qifrey’s mouth still holds that little sound.
The canal flashes past the window, a ribbon of some paper charm snapping against a railing to come loose, spinning wildly in the breeze before the water takes it.
“It’s glowing!” Tetia crows, pressing both hands to the window until the glass blooms faintly under her palm.
“Most things do when you hang enough lanterns on them,” Agott intones dryly, but she’s looking also, her mouth not quite willing to admit wonder but already full of it. A chain of lanterns sway above the next stretch of canal and the water breaks them into rippling shards, into something that looks — for a moment — like a second festival drowning very politely underneath the first.
Coco’s already pulled out her notebook, hair rustling as she leans towards the glass. “The canal system is bigger than I thought it would be. Is the whole town built around it?”
“Most of it,” Qifrey agrees, teacher voice coming warm as a breeze. “Badurel began as a crossing settlement, and then a shrine town and a trade stop. Now, it’s mostly famous for the Lantern Wish Festival.”
Richeh, quiet in the corner, watches the rows of paper charms tied to the bridge railings, moving like little tongues of flame. “Do the wishes come true?”
Qifrey shrugs and cocks a smile. “According to the town, yes.”
Olruggio grunts disdainfully and Tetia is immediately scandalised, turning from the window with strands of hair stuck slightly to her cheek from the humidity. “Master Olruggio, you can’t make that noise at wishes!”
“Oh, I can if they charge admission.”
Qifrey’s smile warms into something smaller; it finds the corner of his eyes, making the shadowed half of his face look devastatingly fond. “I’m sure they don’t.”
He grumbles and makes a show of folding his arms all over again. “I’m sure they will.”
“You’re determined to be charmed by nothing, I see.”
“I’m charmed by plenty of things.” It’s a mistake as soon as he says it, the words leaving his mouth with a little too much heat in them because plenty is a door and he has no business opening doors in confined spaces, with four apprentices listening in.
Qifrey’s expression changes, just a little, touching Olruggio’s face with the innocence of a knife laid flat against silk and the intimate knowledge that the blade is there. His mouth softens curiously. “Oh?”
Olruggio tears his eyes away before he can do something stupid like reach out, or stare directly at the way the other man’s fingers are spread across his own knee. “Sturdy railings,” He says quickly. “Good bread. Good… hinges.”
Agott makes a strangled noise and Tetia sighs with terrible feeling, pressing her forehead to the glass. “That’s so sad.”
“It’s not sad to appreciate safe infrastructure!” He means it but he also means i am not going to look at him again. i am not going to say the other list. The other list lives too near the surface these days, from the way Qifrey’s tea goes cold because he always leaves it somewhere to the way he shrugs when pain is moving through him, and the way the festival lights make his hair look like winter seen through glass and the way his knuckles are scarred and the line of his throat and —
Qifrey laughs, pressing his fingertips to his mouth with delight. Olruggio ignores him even through the way his face heats and his ears catch alight, glaring out the window as they roll over the next bridge. It proves to be a perfect distraction, because he finds himself leaning in to better see the canal below, frowning at the way it laps at the underside of the lower arch of the bridge. Water reeds drag long fingers through the current, a paper lantern floating unlit as its painted wish blurs beyond reading.
Qifrey notices him noticing, and leans forwards also. “What is it?”
“The waterline.” He points with two fingers. “It’s quite high for this time of year.”
Tetia very nearly falls off the seat with how quickly she turns around. “Well! Maybe canals are just like that!”
“Canals are rarely just like anything,” Qifrey hums, and something in Olruggio sinks because that is the sound of Qifrey becoming interested, and Qifrey being interested is how normal trips turn into reports and injuries and sealed letters, and Olruggio sitting awake in a chair near a door he hasn’t been invited through.
“We’re here for the festival,” He reminds the other man firmly.
Qifrey’s gaze slides to him, bright and utterly unconvincing. “Yes, of course.”
Olruggio scowls in what is supposed to be a warning, but Coco beats him to the punch. “Should we investigate, do you think?”
“No,” Qifrey says cheerfully and Olruggio rolls his eyes at the yes underneath. Qifrey shoots him a bemused look. “We’re here because the girls earned a day away from the atelier. Besides, I hear they have excellent candied plums here and I know Agott has a fondness for —”
“I do not want candied plums,” Agott interjects, face pinking.
“Oh, good. We won’t buy any, then.”
Agott’s mouth snaps open but Olruggio cuts in, mercy catching him off guard. “We’re buying candied plums.”
When they draws to a stop, Olruggio steps down first and immediately sinks half an inch into mud. He glares down at his boot and gives Qifrey an exasperated look.
“Romantic, remember?” Qifrey winks, and Olruggio mutinously thinks about picking up a handful of mud and throwing it at that perfect face.
Before he can do so, Tetia bounds down with a grin splitting her face. “The whole town is so shiny!”
A festival attendant approaches them with a basket of paper charms looped over one arm, hair clinging to her cheeks in dark curls. Rainwater drips steadily from the charms onto the stones below as she bows elaborately. “Welcome to Badurel! You’ve come at a lucky time, you know! Fine dry season this year. Perfect weather for the festival!”
“Dry except all the rain,” Agott mutters sourly, mostly to herself, but the attendant’s head tilts.
“Rain? You won’t find any of that here! Why, we haven’t had proper rain in… oh, years at least!”
Olruggio blinks, waiting for her to smile or to wink, or to reveal some local joke at the traveller’s expense. He thinks that perhaps it’s a standard festival greeting or perhaps rain here means a flood or a storm, or unlucky weather. God knows towns collect phrases like cupboards collect dust, and not everything strange is immediately magical.
“Years!” The attendant repeats, apparently of her own volition, before shaking water from the charm basket. “The Lantern Wish Festival always brings clear skies, as you know. A blessing, isn’t it?”
Qifrey accepts a charm with a carefree tone that doesn’t fool Olruggio at all. “How fortunate.”
There is a gutter overflowing but two houses over, water pouring from the roof in a steady stream, but the attendant pays it no mind. She turns to the next arriving family with the same enthusiastic greeting. “Welcome to Badurel! Dry roads and bright wishes!”
Olruggio sighs. “Wonderful.”
Qifrey glances at him with a peculiar expression. “Are you alright?”
“No.” Olruggio watches a child leap over a puddle while his mother calls for him to be careful. “But I’m willing to pretend for another five minutes.”
Qifrey bumps his shoulder, just lightly. “How generous of you.”
x
The town welcomes them with bells, hundreds of them, all brass and glass and painted clay, hung from eaves and the corners of stalls, from bridge rails and shop signs. They answer one another as they step below the first arch of lanterns, a bright uneven shivering thing that travels down the streets ahead of them like news passed hand-to-hand.
visitors, say the bells and wishes say the lanterns.
rain says the stones under Olruggio’s boots, stubborn and cool even where the festival light has pooled in their hollows. The festival has swallowed the town hall, the point where every street is dressed in light. Long ropes of lanterns cross between windows in luminous swoops, ranging from red to gold to a cream as translucent as eggshells, so thin the flames inside them show as dancing apricot hearts. There are lanterns painted with carps and crescent moons, tiny houses and folded hands, some shaped like birds and others round and fat and low, bobbing just above eye level.
The light finds the girls’ faces and makes them look young, which they are already are, and bright, which they already are. It finds Qifrey and does something more dangerous, catching on his hands in a way that keeps snaring Olruggio’s attention despite his best efforts.
