fic - Strandline - part 5
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last_herald_mage-this week in Framing Plots for Men Staring At Each Other. Much dialogue. Probably counts as teasing, sorry Gilda. MUCH purple, wiping blood from my own eyes here.
driveby rec: I am still binge-reading identity porn in DCU - this is so delicious, Regency AU with a really adorable arranged marriage subplot?!?! Lapping this up.
The tavern was a spindle-thin oddity, a woodframe and plaster afterthought jammed between two looming stone buildings, both of which seemed, to his blurred, uncertain eyes, to be listing against its creaking beams. The bar was packed though it wasn't yet noon - with the river so wild, do the docksmen and sailors and smugglers have anything better to do than get blind drunk before noon? Stefen cajoled for them a tiny table at the back. And a flagon of cider that smelt like it could take his tongue off. And only one empty glass; the cup the serving-boy placed in front of Stefen was full. Of water. "He knows I don't drink most-times," Stef explained. "But I tip as if I did, so he don't care."
He dared a swallow, and another, and then sank his head onto his own folded arms.
He felt Stefen's eyes resting on him as he stared at the cracked wall - ghosting over his bare neck as his hair tumbled onto the table. Clouded green irises, eyelids at half mast in respect.
He thinks I only just found out he was right. That Harren's dead. That Harri told me he was leaving Ceejay and now he's dead.
:Van?: He screwed his eyes shut as he acknowledged Tantras. The acrid liquor was dissolving the knot of guilt in his stomach, letting the feeling dissipate all the way through him; his ears felt like they were filling with hot water. :I have the ring. It's definitely Harri's - I'd know that knotwork anywhere.: Harri had sent dozens of letters as he travelled - most sealed with a simple thumbprint, harmless greetings, waxen red herrings. The poorly engraved knotwork wedding band had only been pressed to the seal when he had something important to write between the lines. :I've got that fence down at the gatehouse lockup - I already put him under Truth Spell and talked to him a while.:
:How did he get hold of Harri's seal ring?: he asked, acid anger burning the thought through the void.
:Beachcombing north of the city, he said. Which was a lie,: Tran added needlessly. :I got the name of his sourcer out of him. Pity that most of the watchmen would rather bother the market traders than take on the gang,: he groused. At this point, Van wasn't surprised to hear that. :Van... Could you walk me through it again? What you felt when he...:
He raised his head far enough to take another swig of the vicious drink, and laid his forehead against the cool wood of the table. :I'll try. I guess I should start three days ago, when Harren told me he was leaving Ceejay -:
:You never told me why he headed for home so much earlier than he planned to.:
:It was my idea.: Tantras fumbled the contact in surprise, and Vanyel's head lurched, waves tossing inside his skull, spray dancing over jagged thoughts. Tantras's mind found him again soon enough. :Harri had been headed north following traces of magic - the Cejans haven't much of it, so we assumed they were playing hosts to a foreign mage - or more than one. When he reached Lydra, he sensed blood power, and...: He hesitated. His mind spun around in an eddy - Leren, why had he thought of Leren lately? :Dark wings,: he finished.
:I take it that's bad, then?: Tran asked blandly.
The shadows were folding in around him; to his closed-eyed vision, Stefen was but a bright red candle in the vastness of the dark - a fierce and tiny light, without shelter. :I hoped if Harri could get back into Valdemar - inside our new defences - he'd be safe.: Please forgive me. :When it happened, I was asleep -:
:I know. What did it... Well, how does that...work?:
Tantras was uneasy with Vanyel's new insights into the his comrades' monents of death. He wasn't the only one, either. :I don't yet know,: he admitted. :Harri's only the second Herald to die since we changed the Web.: He stared deep into the darkness, seeing years of this ahead of him - death after death pelting his senses, each one leaving an indelible bruise. What was it I did to bring this upon myself? Was it my arrogance, changing what we've always had? Was it a reminder that I'm responsible for all these lives and ought to bear their ends?
:And Osana's passing was a little less sudden -:
:Quite.: He cut off Tran's musing. Herald Osana had been ninety-one, and had been bedridden for some time. The flashes of pain and light that had overcome him at her passing were still within him in a way he could never have explained to Tantras - a sharp ghost-image seared into his nerves. He knew Harren's agony would never, ever leave him. :I felt - cold, and then burning - deep into the skin.: Not a good description. He had no good description, and Tran should take that as a mercy. You don't want me to share this.
The brief touch at his shoulder startled him. "I know there's not much I could say, but, you want a song?"
"What?" he murmured, not understanding.
"I sing pain away," Stefen explained, and even in his soft intonations there were spirits of peace and slumber. Argonel diluting the rage in his veins. Soft red petals fading on a poppyhead. "I know I can't change nothing, but if you don't feel right and you want a moment's rest..."
Vanyel raised his head, one eye open. "What," he breathed. That's what you do? And you know I'm hurting, even if it's just in my mind?
"I sing pain away," Stef repeated, his cheeks flushing. "I just always done it, all my life. Used to save my keeper from wasting her drinking money on hempleaf."
Bitter smoke in his ears. "Your keeper?"
Stefen shook his head. "Ain't no other word for her. Her name was Berte - I don't know how she came by me. I told you I used to sing in Pinter Square?" Valdir nodded. "She kept an eye on me, I made some coin singing on the street, she spent it on liquor and dreamerie... That's how things were until she died."
"I'm sorry," he murmured automatically.