Beneath the lanterns, the market has flared to life, chestnuts cracked over charcoal until their split skins offer a smell so sweet that Tetia leans towards it with glee. Sweet bean cakes sit in lacquered rows, glazed so brightly they look jewelled. Someone pours ribbons of honey over skewered fruit until they shine. The person next to her roasts river mushrooms with salt and butter and Coco makes a sound so nakedly yearning that Agott looks at her with pity. “We are not eating everything,” She warns, which would be more convincing if she hadn’t slowed beside the chestnuts herself.
Tetia clasps both hands to her chest. “No-one said everything.”
“You have a large appetite.”
She giggles and pirouettes. “I have a large heart!”
“Both can coexist,” Qifrey laughs and buys mushrooms before Agott can argue further. Heat breathes through the packet as Olruggio takes it from him, the way he takes kettles from fire and children from the edge of docks: because his hands always arrive first. Qifrey looks up with surprise and gratitude, lantern gold sitting in the uncovered half of his face, so Olruggio busies himself shoving the mushrooms at Tetia.
“Eat before you start composing poetry about hunger.”
Tetia, already chewing, gives him a betrayed look. “I would write beautiful poetry, Master Olruggio.”
“It would rhyme spoon with moon,” Agott snorts and then tears the packet a little wider so that Tetia doesn’t burn her fingers.
Qifrey acquires tea from goodness knows where, because people tend to just. Give him things. Tea, directions, trust, their life stories — even dangerous artifacts, occasionally. The cup is cheap glazed clay and painted with a clumsy white heron, but he holds it as though it’s porcelain as steam curls against his mouth. The smell of it reaches Olruggio two steps away and makes the yearning in him stupider than usual. The festival is doing the same thing the tea does: it opens for him. Vendors lean towards Qifrey with samples and children glance up as he passes, forgetting to be shy. An old woman at a charm stall presses a strip of pink paper into his hand and says for clear roads, dear without asking payment. He thanks her with such gentle sincerity that she blushes down to the collar of her dress and Tetia whispers to Coco: “He’s so good at people,” with complete and utter awe.
Olruggio scowls at a rack of carved rain charms as Qifrey turns the strip of blue paper over in his fingers. “You’re glaring at the local handicrafts.”
“They’re badly sealed.”
Qifrey’s mouth quirks, just a little. “They are charms, not roof riles.”
“They are paper charms in a canal town.”
“Ah, practicality disguised as criticism yet again.”
Olruggio snorts. “Criticism is often practical, you will find.”
“Is affection?”
He nearly walks into the next stall, the question going through him the way a spark goes through dry tinder, small and bright and already too late. Qifrey’s face remains perfectly serene, mouth still a little crooked. Olruggio fists his hands just to have something to hold. “What?”
Qifrey’s eye gleams under the festival light. It’s the problem with him, Olruggio’s learned; Qifrey doesn’t flirt exactly, because god knows he rarely does anything so mercifully straightforward. Instead, he sets small fires in the shape of a conversation and then looks pleased whenever smoke appears. “Affection. Is it practical?”
“No,” Olruggio says slowly, carefully. “But people keep doing it anyway.”
That little crook in Qifrey’s smile softens and, for a dangerous second, the festival noise seems to dim around them. All the bells and laughter and haggling drop behind the small quiet made by Qifrey looking at him like that, like Olruggio has handed him an answer he hadn’t expected to receive.
Tetia darts between them with a cake in each hand, saving Olruggio from whatever nonsense his face is doing. “Master Qifrey, Master Olruggio! Look! They’re shaped like clouds!”
The cakes are pale and dusted with sugar that clings to her skin as she holds them up. Richeh inspects them with visible disappointment. “Those are fish. They have fins, see?”
Tetia pouts. “Clouds could have fins in a spell.”
Coco looks up from her notebook eagerly, already halfway into the air. “Actually! In weather charm diagrams —”
“No,” Agott and Olruggio say together, and Coco’s mouth wobbles before breaking into a grin.
Qifrey laughs and the sound feels like a hand laid over an old ache, warm and familiar. Olruggio turns towards the canals under the guise of inspecting the railing because if he keeps looking at Qifrey laughing like this, well. He’s going to do something horrific and kiss him in front of the children, and then what?
If nothing else, the railing rewards him by having a number of suspicion notes: its lower posts are dark with water rot beneath fresh paint, that particular soft blackness wood takes on when it’s drunk more than it should. The stone steps leading down to the boat landings are slick with algae that shines green under the lights, silken. Along the canal wall runs a pale horizontal mark, just above the current waterline, and Olruggio’s eyes travel along it.
A boatman standing near the landing notices and calls: “Wish boats! Lantern boats for lucky families! Set your wish afloat and let it find the river!”
The boats in question are small enough to cup in two hands, folded from waterproofed paper and painted with tiny doors, each with a tiny candle waiting in its belly.
“Can we?” Tetia cries, already bouncing, one cake already half-devoured somehow.
“No,” Agott returns automatically, at the same time as Coco’s delighted: “Yes!” They glance sharply at each other, Agott’s mouth tightening before she sighs and nods, which is how Agott says i love you, please don’t drown.
Richeh looks down at the little boats, their painted windows no bigger than an apple seed. “They look like houses.”
The boatman smiles. “So the wishes know where to return should the river lose ‘em.”
Olruggio doesn’t like the sound of it, but Qifrey does. Or rather he finds it interesting, which is worse. Interest in Qifrey is never idle. It’s a door being tested from the inside. He hums. “Return to whom?'“
“To the one who wished, of course!”
“And if the wish is impossible?” It seems a pretty fair question, considering the wishes of children and desperate folk alike.
The boatman just laughs, as though the question is silly. “Then the lantern carries it ‘til it learns how!”
Tetia makes a soft, awed sound and clasps onto Richeh’s sleeve.
“That is hardly reassuring,” Olruggio grumbles, and then explains at Qifrey’s questioning look. “Wishes shouldn’t learn independently, as we well know.”
The boatman leans over his basket to peer at them. “You two will be wantin’ a paired boat, no doubt.”
“We will not,” Olruggio huffs, but Qifrey presses his fingertips to the bow of his mouth, the questioning look turned lethal.
“And what distinguishes a paired boat?”
Olruggio gives him a little scowl. “Betrayal, apparently.”
In response, Qifrey shushes at him. “Consider it academic curiosity, Olly.”
“Your academic curiosity has nearly killed us twice. Recently.”
Coco leans so far over the railing to study the boats that Agott has to hold onto the back of her dress, faithful as a knot. “Does it use dual inscription for shared intentions?”
“Somethin’ like that.” The boatman looks over the moon to have someone ask about his life’s work. He puts his hands on his hips with a proud expression. “Two names, one wish. Strongest kind there is, little lass.”
Tetia sighs wistfully. “That’s so romantic. But what if two wishes aren’t the same?”
The boatman’s smile flickers, just for a moment, before his expression resolves itself. “Then the festival helps them agree!”
Olruggio feels the way those words settle in him, the wrongness of it dressed as charm. Warm as the honeyed fruit and soft as the bells, offered with the same smile as the mushrooms. He doesn’t trust it. “How… kind of it.”
“Yes,” The boatman agrees, too quickly for anyone’s liking. “The festival’s mighty kind.”
Behind them, a chorus of children run past carrying ribbon wands, shrieking with laughter so sweet it almost fixes the moment. One of them trips in a puddle and sends muddy water splashing across Tetia’s shoes.
“Sorry!” The kid calls, before glancing down at the puddle in confusion. “I didn’t see it was so dry.”
“Careful with the stones, love! They’re slippery when dry!” His mother catches up and seizes his hand, carefully. They run on, and Agott’s face crumples into the kind of expression she wears when the world has tried to rewrite something in front of the people she cares about.
Qifrey kneels down next to Tetia, ostensibly to wipe the mud from her shoe with a handkerchief, but the gesture gathers all four girls without commanding them. Coco crouches so low she’s in danger of toppling over. Qifrey’s voice is warm and low. “Festival crowds are tiring. Stay close.”
Olruggio watches him fold the soiled handkerchief and tuck it away, and his heart wobbles badly at the gesture. There are a thousand reasons to love Qifrey and most of them are deeply inconvenient on the best of days, but the worst are always centred around moments like these: the gentle bend of his body towards a frightened child and the way his voice softens. The care he offers others so easily and withholds from himself, like he’s rationing it according to some internal system no-one else could possibly understand.
When he gets up he turns gracefully towards a stall of hanging masks. “Oh, look, girls. Festival craftsmanship.”
The masks are exquisite, hanging in rows under a blue awning and decorated with all manners of spirits and rabbits. The paint is luminous, their expressions ranging from smiling to solemn, all with tear tracks painted from the inner corners of the eyes down to the jaw, silver blue and delicate as the veins in a leaf.
“Oh, this one is beautiful,” Coco gasps reverently, holding one up beside Richeh’s face. “You would look so lovely.”
Agott turns one over in her hands, narrowing her eyes down at the maker’s mark on the back of a crane mask. “Why do they all look like they are crying?”
The stall owner blinks and laughs. “Crying? No, dear. Those are blessing lines.”
Olruggio examines the paint closer, both surprised and unsurprised to find that the paint is waterproofed — not unusual for a canal town, admittedly, but there is a part of this entire experience that catches in the corners of his brain.
Qifrey ends up buying a mask for Richeh, who looks startled when he offers it. The painted tears catch the light and look, for an instant, like real water deciding to stay there forever. “For later. Only if you want it.”
Before Richeh can answer, another vendor approaches bearing a tray of pale lavender lanterns, painted with interlocking rings. “Paired lantern for the beloveds?” He asks brightly. “One lantern, two hands, one flame. It reads the wish between you. Very popular with young couples.”
“We are not a couple,” Olruggio feels the need to point out, adamantly ignoring Qifrey’s disarming smile.
Coco looks between them. “But if it reads shared intentions it could be helpful!”
“Coco,” Olruggio groans, wounded, but Richeh hugs the mask to her chest and turns traitor, too.
“The lantern might show if the town’s wish magic can miscategorise relationships.”
“Oh, that is a good theory,” Qifrey says pleasantly, voice perfectly level.
“It is not,” Olruggio snaps. “It is an ambush with methodology.”
In the end, Qifrey buys the damn lantern. The vendor hands it to him first, then seems to reconsider this and places one edge of it into Olruggio’s hand as well. The lantern is light between them, made from pale paper and thin bamboo ribs, with its tiny dark wick waiting at its heart. The painted rings curl around its sides like promises a touch too close to the bone. There are tiny birds that have been painted with their beaks touching in a little painted eternity.
The girls make a circle without being asked, Richeh watching the wick intently. The vendor takes a little brass striker from his sash. “Both beloveds must hold it.”
“We are not —” Olruggio cuts himself off when Qifrey’s hand shifts on the lantern, a shared trembling through the paper-thin frame.
The striker sparks, the wick catching an immediate, brilliant gold that sends flame blooming inside the lantern. Light fills the paper walls, turning the lavender almost translucent. The painted birds glow red at the wings as the interlocking rings shine silver. Underneath all that, along the lower seam, a line of ink stirs like a thing waking under skin. Heat comes through the bamboo into Olruggio’s palm, sweet and heady.
Tetia clasps both hands over her mouth, but Agott sniffs. “That proves nothing.”
Olruggio is about to agree, but then the flame flickers between them earnestly this time, and the whole world slips sideways. The images that come are not from any real point in time, too bright for a memory and too specific for mercy: it’s Qifrey beneath the lantern arch with rain in his hair and his face tilted up, mouth already parted, saying i love you like a secret he’s finally tired of keeping. It’s Qifrey’s bare hands dragging down Olruggio’s naked chest, palm to stomach while Olruggio chokes on a sound he’s never made.
It’s the workshop with a blanket on the floor and Qifrey on his back, shirt rucked to his ribs as he rocks up into Olruggio’s thigh without shame, breath breaking everytime Olruggio bears down. It’s his mouth falling open on a thin, wrecked sound, on Olruggio’s name as Olruggio drags him into a messy kiss, all teeth.
Olruggio’s whole body goes hot. He can’t — he can’t tell whose thought it is, not at first, not — surely mine, he thinks desperately. Surely the lantern is only reading him, dragging out the ugliest, softest, least survivable wishes and painting them on the inside of his skull. He has wanted the kiss. He has wanted the i love you.
The images whirl and bleed into one another, the vision smearing as Qifrey says please and Olruggio buries his face into silver hair and Qifrey flushes to his navel, whole body going tight and then yielding, too much detail for fantasy and not enough distance to call it only his. It’s Qifrey’s fingers sinking into his hair, it’s Qifrey mouth spreading him open, it’s —
Qifrey snaps back, releasing the lantern with a violence so total Olruggio has to scramble not to drop it, the visions vanishing so abruptly he sways. The heat leaves his palms in a rush and with it the words fall back into him unsaid and sharp, while the rest of the wanting doesn’t leave at all. It sits in him, hot and indecent, impossible to set down now.
Colour has climbed all the way to Qifrey’s ears, lips parted enough that for one single second he looks exactly like the man in the vision: caught and wanting, halfway to ruined already. Olruggio stares at him with building horror, the words falling back unsaid. All he can see is Qifrey on his fingers and in his hand and around him, and he holds the lantern low and does not trust his voice. Olruggio wants to ask if he felt it, too. If his mouth is bruised from a kiss that didn’t happen.
The vendor blinks. “Oh! Too strong, perhaps!”
Qifrey’s own hand finds the column of his neck before it lowers, mildness trying to assemble itself badly. His ears are still pink and lower lip bitten; he won’t meet Olruggio’s eyes at first, and when he does the looks skids away, unsteady. Olruggio wants to shake him. He wants to ask did you see that? did you see me? was that mine? was any of it yours? did the lantern lie? Instead, he forces: “We are keeping this only until we understand what it does.”
Qifrey’s gaze lifts slowly. The flame flickers between them, a small golden animal breathing in a paper house and for one reckless stupid second Olruggio imagines saying it plainly, the sentence appearing shaped and whole in his chest.
i have wanted you like that for years
Qifrey smiles thinly. “So practical yet again.”
Olruggio can see the question there before Qifrey buries it, almost worse than denial: recognition with nowhere safe to go. Then he looks away so deliberately it’s almost a confession all on its own.
The girls descend at once. “What happened?” Tetia demands.
“Master Qifrey?” Agott tries sharply, because for all her protests she is the first to notice when one of her adults has gone pale.
Qifrey, to his credit, recovers almost seamlessly. “The charm seems unusually responsive.”
Coco looks between them curiously. “Was it bad?”
“No,” Qifrey says at the same time Olruggio says, “Yes.”