"Spare me. You gone lost a friend who mattered - someone who had a life. Berte and her crowd - those people, the drugs own them. They ain't friends - they can't have friends. Everything's about the drugs. I weren't nothing to them but a way to get money to get high, and then a way to not get kicked in the teeth by the comedown. I can always tell when someone needs their pain gone," he added.
Valdir gazed into Stefen's cup of murky water. It occurred to him that no one at the Lighthouse Market had attempted to sell them anything; not drugs, distilled spirits or any shape of warm flesh. "You don't drink -"
"I got my other vices," Stef assured him darkly. "And I got some sense about when a man could do with a drink, but it ain't a steady way to live. High water, low water," he shrugged. "Fuck it all, what I'm about is keeping the level," and he waved a hand at the level of Valdir's eyes, palm down. "Berte didn't have nothing left in her life but those highs and lows. I heard tell she had kids of her own once - sold them to the Cejans when they got old enough to bring her more trouble than coin." Valdir gasped low, and Stefen raised a hand to his own mouth. "'Nough about my life. You got your own troubles," he said, as if he'd said more than he'd meant to. "So you want a damned song?"
"No," Valdir replied, reeling from his words. Gods, but I do. But I can't. I am not letting another human being deal with how I feel right now. He stared at Stefen's thin hands, curled around his cup. Steady, tenacious, kind hands. I can't. The thought of taking the offered respite overwhelmed him, and he shook, tipsy and adrift in remembered sensation - touch, warmth, pain. The only thing that seemed worse than feeling was the end of all feeling. And his lips felt warm again, as if a cinder of the kiss they should never have shared; he imagined Stefen's song breathing gently on that heat.
I can't.
"Right." Stef looked aside, his mouth curling with frustration. "Don't think I got no respect. I'd be saying the stuff you're meant to say when someone's dead - about being in the Havens or the good life they lived or whatever. I can mouth that good as anyone but you don't want to hear it, do you?"
Astute. He breathed fast between his smouldering lips, wondering at how well Stefen could understand him. "No, I don't." Words fanning embers. Sharp green eyes pricking at his pretences. How do I keep hiding from you when you live by singing and knowing people and turning every stone - ?
"Wish I'd had enough coin on me to pay Tayard for the ring," Stef sighed. "I could pull a few strings, scrape up enough tonight then go down on the morrow to see if -" Valdir shook his head silently, clutching his glass convulsively and then pushing it aside. Please no. Don't do that for me. Because Tantras already had both ring and fence in hand, and of all the things to worry about now he didn't want Stefen to know that - and he rested his head in his arms again, shaking from the weird, hysteric banality of sudden death. Shaking the way he should have been a day ago. I hadn't the time to feel anything. I never do. And every time - someone dies and there's just more to do, more pieces for me to pick up, and I can't stop like this. I can't allow myself the luxury.
Something nudged his elbow. Stefen proffering the cup again. Valdir seized it, and raised his head to drink, met Stefen's eyes in that brief way of strangers in passing. "Your friend was married? Babes back home?"
"Widowed," explained Valdir. A lie, but it was Harri's accustomed lie; an excuse to wear a ring and to seek company while shunning attachment. Why was he compelled to keep Harri's secrets? You're making me speak of him, share him; you don't know how I'm always alone when someone dies.
Maybe that was why it was such a relief to be someone - anyone - but himself.
"Come from out west, like you?" Stef asked gently.
"Everything's west of here." He stared blankly at the wall.
"Is not," corrected Stefen. "World don't stop at the edge of the river - worse luck." He set an elbow on the table. Valdir knew that Stef had one last question - the one he hadn't wanted to ask. "So what you do now you know he ain't going to be meeting you here? You going back where'ere you came?"
And there was another reason Valdir never got close to people. It got harder and harder to keep up with his own story, to invent reasons to keep investigating. "I...I need to know what happened to him," he said hesitantly and Stefen laughed in his face.
"Trust me, that's the last thing you need to know." He shook his head. "I get it, I seen it - someone dies of a sudden, it's not over for you until you know why. You'll go mad chasing a truth that ain't there - doesn't matter who you ask, how much you pay to priests or fortune tellers or the river herself. You won't find no reason for it, not on the river or your soul. You won't get naught good come of seeking truth. He's still dead, and you're a small leaf floating down the big river."
The frustration and black anger in him lanced through the warm flame of Stefen's eyes. You're right. If I was doing this for myself - if I was who you think I am - I'd be a hopeless mad fool to keep trying. So for Valdemar's sake, please believe that I'm a hopeless mad fool. "You told me the traders got their goods from the river traps -"
"Sometimes, and I'm telling you Tayard never want to know where his goods come from. He's a fence," Stefen explained patiently. "Less he knows, happier he is, happier his sources are. You won't get nothing on them."
And Tantras was probing that cosy arrangement even as they spoke. "I see," he muttered. "No one wants to know what happens on the river?" The men crushed at the bar had started singing - some oar-shanty he'd never heard before. "No one pays an eye to the water? Not the fences or the watchmen or the pirates -"
"Shh, there's a dirty word," Stefen warned him. "It's over. Drink up, and let it lie." But his eyes flickered with doubt.
Valdir seized on it. "I can't." Think me mad, if you will - but look at me and know that I need to find out what became of Harri. "Just tell me one thing - if we'd found nothing at the bazaar, would that have been the end of it for you? Would you have told me to stop looking for him?"