Coco nods slowly, looking like she very much wants to write that down. The vendor gives an awkward little laugh. “Well, the first light can be intense for strong pairs. The wish between you must be very lively.”
Olruggio stares at him, and then turns on his heel and stomps off, trusting the others to follow. Every step feels like a negotiation with his own body, like he’s crossing a wet roof. The want sits low and humiliating and hot still, competing with the colder alarm that something in this town has reached in and found him. Found the both of them, maybe.
Qifrey does not offer to take the lantern back. He walks with his hands folded behind him, as though proximity itself has become a lit wick. At one point their arms nearly brush and he corrects the angle so quickly that a stranger would probably call him clumsy. The pressure of the unsaid thing remains under Olruggio’s tongue, lodged there like some kind of fishbone. Every few steps the lantern’s bamboo frame taps softly against his leg, warm through the cloth, and with each tap he sees it again: Qifrey’s face and Qifrey’s knee against his hip. That bitten-off noise he’d made.
There’s no reason to believe the lantern has shown Olruggio anything but the wish he already knows too well, and no reason to believe Qifrey saw the same kiss or hands or the same yes. All the same, Olruggio’s heart feels like it’s missed several steps in his chest, so off kilter that he nearly jumps when Qifrey finally does clear his throat. “Are you alright?”
The question is so gentle it nearly finishes what the lantern started. Olruggio exhales very, very slowly. “No.”
Qifrey’s voice is not entirely steady. “No?”
He should say something pragmatic. He should say that the lantern is unsafe and untrustworthy, that they need to observe whether it reacts again. All of that would be true. He should say Qifrey is not allowed to touch it without warning him first — also true. He should say, above all, that whatever it showed them is not to be spoken of where the girls can hear, and preferably not where Olruggio can hear himself want. He feels the truth shift again, hot behind his teeth, and swallows it back. “Something that interferes with thought is never harmless.”
Qifrey is silent for several steps before he agrees, finally: “Yes. You’re right.”
Olruggio risks one look at him, at how he’s watching the path ahead with his face composed. His hands are still folded behind his back, posture calm and mouth flat. His colour has not quite recovered though, still high along the cheekbones. Olruggio looks away again, rattled with alarm and exposure and a mean, private thrill knotted through both.
Fortunately, the girls seem determined to keep them surrounded in a bright orbit of commentary, Tetia pointing at stalls enthusiastically while Agott translates. Coco finds a calligraphy booth where festival goers write their wishes in silver ink that smells faintly of rain. She asks the old scribe at least six questions about the ink composition, until his delight turns to alarm and he eventually gives her a spare brush just to end the conversation. Richeh stops before a shrine of hanging paper doors, turning in the breeze. She does not touch any of them, but Qifrey stands beside her for a while.
When she finally turns away, he buys fried dough for everyone and portions it out with a little smile. “Eat.”
“Yes, Master Qifrey,” Olruggio mutters but it only serves to make Qifrey snort with a laugh so unexpectedly amused that Olruggio nearly drops his damn dough. It’s unfair, really, how genuine enjoyment moves through Qifrey before performance can catch it. His shoulders lower and his mouth softens, sugar clinging to the edge of his hand and for the tiniest moment he looks like someone who hasn’t built his life around endurance — only around this, only around the ridiculous mercy of being fed among loved ones.
Somewhere along the canal, children release their wish boats one-by-one, candles trembling over the black water. Each small vessel goes out with a cheer, drifting in a loose, glowing procession beneath the bridge, their lights shivering. A singer begins a song about river roads and lanterns, the melody lovely and distracting, simple enough for children to learn yet old enough that probably no-one remembers who first sang it. Her voice lilts over the water, threading through the bells and stalls and the shrieks of children chasing each other with ribbons.
Despite himself, Olruggio lets the sound carry, only a little. At first he thinks Qifrey is watching the singer, and then he realises the other man is watching the water. His mouth is thin with thought, neither smiling nor serious enough to warn anyone who doesn’t know him. The problem is Olruggio does know him, from the angle of his attention to the stillness that gathers in him when something beneath the world has shifted.
Olruggio tightens his grip on the lantern, but before he can speak a drop of water strikes the back of his hand. He glances down at how the bead sits on his skin before running towards his wrist. Another drop hits the folded lantern and the flame inside hisses. The third drop lands on Agott’s cheek, and she wipes it away with a weary sigh.
“Oh!” The mask seller says nearby. “Evening blessing. You –”
“What blessing?” Olruggio asks, but she’s already turned away and — no, not turned. She’s stopped so abruptly that at first he doesn’t understand what he’s seeing, until he does. She’s standing there with one hand lifted to the row of masks, fingertips brushing from a painted crane. Her mouth is open around the beginning of a smile, rain beading on her silver bracelets and gathering on her eyelashes.
The rain begins in earnest, falling silver through the light to turn every rope of paper moons into a chain of blurred stars. It strikes the canal with a million tiny songs and the festival just. Stops. A child freezes midlaugh with one ribboned hand flung high above her head, her flower wand trembling only because the rain is touching it. A vendor stands with long tongs suspended over an iron pan while the singer by the canal holds one hand against her heart, mouth open around a note that does not finish. A man in the middle of tying a wish to the bridge rail remains bent forwards, ribbon pinched between finger and thumb.
The rain moves and the fires in the stalls move. The canal moves. The people do not.
Tetia makes an aghast sound, but Qifrey’s hand comes down on her shoulder at once. “Stay still. No-one touch anything.”
Agott’s face has gone bloodless. “Are they dead?”
“No,” Olruggio answers too sharply, the word cracking out of him before sense can soften it. He swallows and forces his voice lower. “No, they are just frozen. Breathing, I think. Best not to touch them.”
“I don’t see them breathing,” Coco whispers.
Olruggio looks, almost wishing she hadn’t said it. The nearest frozen man has rain running down his cheeks and into his open mouth, but his chest does not rise. His eyes are fixed on a point beyond Olruggio’s shoulder, neither dead nor present.
a spell, he thinks sourly, and then immediately doubts himself because a spell can do a great many things, but to seize an entire street? An entire festival? His gaze drags outwards, taking in the frozen bridge and the frozen market. Across the canal, beneath a second arch of lanterns, more people stand perfectly still in the rain. The same motionless shapes continue for as far as his eyes can see, containing children and musicians, old women and lovers, families and parents all held in place as water runs over them.
Beside him, Qifrey takes a step towards the frozen mask seller but Olruggio catches his wrist instinctively, fingers closing around the narrow bones there. Qifrey stops, staring down at where they’re joined. His eye is pale and intent, and plainly horrified beneath the practised calm. “I wasn’t going to disturb them.”
Then Tetia whispers: “Master Olruggio?” and he lets go.
“It’s alright,” Qifrey says, small and steady. “We are here and we are together. We will not touch the townspeople while they are caught in this state. We are going to observe carefully.”
“I don’t want to observe.”
“No,” Qifrey agrees gently. “You don’t have to.”
The rainfall lightens, and Olruggio has been so caught up in trying to break apart the puzzle here that he realises it only a second before it happens. “Brace yourselves,” He warns, and the rain stops all at once. It’s as if a line has been cut: sound returns in pieces, immediately. The singer finishes her note and the vendor lowers his tongues. The man at the bridge ties off his wish and the mask seller completes her turn towards them, smile still enthusiastic and voice continuing as though no time has passed. “Good for the lanterns, you know! You’ll want to keep the little ones dry.”
Agott stares at her, and the festival resumes. Laughter rises again as bells chime and children shout for their wish boats, which have drifted further down the canal during a rain no-one else seems to have experienced.
Qifrey is standing very still, peering up at the blue sky, and Olruggio recognises that stillness in a way he does not like. He’s seen it when Qifrey’s found a dangerous spell hidden under a nursery charm, and when he wakes from dreams he won’t describe. He’s seen it whenever memory brushes too close to whatever locked tombs he carries inside himself. “We should go to the inn.”
“No.” Agott’s eyes are damp with fear and fury both. “We can’t just go to the inn. We need to know what that was.”
Qifrey crouches slightly so that he’s closer to her height, heedless of the rainwater dripping from his hat. “Listen to me. None of you are in trouble for being afraid. I, too, am afraid. However, fear is not the same as being helpless. We know more than we did a minute ago, and that matters. We know the rain changes something and the townspeople are affected.”
Agott wipes rainwater from her own cheek with an angry hand. “And we know it’s huge.”
“Yes,” Qifrey says carefully. “We know that, too.”
Olruggio steps in before Qifrey can say anything gentle and self-sacrificing. “Rules. One: no wishes, no ribbons, no boats. No lanterns except this one, and no touching this one. Two: we do not separate. If you cannot see both Qifrey and myself, you are too far away. Three: if it rains again, you do not touch any townspeople, regardless of if they are falling, spilling, burning or about to step into something. You call one of us.”
Coco looks sick with worry. “What if someone’s hurt?”
“Then you call one of us faster.”
They start towards the inn through streets that gleam with the aftermath of the downpour. Qifrey walks at Olruggio’s side, quiet now, and Olruggio wants to ask a dozen things but none of them are the right shape.
what happened? how wide is it? why us? why them? what does the lantern mean? are you alright? are you already planning to disappear into this? Instead, because he’s practical and doomed and has loved this impossible man long enough to know that questions can easily become knives if drawn too fast, he frowns. “You’re not investigating anything alone.”
Qifrey turns his head slightly. “Master Olruggio, are you concerned?”
“Yes.” The answer comes too quickly and far too plainly, and a flicker of surprise darts across the other man’s face.
“I’ll be careful,” He says at last, and Olruggio snorts.
“No, you’ll be watched.”
x
The inn stands at the end of a narrow side street where the canal widens into a turning basin, the water there moving in a slower, fatter circle. It holds lanterns on its sky like a tray of cooling jewels. The inn itself is objectively gorgeous with blue shutters and whitewashed walls that throw the evening back softer than any stone should. Seasonal flowers in pink and cream spill out of window boxes, their petals beaded with rain.
Inside, warm light spills across the entryway; the common room beyond is crowded with festival travellers, all damp to varying degrees and all cheerfully pretending otherwise. The innkeeper descends on them immediately in a rustle of green silk, silver haired and brimming with pleasantries. “Ah, yes! Our late arrivals! Master Qifrey, yes? And your lovely husband and children!”
Olruggio groans, but Qifrey just smiles again, demon that he is. “Thank you for having us.”
“How was the road? Still dry, I hope?”
Coco looks down at the muddy hem of her dress rather pointedly, while Tetia opens her mouth before seeming to remember their rule about not touching suspicious things — it’s a growth Olruggio would praise if his blood were doing anything useful.
Qifrey hums. “Clear enough.”
Behind the innkeeper, someone wrings a cloth into a bucket, water streaming from it in a steady silver line. The innkeeper’s eyes stay on their faces with that warm, unblinking attention. “We have your rooms prepared, of course. A shared room for the young ladies, warm and close to the hearth passage. And for you two, our best attic room.”
“No,” Olruggio says immediately, surprising even himself with how brisk it comes out. He clears his throat and tries again, kinder this time. “We will need separate rooms.”
“Ah!” Her smile turns sympathetic. “Oh, dear, I’m afraid the festival has us quite full.”
Qifrey looks at the vase on the front desk with entirely false innocence. The innkeeper leans in like she’s sharing a cherished secret. “The attic room is very private. It’s much preferred by festival couplings.”
“We are not a festival coupling,” Olruggio splutters as, behind him, Tetia makes a sound caught between a cough and a laugh.
The innkeeper raises her eyebrows at the lantern in his hands. Her smile does not change. “Well. The lantern knows best.”
Olruggio looks down at the lantern in abject horror and then at Qifrey, who is biting back a smile so badly that Olruggio wants to throttle him here and now. He also wants to kiss him though, so. Clearly his desires cannot be trusted regardless. He sighs. “We will take the room.”
“Of course!” The innkeeper lifts a ring of keys in the shape of a fish, with one single painted eye. “This way!”
The girls’ room, at least, is acceptable. It opens off a passage with two large beds, high and dry, and a basin with a painted rim of tiny blue waves. A window looks down onto the side street and Olruggio checks the window latches. Then the floorboards and the hearth passage and the bedding. Agott endures this for about ten seconds before barking: “We are capable of identifying a trap, you know!”
“You are capable of identifying some traps,” Olruggio corrects, running a thumb along a latch until he feels the honest click of it. “That is how traps work.”
Tetia sits on one of the beds and bounces. “It’s so soft!”
“The puddles are gone,” Richeh remarks from the window and Olruggio crosses there to discover that she’s right: the street below still shone, glazed as a plate, but the obvious puddles from the sudden rain have vanished. Qifrey comes to stand on the other side; a quiet third line. For a moment the three of them watch the town arrange itself around this, how the turning basin holds the sky and still refuse to admit how high it’s climbed.
“It’s like they’ve forgotten,” Coco notes, on her knees by the skirting.
Qifrey is silent for a moment and Olruggio can’t help but think of how much this particular silence feels like a room being prepared. “Perhaps they aren’t forgetting. Perhaps they are being returned to the memory the spell permits them to keep.”
That lands badly, the way a dropped key lands in a quiet house. Tetia stops bouncing and looks at Qifrey with great sadness. Olruggio watches Qifrey’s reflection in the darkening window glass, at his pale face and soft mouth, at the way the lanterns outside make him seem, for a moment, like a man made of light and the refusal of light. The real Qifrey stands close enough that Olruggio can take his elbow, if he so likes. The glass Qifrey is already halfway into town.
Dinner is pleasant enough and that, Olruggio reckons, is Badurel’s particular talent. The town seems to have quite the skill for hiding mildew behind polished screens and fear beneath bells, and serving a dinner under lights so beautiful that a person has to work not to be lulled by it.
The common room has transformed into something warm and gold and noisy, a hive of festival guests crowding low tables. The windows overlooking the canal have been thrown open to catch the music outside and every now and then the air that drifts in smells less of sweets and smoke and more of a mineral breath that Olruggio can’t quite decipher.
Qifrey sits opposite him with his sleeves neatly folded back, his wrists bared to the lamp. A cup of hot tea sits untouched near his right hand, steam rising and dying and rising again. He has that luminous, attentive look he wears when he’s pretending to be at ease for the girls. Olruggio can see the calculation beneath, about the festival and the rain from nowhere, the innkeeper’s empty smile. He’s present in the room and also six hundred hallways away inside his own mind, opening doors he will later deny existing.