"You're mad." Stefen hung his head. "I had one more notion," he said grudgingly. "If anyone's watching, it would be the Morn."
He clutched that fine straw with both hands. "Then tell me where to find them. I'll not trouble you further, just direct me and -"
"Oh no. I wouldn't do that to no one I hated, never mind you. Silona of Morn - he's madder than you are and he ain't even the dangerous one. That would be Loa - his daughter. They'd split you for breakfast, but I'm in well enough with them that Silona might not do nothing crazy if I pay him a call. Loa knows me, is the good part. The bad part," he added under his breath, "is that Loa knows me."
Stefen made him eat. Something for something, he explained; if Valdir ate and sobered up a little, Stefen would tell him about the Morn. He had little choice but to go along with the nakedly manipulative coddling. "Anyone asks me," Stef hissed, as Valdir reluctantly spooned up the thick shellfish soup, "I'm in good with the Morn. Honest dealers, their word's as good as mine, trust Stefen on this one. Reality is a bit more complicated."
"Silona sounds like an Ifteli name," he observed, puzzled.
"You know a lot," Stefen's eyes narrowed. "Yeah, he's from Iftel. Exiled." Valdir heard the distant clatter of his own spoon hitting the floor. "You know a lot if you know what that means," Stef added suspiciously.
"I've heard stories," he replied stiffly as he retrieved the spoon, wiping it on a corner of tablecloth that wasn't much cleaner than the ground, if at all. "They do say Iftel is blessed by the gods - so what you'd have to do to be exiled -"
Stefen nodded. "No one knows for sure what Silona did - except maybe Loa. He's made sure there's all kinds of stories though - heresies, consorting with demon princes, that sort of thing. What we do know is, he's not just exiled - Iftel cursed him, too. They set him out in the Northern Ocean and told him that should he even set foot in any of Iftel's neighbours, he'll die. That god wanted him far gone."
Valdir bilnked. "But Valdemar... Oh."
Stefen nodded. "Silona lives on the Culway. He gets around a bit - moors at Lydra sometimes, or upriver in Hardorn when he gets a mind to wander. Loa conducts all his business. She ain't cursed."
"Why are you afraid of them?" Valdir asked.
Stefen looked at him sidelong. "Except for the demon princes, you mean? That not enough to bother you?" Valdir stared back, his face vacant, his scarred back flexing under his ragged clothes. "Silona's capricious, is why. You never know what you might pay when you deal with the Morn. I think sometimes, he gains more from truce than anyone, but I still figure he's most like to break it. He likes breaking things. Best hope is, he decides not to break something that's mine."
Here was his chance to enquire. "I've heard tell of the song truce -" Stefen smiled tightly, not replying. "I thought you would know of it."
"You could say that," he replied, droll as the devil himself. "What you heard about it?"
Valdir thought back to how his cellmates had invoked the truce, included him under it. "It's a rule against fighting, and it requires helping each other?"
Stefen snorted. "Keep your voice down," and he gestured to the crowd around them. "Toughs wouldn't be caught dead helping each other. But before song truce, Cul Aber used to be more like three different cities - you could get by the Morn if you played their games, but the Scale or the Rockharbour..." He shook his head. "Walls around everything, and half the people inside the damn walls never even asked to be there. People got killed just for being on the wrong street."
He had seen such occurrences on other porous borders.
"Song truce is just, you don't hurt no one who ain't hurting you, and you don't lay a fellow out for asking questions. Not much to it, but you get that down, you got a chance to talk about more. You cooperate, even with them you'd rather put your eyes out than help. You can go free as you like, so long as you don't tread on no toes, and you couldn't always say that in Cul Aber. You still got to watch where you take and where you sell and where you leave marks, but not where you go or who you talk to," Stefen explained. "And even Silona can sit on the river and get something off of that, and he knows it."
"I can imagine," Valdir breathed. All too easily. "How did it happen?" We train Bards for years to negotiate and soothe away trouble. You tamed a city alone?
"S'another story." Stefen drew the words out slowly. "And it is and it isn't about Morn, so I've a mind to save it." He rapped his fingers on the table, music in his least gesture. "You set?"
"Aye." He'd managed most of the soup, and hadn't much stomach for the rest. "How lucky I was that you found me," he added, quite honestly. "I can't imagine how I would have found my way without you -"
"And you'd squander that luck on courting the Morn?" Stefen shook his head. "Seems like, you know things but don't know when to stop."
"That's been said of me," he conceded. (Of who?)
Stefen stared at him, shaking his head, and he felt Valdir - the hapless, inoffensive Valdir he'd played on many a stage in the past - dance out of his reach. "You'd think, you survive a war, you had enough of lost causes."
"You don't know when something's lost," and he looked down at his hands. "You don't know when it's still worth hanging on. These aren't the times people sing about."
Stefen was quiet for a few seconds. "That's the truth - I don't know a song for that, and I thought I knew a song for everything. I think there should be a song for everything - made a lot of my own that way."
"I don't make songs." Was Valdir sorrowed by that? Had he ever expected more of himself? No one had ever asked him.
"You make trouble," Stefen reminded him, and he dropped a silver on the table as he rose. Valdir followed him as he shouldered his way to the door. "Just hope Loa like the look of you," he muttered as they stepped outside. "It's all that -"
Stefen gasped, and flattened himself against the side of the tiny porch, Valdir moving with him without thought.
Two men passed down the street, mounted. One was an unknown to him, in a crisp grey uniform and plumed hat. The other was less of a mystery. Stefen breathed hard at his shoulder, gazing up at Tantras's majestic figure, his frowning, sculpted face. Delian looked at them sideways, and winked at him.
:Tran,: Vanyel called, willing his friend not to look down at them. He shuffled close against Stefen, so close he could feel the young man shiver. :Fancy seeing you here.:
:And you,: Tantras murmured, a little amused. :That's your street-bard? Delian had been wanting a good look at him.:
His reply wasn't entirely verbal - :Yes,: it included, and :more besides.: Alongside him, Stefen appeared to be trying to retreat into the grey stone. :I found out a little more about the Song Truce,: he added.
As he explained, he could almost see the hairs standing up on Tran's retreating neck. :So you think this truce is all just one gang fixer, and you found him?:
:No, he found me,: he replied in wonder.
:Bards,: and Tantras turned his head slightly, revealing a crooked, incredulous smile. :Can't stand them -:
:- can't live without them,: Vanyel finished, shaking his head, feeling a small smile on his lips. Stefen looked up at him strangely, and he inwardly kicked himself for the lack of focus. :Though if someone he knows can tell us what happened to Harri -:
Tantras indicated grudging agreement. :At this point, I can't say I mind what form of lawless lowlife you turn up as witnesses, so long as you find someone who knows enough that you can use that damned spell.:
The thought set Vanyel's curiosity tugging at his faith, unravelling it from one corner. :On that note... I wonder if you could ask a favour of the city watchmen for me.: Tantras queried him wordlessly, with something that in person may have become a raised eyebrow. :Ask if they have an arrest record for Stefen.:
Tantras startled, and sent two queries simultaneously. :What's his last name? Why?:
:Don't think he uses one. I know you weren't sure of him,: Vanyel addressed the latter point awkwardly.
:And neither are you?:
:I don't know,: he replied, not wholly comfortable with his own reasoning. :But I want to find out.: He dropped the contact with the question still hanging over him. Beside him, Stefen shivered.
"Did you see that?" he murmured, entirely rhetorically. "It looked at me. Those eyes... And he was so..." Stefen's hush, the rose on his cheeks, were more than enough to convey what was so about Tantras. I don't disagree, but - Valdir looked away, feeling his ears burn. "That was a Herald? On a Companion?" He turned to Valdir, eyes wide in consternation. Valdir bit his lip and nodded in confirmation. "And he's with the watch captain."
That last was exclaimed in bitter disappointment. Betrayal.
"But he's so..." Stefen shook his head. "Might have preferred 'em not real, ain't that as always is," and he stared wistfully at the retreating figures. "Why would a gods damned Herald come here?"
Stefen tapped his foot; far down the street, Valdir could still hear Delian's hoofbeats.
"Why," and Stefen looked straight at Valdir, his eyes like shards of broken glass.
-->Part 6
driveby rec: I am still binge-reading identity porn in DCU - this is so delicious, Regency AU with a really adorable arranged marriage subplot?!?! Lapping this up.
The tavern was a spindle-thin oddity, a woodframe and plaster afterthought jammed between two looming stone buildings, both of which seemed, to his blurred, uncertain eyes, to be listing against its creaking beams. The bar was packed though it wasn't yet noon - with the river so wild, do the docksmen and sailors and smugglers have anything better to do than get blind drunk before noon? Stefen cajoled for them a tiny table at the back. And a flagon of cider that smelt like it could take his tongue off. And only one empty glass; the cup the serving-boy placed in front of Stefen was full. Of water. "He knows I don't drink most-times," Stef explained. "But I tip as if I did, so he don't care."
He dared a swallow, and another, and then sank his head onto his own folded arms.
He felt Stefen's eyes resting on him as he stared at the cracked wall - ghosting over his bare neck as his hair tumbled onto the table. Clouded green irises, eyelids at half mast in respect.
He thinks I only just found out he was right. That Harren's dead. That Harri told me he was leaving Ceejay and now he's dead.
:Van?: He screwed his eyes shut as he acknowledged Tantras. The acrid liquor was dissolving the knot of guilt in his stomach, letting the feeling dissipate all the way through him; his ears felt like they were filling with hot water. :I have the ring. It's definitely Harri's - I'd know that knotwork anywhere.: Harri had sent dozens of letters as he travelled - most sealed with a simple thumbprint, harmless greetings, waxen red herrings. The poorly engraved knotwork wedding band had only been pressed to the seal when he had something important to write between the lines. :I've got that fence down at the gatehouse lockup - I already put him under Truth Spell and talked to him a while.:
:How did he get hold of Harri's seal ring?: he asked, acid anger burning the thought through the void.
:Beachcombing north of the city, he said. Which was a lie,: Tran added needlessly. :I got the name of his sourcer out of him. Pity that most of the watchmen would rather bother the market traders than take on the gang,: he groused. At this point, Van wasn't surprised to hear that. :Van... Could you walk me through it again? What you felt when he...:
He raised his head far enough to take another swig of the vicious drink, and laid his forehead against the cool wood of the table. :I'll try. I guess I should start three days ago, when Harren told me he was leaving Ceejay -:
:You never told me why he headed for home so much earlier than he planned to.:
:It was my idea.: Tantras fumbled the contact in surprise, and Vanyel's head lurched, waves tossing inside his skull, spray dancing over jagged thoughts. Tantras's mind found him again soon enough. :Harri had been headed north following traces of magic - the Cejans haven't much of it, so we assumed they were playing hosts to a foreign mage - or more than one. When he reached Lydra, he sensed blood power, and...: He hesitated. His mind spun around in an eddy - Leren, why had he thought of Leren lately? :Dark wings,: he finished.