Olruggio kicks his ankle, hard, and Qifrey shoots him a fondly exasperated look before lifting the tea and drinking it clean, which feels like the smallest surrender in a day full of refusals. The girls are entranced by the dinner, devouring river mushroom stew thick with cream and black pepper and vegetables grilled to perfection. There is a platter of festival sweets shaped like mini lanterns, sugar glazed and ridiculously cute, almost glowing under the real lanterns strung above. For a little while, the room is exactly what it’s supposed to be, warm and crowded and alive, full of children and dinner and harmless teasing. Someone at the next table starts clapping to the festival music outside and a waiter comes to refill their cups.
“River mint,” He says happily. “Festival favourite.”
Coco sniffs hers as the waiter moves on, pitcher gleaming. “It smells nice.”
“It smells like a pond,” Agott huffs.
Richeh holds her cup between both hands, warming her fingers. She gives it a subtle smell. “A fancy pond.”
Tetia takes a careful sip and pulls a face. “A very fancy pond indeed. Master Qifrey, will you fix it tonight?”
Qifrey’s smile is gentle. “We are going to understand it. That comes first. I can’t say I’m very fond of water, but even this is outside its usual scope.”
The table goes quiet for a moment, clearly surprised. Tetia’s smile flickers, uncertain. “Not fond of water?”
Agott stares at him. “You specialise in water spells.”
“I do.”
Coco’s eyebrows pull together. “But how, if you hate water?”
Qifrey lifts his cup to examine the rising steam, the way it’s thin and fragrant. He sets it down again. “Being good at something and liking it are not the same, you will find.”
Tetia’s smile softens into worry. “But you’re not scared of water, are you?”
Qifrey considers this with far more seriousness than Olruggio expected. “I was,” He says at last. His gaze moves towards the open window. “I learned its rules. Fear is much larger before it has fences, you see. Once you understand a thing — how it moves or what it obeys, where it gathers force — it becomes less like a monster and more like a language.”
Agott frowns. “So you studied water because you hated it? That sounds awful.”
His mouth curves. “It was often unpleasant, yes.”
Tetia makes a distressed sound. “Then why keep doing it?”
Olruggio knows the answer before Qifrey gives it, knows about the boyhood courtyard slick with rain and the stones so wet they had a skin. Qifrey at fourteen, pale hair plastered to his face and shaking with fury, standing ankle deep in the runoff channel while a practice spell turned every puddle around him into rising ropes of water. He’d been too thin and too intent and too stubborn to admit terror, but his hands had trembled so badly the circle warped at the edges. Water had climbed his shins in eager threads and Beldaruit had told him to stop, but.
But Qifrey had not stopped. Olruggio, broader and already charmed beyond salvation, had stood under the eaves holding a brazier charm he had no damn reason to be holding except that Qifrey was soaked through. He had watched the water waver and collapse and rise again and had understood, with the brutal clarity of teenagehood, that some people would rather drown inside a lesson than walk away unfinished.
Afterwards, he’d lit the stove so hot that three students complained and a window cracked. Qifrey had sat near it without comment, dripping onto the floor, a dark map widening around his boots. He’d smiled through chattering teeth. “How thoughtful.”
“How stupid,” Olruggio had snapped, and then spent the next year learning every drying, warming, flame-keeping, steam dispersing charm he could get his hands on.
Across the table, now, Qifrey props his chin in his hands and makes a thoughtful noise. “Because I did not want fear making my choices for me.”
The girls absorb that slowly, before Tetia asks: “Did it stop being frightening?”
“No. Not entirely.” He continues with his voice still mellow, still safe for tables. Anything under the old bruise has been carefully wrapped. “Sometimes facing fear does not make it vanish. Sometimes it only means you learn where to put your hands.”
“On the spell?”
“Sometimes.” Qifrey allows. “Sometimes on a friend’s sleeve. Sometimes on the truth, if you’re feeling particularly brave.”
Olruggio looks at him sharply and Qifrey meets it with ease, a memory laid carefully between the stew and the sweets. Coco leans on her elbows, expression turned thoughtful. “So you learned water and Master Olruggio learned fire? As opposites?”
Qifrey’s gaze does not leave Olruggio, even as Olruggio says: “We are not opposites. Counterbalances, perhaps.”
“Complementary disciplines?” Qifrey tries, voice soft. “Mutually stabilising forces?”
Olruggio points with his spoon. “Eat your stew.”
Qifrey smiles in turn and it’s so damn affectionate that Olruggio feels it in that old place under his ribs, the place Badurel has been occupying all day. He lets himself look properly, this time. He lets himself have the whole picture, from Qifrey beautiful in the light with his throat bare to the gold and the girls clustered around in their affectionate orbit. He lets himself Qifrey’s mouth still shaped by laughter. He knows it won’t last — the paired lantern sits between them, folded shut but hardly silent. Somewhere beyond the windows, the canal is too high and the rain waits. But for this breath? For this breath Qifrey is drinking tea. For this breath the girls are laughing. For this breath Olruggio can sit with the awareness that he’s built half his magic around keeping rooms warm enough for Qifrey to return to.
Qifrey’s knee brushes his under the table. When he speaks, his voice is light but there’s an old kindness under it that belongs only to the space between them. “For what it’s worth, I’ve always found your fire very comforting.”
Olruggio’s breath catches before he has to cover his face with one hand, smiling into his palm. The smile lingers the way heat stays trapped in good stone long after the fire has gone out.
Afterwards, they deliver the girls back to their room where Olruggio checks the window fittings yet again. Coco sits cross legged on her bed with her hands tucked beneath her knees, like she’s stopping herself from touching anything. Qifrey gives them all the same instructions Olruggio already has, only gentler.
no wishes / no lanterns / no ribbons / no opening doors / no going anywhere alone
He tells them that if it rains again they are to stay away from the window and wait for them, and Tetia looks at him with an expression that says she is trying very hard to be brave. “Are you going to investigate it now?”
Qifrey smiles. “We are going to understand it. That comes first.”
Agott turns away from the window with a little frown. “That is not the same thing.”
Olruggio sighs and pushes himself back to his feet, satisfied the hearth will remain a simple hearth come what may. “The first priority is that all of you remain unharmed. Not brave, not helpful — unharmed. You understand?”
They leave them with a tray of food, just in case,and Agott stationed nearest the door. Olruggio waits in the hallway before the door locks behind them, and only then does he let his face become true. The hallway here has green wallpaper gone dark where moisture has climbed, a tide mark no-one has agreed to see. Qifrey stands there with his hat in his hands and Olruggio thinks, without permission, beautiful. He shoves the thought down hard enough to bruise. “The Knights.”
Qifrey does not quite flinch, but the not-quite is somehow worse. “No.”
Olruggio lowers his voice and not his temper. “The answer is yes, Qifrey. We watched an entire street stop in active rainfall. Whatever this is, it is wide enough to take the festival district and possibly the town. It handles wish magic, rain, memory and time. We have four children in a locked room pretending they are not afraid. This is not a field exercise.”
Something crosses Qifrey’s face — irritation or fear, or the old acquaintance of the two. With Qifrey, they have always been woven together more tightly than he likes to admit. “We do not know what it is yet.”
“That is traditionally when one calls the people whose profession is finding out!”
“Their profession is containment,” Qifrey’s voice stays low, which makes the edge of it clearer. “Containment often begins with force. You have seen the beginning. You know what the middle looks like.”
He does, that’s the rotten part: Olruggio has stood in rooms after the Knights have finished being correct, has seen seals laid over a district like hands over a mouth. He has seen Easthies smile with nothing in it and has seen fear turned into evidence. He has seen Qifrey come back from interviews one shade less present, as though some tidy violence has been done to the part of him that is still expected to be believed. The Knights are not monsters, but they are worse, on certain days — on certain days they;’re right.