:I take it that's bad, then?: Tran asked blandly.
The shadows were folding in around him; to his closed-eyed vision, Stefen was but a bright red candle in the vastness of the dark - a fierce and tiny light, without shelter. :I hoped if Harri could get back into Valdemar - inside our new defences - he'd be safe.: Please forgive me. :When it happened, I was asleep -:
:I know. What did it... Well, how does that...work?:
Tantras was uneasy with Vanyel's new insights into the his comrades' monents of death. He wasn't the only one, either. :I don't yet know,: he admitted. :Harri's only the second Herald to die since we changed the Web.: He stared deep into the darkness, seeing years of this ahead of him - death after death pelting his senses, each one leaving an indelible bruise. What was it I did to bring this upon myself? Was it my arrogance, changing what we've always had? Was it a reminder that I'm responsible for all these lives and ought to bear their ends?
:And Osana's passing was a little less sudden -:
:Quite.: He cut off Tran's musing. Herald Osana had been ninety-one, and had been bedridden for some time. The flashes of pain and light that had overcome him at her passing were still within him in a way he could never have explained to Tantras - a sharp ghost-image seared into his nerves. He knew Harren's agony would never, ever leave him. :I felt - cold, and then burning - deep into the skin.: Not a good description. He had no good description, and Tran should take that as a mercy. You don't want me to share this.
The brief touch at his shoulder startled him. "I know there's not much I could say, but, you want a song?"
"What?" he murmured, not understanding.
"I sing pain away," Stefen explained, and even in his soft intonations there were spirits of peace and slumber. Argonel diluting the rage in his veins. Soft red petals fading on a poppyhead. "I know I can't change nothing, but if you don't feel right and you want a moment's rest..."
Vanyel raised his head, one eye open. "What," he breathed. That's what you do? And you know I'm hurting, even if it's just in my mind?
"I sing pain away," Stef repeated, his cheeks flushing. "I just always done it, all my life. Used to save my keeper from wasting her drinking money on hempleaf."
Bitter smoke in his ears. "Your keeper?"
Stefen shook his head. "Ain't no other word for her. Her name was Berte - I don't know how she came by me. I told you I used to sing in Pinter Square?" Valdir nodded. "She kept an eye on me, I made some coin singing on the street, she spent it on liquor and dreamerie... That's how things were until she died."
"I'm sorry," he murmured automatically.
"Spare me. You gone lost a friend who mattered - someone who had a life. Berte and her crowd - those people, the drugs own them. They ain't friends - they can't have friends. Everything's about the drugs. I weren't nothing to them but a way to get money to get high, and then a way to not get kicked in the teeth by the comedown. I can always tell when someone needs their pain gone," he added.
Valdir gazed into Stefen's cup of murky water. It occurred to him that no one at the Lighthouse Market had attempted to sell them anything; not drugs, distilled spirits or any shape of warm flesh. "You don't drink -"
"I got my other vices," Stef assured him darkly. "And I got some sense about when a man could do with a drink, but it ain't a steady way to live. High water, low water," he shrugged. "Fuck it all, what I'm about is keeping the level," and he waved a hand at the level of Valdir's eyes, palm down. "Berte didn't have nothing left in her life but those highs and lows. I heard tell she had kids of her own once - sold them to the Cejans when they got old enough to bring her more trouble than coin." Valdir gasped low, and Stefen raised a hand to his own mouth. "'Nough about my life. You got your own troubles," he said, as if he'd said more than he'd meant to. "So you want a damned song?"
"No," Valdir replied, reeling from his words. Gods, but I do. But I can't. I am not letting another human being deal with how I feel right now. He stared at Stefen's thin hands, curled around his cup. Steady, tenacious, kind hands. I can't. The thought of taking the offered respite overwhelmed him, and he shook, tipsy and adrift in remembered sensation - touch, warmth, pain. The only thing that seemed worse than feeling was the end of all feeling. And his lips felt warm again, as if a cinder of the kiss they should never have shared; he imagined Stefen's song breathing gently on that heat.
I can't.
"Right." Stef looked aside, his mouth curling with frustration. "Don't think I got no respect. I'd be saying the stuff you're meant to say when someone's dead - about being in the Havens or the good life they lived or whatever. I can mouth that good as anyone but you don't want to hear it, do you?"
Astute. He breathed fast between his smouldering lips, wondering at how well Stefen could understand him. "No, I don't." Words fanning embers. Sharp green eyes pricking at his pretences. How do I keep hiding from you when you live by singing and knowing people and turning every stone - ?
"Wish I'd had enough coin on me to pay Tayard for the ring," Stef sighed. "I could pull a few strings, scrape up enough tonight then go down on the morrow to see if -" Valdir shook his head silently, clutching his glass convulsively and then pushing it aside. Please no. Don't do that for me. Because Tantras already had both ring and fence in hand, and of all the things to worry about now he didn't want Stefen to know that - and he rested his head in his arms again, shaking from the weird, hysteric banality of sudden death. Shaking the way he should have been a day ago. I hadn't the time to feel anything. I never do. And every time - someone dies and there's just more to do, more pieces for me to pick up, and I can't stop like this. I can't allow myself the luxury.