“And sometimes secrecy does the same work,” He snaps, and it comes out rougher than he means. Qifrey’s eyebrows jerk up, but Olruggio doesn’t take it back. “You are suggesting that the two of us poke a town-wide interruption until you decide whether asking for help is acceptable. You, who will not ask for a hand until someone else’s neck is on the block.”
Qifrey’s mouth tightens. “I am suggesting caution.”
“No, you are suggesting control. One day you’ll learn the difference.”
Qifrey’s face goes quiet, then hurt and then cool, too fast for any of them to be the whole truth. He looks towards the staircase. “They will seal the bridges. They will confiscate every charm, and they will question the girls. They will question everyone. They are not paid to be gentle, Olly.”
The name lands like a thumb pressed gently to his brow. Olruggio tries to see past it. “Listen to yourself, you are standing in a wet hallway in a town that stops moving when it rains, arguing against the very people trained for dangerous public spellwork because they might be unpleasant. Do I want Easthies in this inn? Do I think they will be sweet about this? No. I think they will be specific and unfeeling, and pleased to have a reason to be. I also think being specific and unfeeling is still better than you walking into this alone because you would rather be wounded by your own judgment than theirs.”
“They may be wrong,” Qifrey’s voice goes raw. “They may decide the town is the danger rather than the trapped party, and may tear the spell open from the outside. You know how they look at me. You know what they already believe I am willing to hide. If I am the one who sends for them, they will not hear a report. They will hear a confession they have been waiting for me to finish.”
This only serves to piss Olruggio off more, in part because he can’t exactly deny it. He’s been a Watchful Eye in countless rooms where Qifrey was the subject and not the colleague, and has seen Easthies’s attention snag on Qifery the way a hook snags on silk. Unfortunately for Olruggio, understanding Qifrey has always been one of the more exhausting curses of his life. He pinches the bridge of his nose and knows he should protest anyway. He should send word tonight and let the Knights do whatever they feel must be done. He should walk away, right now.
He looks at Qifrey instead, at the hat in his hands and the rain in his hair, at the passive expression not quite covering the fear. Worse than that, under the fear he sees the old request he’s never been able to refuse: believe me a little longer. It’s not the better option, frankly. The better option is the report because he’s learned, well and truly, that faith is not a strategy. God knows faith is the thing he keeps choosing anyway. He sighs. “One night. Not because you are right, mind you. But we do not touch the town, and in the morning I will not ask your permission twice. In the morning we send word. Specialist, not a raid — if they hear the difference. And you do not vanish into this.”
Qifrey’s face crumples into relief. “Alright.”
Olruggio nods once. He believes in Qifrey and still does not believe this is safer. Both things are true, and right now he’s tired of pretending only one of them can exist in him. “Then let’s go to bed.”
x
The attic stairs are narrow and steep, and Olruggio drags his fingers along the walls as they climb. The plaster is damp and cold, suggesting the building is soaked deeply and often. Qifrey follows one step behind, too close and never close enough, stopping short when the innkeeper halts before a low door at the top.
“Our best room,” She says, unlocking it. “Stays dry through every festival.”
“Every?” Qifrey queries lightly.
“Of course! The festival has always been blessed.” She opens the door to let the pent up heat inside breathe out and Olruggio steps in, before stopping so abruptly Qifrey nearly collides with him.
“Oh,” Qifrey says, the syllable landing against Olruggio’s shoulder blades.
The room is almost painfully dry, a small lamp burning on a table near the windows. The ceiling slopes low under the eaves, the floorboards pale and unswollen. There is one bed, neatly made with quilts the colour of toasted cream.
Olruggio closes his eyes, but the inside of his skull offers no help at all. It offers, instead, the width of the mattress and the fact that he hasn’t shared a bed with Qifrey in years and then, because the lantern has ruined sequence, it offers the bed with Qifrey in it and Olruggio’s hand on him, and heat climbs his skin so fast he feels sick with it.
He forces his eyes open to find Qifrey hovering by the door, not quite looking at the quilt either.
“We’ll need another blanket,” Olruggio says.
“Of course!” The innkeeper looks thrilled to have a task and bows herself out. “Right away!”
The room seems smaller with both of them in it, if only because everything enclosed becomes dangerous whenever Qifrey occupies it. Olruggio is used to wanting him across worktables and down halls, through doorways and in kitchens and classrooms and gardens. Want there could disguise itself as passing a cup or mending a sleeve, saying eat and meaning stay. Silence expands to fill the slope of the ceiling and find all the spaces between their shoulders, and in that space Olruggio can still see Qifey’s lips moving around his name, around please. He stares at the wall until he might survive the cut of the other man’s jaw, and it works right up until the paint resolves into a carving. He cocks his head. “Qifrey, look.”
The markings are old and uneven, cut by hand by a knife or a nail. It’s crude but sincere, folded around an intention so simple it makes Olruggio’s skin prickle. “That is why this room is dry.”
Qifrey’s fingers hover near the carving. “It’s not repelling water. It could be… rejecting the forgetting?”
“Or refusing to participate in it.”
Qifrey looks at him again with that careful expression, the one Olruggio has no defense against. It makes Qifrey look like he’s been caught wanting something but has not yet decided whether to run. Here, after the lantern, wanting no longer feels like a metaphor. Wanting has a shape. Wanting had Qifrey’s knee between his thighs and their voices gone rough, and Olruggio still does not know if Qifrey saw it. The not knowing is so dense it almost feels like a third person in the room.
He almost asks again, but the question gets as far as his teeth and dies there because if the answer is no he will have to live with being the only one, and if the answer is yes he won’t survive the night.
A knock at the door spares him, an attendant bringing a fresh jug of hot water and another blanket. He calls them dear sirs in a tone that implies he’d die for them, and then ushers himself out quietly. Qifrey watches the door close again, his ears still faintly pink. “We could ask for a chair. You can take the bed.”
“No.” It comes too fast, even though a chair would be a mercy. A chair would also be Qifrey asleep somewhere Olruggio can’t hear him breathe, and that’s not a risk he’s willing to take tonight.
Qifrey grimaces. “I have slept in worse places, I assure you. Besides, it is only for one night.”
“It’s always only one night with you.” He regrets the choice in words immediately: the bed makes one night sound too much like the vision, and his body flushes hot at the phrase, like it had been some kind of offer. “No, I — that was uncalled for, sorry. I am very — tired. You take the far side.”
Qifrey blinks. “Pardon?”
“The bed.” His voice has gone hoarse; he forces himself to look away from the other man’s mouth. “You take the far side. I’m sure we can endure it.”
For one second Qifrey just stares at him, and Olruggio feels the look in his ears and his palms and in the stupid, leaping gladness under the panic — he will be in the bed he will be in the bed — he stamps on it. Then Qifrey laughs, loose and startled, younger and older all at once, and Olruggio glares at his feet so he doesn’t do something unforgivable with the sound.
“Ah,” Qifrey remarks, a little breathless. “So you are charmed by things, after all.”
Olruggio has no fucking comeback to that, so he spins on his heel and starts getting ready for bed. Qifrey responds in kind, removing his outer layers so pointedly that Olruggio needs to develop a passionate interest in inspecting the window pane. He sees, anyway, the vision of his mouth on that neck and the way Qifrey’s head had tipped back to give to him. His hands are steady, but under the alarm there is that low, sparking thrill, close and warm. Under that is the question he will not ask: did you see it? did you want it, too?