Something nudged his elbow. Stefen proffering the cup again. Valdir seized it, and raised his head to drink, met Stefen's eyes in that brief way of strangers in passing. "Your friend was married? Babes back home?"
"Widowed," explained Valdir. A lie, but it was Harri's accustomed lie; an excuse to wear a ring and to seek company while shunning attachment. Why was he compelled to keep Harri's secrets? You're making me speak of him, share him; you don't know how I'm always alone when someone dies.
Maybe that was why it was such a relief to be someone - anyone - but himself.
"Come from out west, like you?" Stef asked gently.
"Everything's west of here." He stared blankly at the wall.
"Is not," corrected Stefen. "World don't stop at the edge of the river - worse luck." He set an elbow on the table. Valdir knew that Stef had one last question - the one he hadn't wanted to ask. "So what you do now you know he ain't going to be meeting you here? You going back where'ere you came?"
And there was another reason Valdir never got close to people. It got harder and harder to keep up with his own story, to invent reasons to keep investigating. "I...I need to know what happened to him," he said hesitantly and Stefen laughed in his face.
"Trust me, that's the last thing you need to know." He shook his head. "I get it, I seen it - someone dies of a sudden, it's not over for you until you know why. You'll go mad chasing a truth that ain't there - doesn't matter who you ask, how much you pay to priests or fortune tellers or the river herself. You won't find no reason for it, not on the river or your soul. You won't get naught good come of seeking truth. He's still dead, and you're a small leaf floating down the big river."
The frustration and black anger in him lanced through the warm flame of Stefen's eyes. You're right. If I was doing this for myself - if I was who you think I am - I'd be a hopeless mad fool to keep trying. So for Valdemar's sake, please believe that I'm a hopeless mad fool. "You told me the traders got their goods from the river traps -"
"Sometimes, and I'm telling you Tayard never want to know where his goods come from. He's a fence," Stefen explained patiently. "Less he knows, happier he is, happier his sources are. You won't get nothing on them."
And Tantras was probing that cosy arrangement even as they spoke. "I see," he muttered. "No one wants to know what happens on the river?" The men crushed at the bar had started singing - some oar-shanty he'd never heard before. "No one pays an eye to the water? Not the fences or the watchmen or the pirates -"
"Shh, there's a dirty word," Stefen warned him. "It's over. Drink up, and let it lie." But his eyes flickered with doubt.
Valdir seized on it. "I can't." Think me mad, if you will - but look at me and know that I need to find out what became of Harri. "Just tell me one thing - if we'd found nothing at the bazaar, would that have been the end of it for you? Would you have told me to stop looking for him?"
"You're mad." Stefen hung his head. "I had one more notion," he said grudgingly. "If anyone's watching, it would be the Morn."
He clutched that fine straw with both hands. "Then tell me where to find them. I'll not trouble you further, just direct me and -"
"Oh no. I wouldn't do that to no one I hated, never mind you. Silona of Morn - he's madder than you are and he ain't even the dangerous one. That would be Loa - his daughter. They'd split you for breakfast, but I'm in well enough with them that Silona might not do nothing crazy if I pay him a call. Loa knows me, is the good part. The bad part," he added under his breath, "is that Loa knows me."
Stefen made him eat. Something for something, he explained; if Valdir ate and sobered up a little, Stefen would tell him about the Morn. He had little choice but to go along with the nakedly manipulative coddling. "Anyone asks me," Stef hissed, as Valdir reluctantly spooned up the thick shellfish soup, "I'm in good with the Morn. Honest dealers, their word's as good as mine, trust Stefen on this one. Reality is a bit more complicated."
"Silona sounds like an Ifteli name," he observed, puzzled.
"You know a lot," Stefen's eyes narrowed. "Yeah, he's from Iftel. Exiled." Valdir heard the distant clatter of his own spoon hitting the floor. "You know a lot if you know what that means," Stef added suspiciously.
"I've heard stories," he replied stiffly as he retrieved the spoon, wiping it on a corner of tablecloth that wasn't much cleaner than the ground, if at all. "They do say Iftel is blessed by the gods - so what you'd have to do to be exiled -"
Stefen nodded. "No one knows for sure what Silona did - except maybe Loa. He's made sure there's all kinds of stories though - heresies, consorting with demon princes, that sort of thing. What we do know is, he's not just exiled - Iftel cursed him, too. They set him out in the Northern Ocean and told him that should he even set foot in any of Iftel's neighbours, he'll die. That god wanted him far gone."
Valdir bilnked. "But Valdemar... Oh."
Stefen nodded. "Silona lives on the Culway. He gets around a bit - moors at Lydra sometimes, or upriver in Hardorn when he gets a mind to wander. Loa conducts all his business. She ain't cursed."
"Why are you afraid of them?" Valdir asked.
Stefen looked at him sidelong. "Except for the demon princes, you mean? That not enough to bother you?" Valdir stared back, his face vacant, his scarred back flexing under his ragged clothes. "Silona's capricious, is why. You never know what you might pay when you deal with the Morn. I think sometimes, he gains more from truce than anyone, but I still figure he's most like to break it. He likes breaking things. Best hope is, he decides not to break something that's mine."
Here was his chance to enquire. "I've heard tell of the song truce -" Stefen smiled tightly, not replying. "I thought you would know of it."