He checks the lock again, and the window, and the ward, and the lantern which has been set on the floor as far away from the bed as possible. He tests which floorboards creek and then does it all again, because his hands need something to do that isn’t imagining the weight of Qifrey’s body.
Qifrey watches the second circuit, plainly bemused. “Are you preparing to sleep in the room or dismantle it?”
“The window sticks. The hearth… draws well.”
Qifrey glances at it musingly. “I believe it’s doing it’s best.”
“Its best is sufficient.” He sounds normal, but he feels fourteen and holding a brazier for no reason. He also feels like a man about to lie down next to the love of his life and pretend he did not, only a few hours ago, watch them kiss in a paper lantern. He wants to ask how it felt and whether Qifrey’s ears went pink because he saw the same scene or if the please had been his or whether he’s also afraid that if either of them speaks about it the other will have to answer.
He says none of it, and by the time the lamps are lowered the room is in an amber hush. They lie on opposite sides of the bed with a gulf wide enough to fit another person, and not wide enough for the lantern’s vision. The extra blanket has been folded lengthwise between them at Olruggio’s insistence, claiming it’s a good barrier against drafts. He can still feel Qifrey through the dip of the mattress and the altered warmth of the quilt, and the living fact of him an arm’s length away after years of careful distance.
His body feels tight and overheated, every nerve awake under his skin and prowling restlessly about it. If he rolls over he’ll be close enough to finish what the lantern started, or close enough to ask, which might actually be worse. He stares up at the ceiling and thinks, with despairing honesty, that he’s wanted this dark and this breathing next to him for so long that getting it now, with the vision still seared into his brain, feels like a punishment.
did you see it?
The question turns over every few breaths. He almost asks it when Qifrey shifts and almost asks it when the fire settles. He bites the inside of his cheek until the impulse goes back down and lies there going quietly mad, thinking about Qifrey’s tongue and knee and the possibility that he’s awake on the other side of a blanket doing the exact same thing.
He turns his head just enough to see the line of the other man’s face in the last of the firelight, eyes closed, and lies there until the wanting wears a thin place in him. At some point, despite himself, he sleeps.
He dreams of water, of a canal seen from above and lanterns floating down it in orderly lines, gold on black. A hand trails from a boat, fingers cutting ripples in the dark as rain strikes the water so hard the surface appears to boil, a thousand brief white mouths opening and closing.
The street comes up around his legs, bringing water to his ankles and then his knees. Then his waist and worse, lanterns bobbing past at chest height and then overhead, their paper faces glowing underwater — carp and moon, folded hands and blessing lines that were tears, after all. Ribbons find his wrist and wind there with the patience of weeds and when he opens his mouth the water finds the inside of his throat. It goes up his nose and seals his ears from the inside, his chest locking around a breath that is no longer air. He gags and the canal uses the gag as a door, pouring cold into him until his lungs are only two more pockets of river. His hands claw at nothing. He reaches for someone — anyone — and his hand closes on wet hair that comes away in reeds.
He wakes choking. For that one awful breath the attic a throat and the quilt weight, and the breath fails because it is not air. Water fills his mouth, all cold and rot, and he jackknifes it up coughing, an ugly retching thing that sends water spilling over his lip onto the bed: real and shining, already soaking into the cream cloth. Rain hammers the roof so loudly it sounds like the canal is beating its way down into the tiles as his next inhale snags and tears. There is still water behind his teeth and he spits it once, then twice, gagging at the sweet-sour taste of it. Then Qifrey makes a sound, a broken strangled noise, like the wet click of someone trying to remember what air is for.
Olruggio moves before he understands, knees hitting Qifrey’s hip until his hands find cloth and bone, and the shaking underneath. His own mouth is still flooding, a thin second spill he has to swallow or drown on. “Qifrey, wake up.”
Qifrey bolts upright in the dark as if hauled, one hand clawing at his throat and the other tangled in the sheets between them. His eye is open but unfocused, white at the edges and blind with terror. He drags in a breath that seems to catch halfway into a thin, panicked whistle, before he tries again.
“Qifrey.” Olruggio grabs his shoulders. Water drips from his chin onto Qifrey’s shirt. “Just breathe. Breathe, just — just breathe.”
Qifrey’s fingers close around his sleeve with startling force, all tendon and panic. His chest hitches in an ugly, arrhythmic jump and Olruggio’s own fear rises, rough and savage. “You’re here. In the room, with me. Not in the water. There is a floor and a fire and air — take it.” He exaggerates his own breath, loud, the way he would coach a child through smoke. Qifrey sucks in half a breath, looking almost shocked at the way it catches and stays, albeit shakily. He tries again and again, each breath coming awful and ragged but real. In the dim light, he’s wet eyed and grey mouthed, terrified and furious about it.
“You’re alright,” Olruggio says before he can stop himself, raw with relief. “Stay. Do you hear me? Stay.”
Qifrey makes a faint sound, halfway between a sob and a laugh. It breaks in the middle and becomes a cough that very nearly doubles him. He swallows, winces and rasps: “I’m beginning to think this town has poor hospitality.”
Olruggio snorts, badly, trying to loosen his fingers away from the other man’s shoulders but they don’t want to let go. His mouth still tastes wrong. “What did you dream?”
Qifrey is still shaking, fine and continuous, but his mouth purses. For a moment, Olruggio truly thinks he might lie — he can almost see the lie assemble itself, but then Qifrey glances down at Olruggio’s hand still on his shoulder and the lie puts itself down. “Bodies. In the canal. Someone was calling from beneath the floorboards. Many someones, in fact. They were singing that song they played at dinner.” His eye flicks to Olruggio’s mouth and the shine still on his chin. “Did you dream it also?”
Olruggio doesn’t answer; he doesn’t know how, not yet. He wipes his mouth with the back of his wrist and finds the water still there, still cold.
“We should wake the girls.” Qifrey shifts as if to rise, but Olruggio pushes him back with one hand firmly against the centre of the chest. He shakes his head. “Not you.”
Qifrey blinks, affronted despite the way his heart is running madly under Olruggio’s touch. “I am perfectly —”
“No. Not this time.” He rises to light the lamp, bringing gold slamming back into the eaves. He moves for the door, but before he can cross the room the paired lantern on the table makes a wet, tearing sound, unfolding itself until its bamboo ribs stretch outwards like fingers. The paper glows faintly, a deep submerged blue like light already drowned. Ink runs over its surface from the inside, one dark line cutting through and through and through.
Qifrey stands too quickly and sways, the room tilting in his face. Olruggio’s across the boards in three strides, catching his elbow and then more than an elbow. “I said not you.”
“And yet,” Qifrey says, voice almost laughing and almost not. “Here I am.”
Olruggio doesn’t argue, if only because he has the desperate need to ensure the children haven’t also jerked awake to the sensation of drowning. He keeps a hand on Qifrey and opens the door, freezing in his tracks at the sheer sight of the hallway so filled with water. It sheets down the plastered walls, carrying flecks of old paint like confetti, and pools over the landing until it laps, cold, at their ankles. The air that meets them stinks of stone that’s been under too long; the stairs in front disappear after the third step, black and moving.
Qifrey’s fingers close in Olruggio’s sleeve. “Dry roads and bright wishes,” He says darkly.
“Dry roads and bright wishes,” Olruggio mutters, and pushes through anyway.