"You could say that," he replied, droll as the devil himself. "What you heard about it?"
Valdir thought back to how his cellmates had invoked the truce, included him under it. "It's a rule against fighting, and it requires helping each other?"
Stefen snorted. "Keep your voice down," and he gestured to the crowd around them. "Toughs wouldn't be caught dead helping each other. But before song truce, Cul Aber used to be more like three different cities - you could get by the Morn if you played their games, but the Scale or the Rockharbour..." He shook his head. "Walls around everything, and half the people inside the damn walls never even asked to be there. People got killed just for being on the wrong street."
He had seen such occurrences on other porous borders.
"Song truce is just, you don't hurt no one who ain't hurting you, and you don't lay a fellow out for asking questions. Not much to it, but you get that down, you got a chance to talk about more. You cooperate, even with them you'd rather put your eyes out than help. You can go free as you like, so long as you don't tread on no toes, and you couldn't always say that in Cul Aber. You still got to watch where you take and where you sell and where you leave marks, but not where you go or who you talk to," Stefen explained. "And even Silona can sit on the river and get something off of that, and he knows it."
"I can imagine," Valdir breathed. All too easily. "How did it happen?" We train Bards for years to negotiate and soothe away trouble. You tamed a city alone?
"S'another story." Stefen drew the words out slowly. "And it is and it isn't about Morn, so I've a mind to save it." He rapped his fingers on the table, music in his least gesture. "You set?"
"Aye." He'd managed most of the soup, and hadn't much stomach for the rest. "How lucky I was that you found me," he added, quite honestly. "I can't imagine how I would have found my way without you -"
"And you'd squander that luck on courting the Morn?" Stefen shook his head. "Seems like, you know things but don't know when to stop."
"That's been said of me," he conceded. (Of who?)
Stefen stared at him, shaking his head, and he felt Valdir - the hapless, inoffensive Valdir he'd played on many a stage in the past - dance out of his reach. "You'd think, you survive a war, you had enough of lost causes."
"You don't know when something's lost," and he looked down at his hands. "You don't know when it's still worth hanging on. These aren't the times people sing about."
Stefen was quiet for a few seconds. "That's the truth - I don't know a song for that, and I thought I knew a song for everything. I think there should be a song for everything - made a lot of my own that way."
"I don't make songs." Was Valdir sorrowed by that? Had he ever expected more of himself? No one had ever asked him.
"You make trouble," Stefen reminded him, and he dropped a silver on the table as he rose. Valdir followed him as he shouldered his way to the door. "Just hope Loa like the look of you," he muttered as they stepped outside. "It's all that -"
Stefen gasped, and flattened himself against the side of the tiny porch, Valdir moving with him without thought.
Two men passed down the street, mounted. One was an unknown to him, in a crisp grey uniform and plumed hat. The other was less of a mystery. Stefen breathed hard at his shoulder, gazing up at Tantras's majestic figure, his frowning, sculpted face. Delian looked at them sideways, and winked at him.
:Tran,: Vanyel called, willing his friend not to look down at them. He shuffled close against Stefen, so close he could feel the young man shiver. :Fancy seeing you here.:
:And you,: Tantras murmured, a little amused. :That's your street-bard? Delian had been wanting a good look at him.:
His reply wasn't entirely verbal - :Yes,: it included, and :more besides.: Alongside him, Stefen appeared to be trying to retreat into the grey stone. :I found out a little more about the Song Truce,: he added.
As he explained, he could almost see the hairs standing up on Tran's retreating neck. :So you think this truce is all just one gang fixer, and you found him?:
:No, he found me,: he replied in wonder.
:Bards,: and Tantras turned his head slightly, revealing a crooked, incredulous smile. :Can't stand them -:
:- can't live without them,: Vanyel finished, shaking his head, feeling a small smile on his lips. Stefen looked up at him strangely, and he inwardly kicked himself for the lack of focus. :Though if someone he knows can tell us what happened to Harri -:
Tantras indicated grudging agreement. :At this point, I can't say I mind what form of lawless lowlife you turn up as witnesses, so long as you find someone who knows enough that you can use that damned spell.:
The thought set Vanyel's curiosity tugging at his faith, unravelling it from one corner. :On that note... I wonder if you could ask a favour of the city watchmen for me.: Tantras queried him wordlessly, with something that in person may have become a raised eyebrow. :Ask if they have an arrest record for Stefen.:
Tantras startled, and sent two queries simultaneously. :What's his last name? Why?:
:Don't think he uses one. I know you weren't sure of him,: Vanyel addressed the latter point awkwardly.
:And neither are you?:
:I don't know,: he replied, not wholly comfortable with his own reasoning. :But I want to find out.: He dropped the contact with the question still hanging over him. Beside him, Stefen shivered.
"Did you see that?" he murmured, entirely rhetorically. "It looked at me. Those eyes... And he was so..." Stefen's hush, the rose on his cheeks, were more than enough to convey what was so about Tantras. I don't disagree, but - Valdir looked away, feeling his ears burn. "That was a Herald? On a Companion?" He turned to Valdir, eyes wide in consternation. Valdir bit his lip and nodded in confirmation. "And he's with the watch captain."
That last was exclaimed in bitter disappointment. Betrayal.
"But he's so..." Stefen shook his head. "Might have preferred 'em not real, ain't that as always is," and he stared wistfully at the retreating figures. "Why would a gods damned Herald come here?"
Stefen tapped his foot; far down the street, Valdir could still hear Delian's hoofbeats.
"Why," and Stefen looked straight at Valdir, his eyes like shards of broken glass.
-->Part 6
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Date: 2014-10-13 01:18 am (UTC)Love the song truce, love Van's all-too-real pain; you have the characterization down incredibly well.
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Date: 2014-10-13 03:32 am (UTC)Also, thanks! - was hoping this scene would kick-start the chemistry again.
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Date: 2014-10-15 01:29 pm (UTC)Enjoy London!! I wish I were going there!
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Date: 2014-10-16 12:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-10-13 08:51 am (UTC)As long as you're passing out links (I saw that fic earlier but gave it a pass as there is like A LOT of bad regency fic in the world, but now I will check it out) this fic is def worth a read, the only thing I can think to say about it to convey just how very much I adore it is, it's like the Pactverse but with interspecies lesbians.
WHAT SLEEP CYCLE
Date: 2014-10-14 12:13 pm (UTC)Thanks for the rec - that was some damn fine prose. I, uh, see the connection. ;_;
Re: WHAT SLEEP CYCLE
Date: 2014-10-15 02:08 am (UTC)It feels like you have a good balance though, of awkward Van self-loathing and embarassment and plot. Too much of a good thing (except porn), etc.
Fffff in my head Vastra and Jenny are the female versions of Vanyel and Stefen, great characters but their canon totally sucks. I am detecting a pattern here.
Re: WHAT SLEEP CYCLE
Date: 2014-10-16 12:50 am (UTC)'good balance of self-loathing and embarassment and plot' this is like the nicest thing anyone has ever said about something i wrote and you know it
aahahah I honestly feel more inclined to dive into something when it sucks in just the right way. Metal Gear, I was a huge fan of for nearly a decade before I went looking for the fandom - I got fannish over it because canon took a massive suck nosedive and I needed someone, anyone, to fix that shit for me or at least make it entertainingly worse.
Does canonness+suck help? Because with Van/Stef, you just go 'what how is this canon they have nothing in common and are terrible for each other and......oh.' The last pairing to seriously give me a Van/Stef vibe was Raines/Rygdea in FFXIII - well, Raines p much is a dystopic AU Van and Rygdea is the very, very, nothing in common with him guy who's attached to him at the hip and who, when it really hit the fan, Raines asked to shoot him. I had to back away from that pairing for the good of my health, no lie.
Re: WHAT SLEEP CYCLE
Date: 2014-10-16 05:10 am (UTC)Ahahaha, that is exactly what got me into the one, tiny segment of DW fandom that is the Vastra/Jenny page on AO3. In this case it is both the fact that they are so misfit, and there is so very little we have to go on and it mostly sucks. You know how I feel about rape as plot device, and most especially when lesbians are involved, so reading that supposedly they met when Vastra saved Jenny from being raped by a CHINESE GANG--that is seriously the best scenario they could come up with? And before that Vastra apparently chose to be employed as a freak show attraction??? How exactly was that supposed to endear her to humans instead of viewing them as (purely) a food source??? So we go from a.) Implying that they might be a couple to b.) They are married. In two episodes. And Moffat consistently ignores all the emotional and dramatic potential that clearly MUST exist in a character like Vastra (who for all intents and purposes is the last of her kind, forced to coexist with a species she considers vastly inferior, eventually coming to a grudging acceptance of her situation, to finding a fulfilling career as a private investigator and falling in love with a member of said vastly inferior species) in favor of using them as comic relief.
AND ANOTHER THING: I resent the fuck out of the fact that their one and only onscreen "kiss" was a fucked up kind of mouth-to-mouth. If they are married as Moffat takes such glee in reminding us, (look at how openminded and progressive he is!) THEN WHY CAN'T THEY HAVE A REAL GODDAMN KISS LIKE MARRIED PEOPLE WHO ARE IN LOVE.
Re: WHAT SLEEP CYCLE
Date: 2014-10-16 12:18 pm (UTC)Re: WHAT SLEEP CYCLE
Date: 2014-10-17 12:33 am (UTC)Thankfully, Tumblr exists to give me gifs so I can look at the pretty ladies without having to deal with the bullshit, and live in my headcanon :)
no subject
Date: 2014-12-02 03:58 am (UTC)So... is there any more???
Thank you!
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Date: 2014-12-02 01:22 pm (UTC)And yes, yes, there is. I got stuck on the next part and got working on the next two chapters kind of backwards. If I'm not hopelessly stuck on the scene I'm hacking at rn, I should drop about 11,000 words later this week several of which are 'cock'.
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Date: 2014-12-04 04:53 am (UTC)Also, I admit I am posting this reply partially because I did not use the obvious icon on the previous comment, and I can't just not use it in this conversation.
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Date: 2014-12-05 12:24 am (UTC)Aw, I imprinted on the LHM when I was 16 and therefore furious; it was both liberatory and also frustrating. I lived in a really rural area where there was a wall of silence about anything queer, and sharing the LHM with people was therefore a dangerous and wonderful act in a way that wouldn't make sense any more. A friend who Got It once described the LHM as a 'time bomb'. In fandom I've wavered between mindless but necessary idfic/fluffporn, and attempts to pick fights with canon.
In case you haven't found it already - this is the best Vanyel AU, hands down. The sticked recs post links some other good stuff too.