Scavenger, 6-8 (end)
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last_herald_mage-it always takes me forever to get stuff finished, agh, but here are the final three chapters of Scavenger. There's about 13k of text in this post (scav is ~35k total). There's a lot I want to tweak before I can put a final draft on AO3, but in the meantime, here's the rest of what I got. *sits on hands*
-aborted headcanons: it struck me that while we get good descriptions in canon of Starwind & Brightstar's bondbirds, we don't for Moondance's, and i toyed with the thought that he doesn't have one and every time someone brings this up he's like 'bite my immigrant ass' but unfortunately Savil mentions 'their bondbirds' at one point so this is not rly true. Oh well.
-ch 6, esp, has sexual abuse related content - nothing graphic. (Also re. the end of chapter 6: you could take it however you want but my personal stance is that Taver is telling the truth.)
-I think it goes without saying that Van's coping strategies are less than ideal in any way? *sits on hands*
chs 1-4
ch 5
6
It was a warm morning in Horn, with but a light breeze carrying smoke over the courtyard. The keep's fires had been lit all night, as Vanyel had noticed now and then through fitful sleep. He felt the cold dread he'd bottled up deep inside seep into his blood, his fingers. His hands shook as he traced the stone around the temple doorway, trying to feel his way into its heart. I didn't want to do this now. It's too soon, too far. I might not make it. He felt like a cornered fox, with one bolthole left, knowing he'd be trapped for good if he ran. If I go now, we can get there while Stef still has something left. And if Roal thinks the only other option left is just cutting off his Gift and hoping that doesn't kill him, I have to try. I can't lose him.
I don't have a choice. I never, ever had a choice.
But he couldn't stop shaking.
I shouldn't be doing this. It had always given him a little vindication that even mages who tolerated Gates much better than him often shared his horror of them. They might be convenient or, in some tight spots, a necessity, but to move through one was to pass the incomprehensible - it was a violation of Velgarth's natural distance and boundaries. Likely there were mages who'd used them carelessly, but not living ones. I don't trust my magic any more. And I've never been able to trust Gates. The only prospect that could have frightened him more was to do nothing.
Some things he could make sure of. The door of Horn's temple was a solid enough terminus, and magically speaking he knew the land beneath it well, though the building itself gave him an oddly inauspicious feeling; he'd been inside only once before, years ago, Percevar tempting him there one night while the priests slept, insisting that Van should come with him by candlelight to see the great idol of Kernos and the gold-threaded altar cloth. Vanyel prayed rarely and only beneath the stars, but that mattered little: Percey's intent had been thoroughly blasphemous. Exasperated with his posturing, Van had given up to debauchery up to a point - not on the altar - but he was a little wary of stepping within the sanctuary again.
It didn't matter. He had nowhere else to turn.
The past felt like so many crumbs, like nothing.
He opened the door; inside the temple, shafts of coloured light fell across the grey marble floors, over the shining altar, between Kernos's strong open arms, and Vanyel's heart instinctively reached for the wrong god, at the wrong time. Star-Eyed. Please guard me on my way to your land. Am I one of your children?
Am I?
The uncertainty tugged him off balance, teetering at the edge of forsakenness and loss, and he turned away from the temple window before the darkness could sink deeper into his thoughts.
Taver came up close behind him. :Chosen, are you sure of this?: Van realised how hard he was breathing, and he leaned against Taver's shoulder to keep himself from trembling.
:No,: he admitted. :It's very, very far.: Van didn't know how far one could safely Gate - most likely no mage knew for sure, but if one were to pick a number of miles, that number would likely be much smaller than the distance from Horn to K'Treva Vale. There was only one reason Van would dare this; he had long suspected, with much discomfort, that the distance didn't matter at all. The void was all the same, the pain was all the same, so why would it matter how far? And given Stef's state, he couldn't hesitate. But he wouldn't stake Taver's life on his wild fancies. :It would better for you to stay here - you've every reason to, and I don't know how long I might be gone from Valdemar.:
:You aren't going without me,: Taver informed him.
It hurt to even frame his fear into words, even to Taver, who surely knew - he could hardly have avoided knowing. :I'm not going solely for Stef. There's something wrong with my magic. There has been for months. I feel like I can barely hold it together any more. I need to ask Starwind to - to help me. If I can even Gate that distance once, I can't promise I'll be able to Gate back again after.: The truth, cut one careful step at a time. He couldn't share what lay beyond that limit.
:Van, where you go, I go. And where I go, Valdemar is.:
Taver sounded so certain, foundation-stone love set in his words. Van rested his mind against that feeling for a long moment, trying to figure out what he needed to do. :It's not just the distance that's going to be hard. I hate Gating - I only do it when I have to. I haven't done it at all since I bonded with Stef.: He swallowed hard.
:I understand,: and Taver hesitated. :Van, I was there that night too,: he reminded him.
Van stepped away. It was a cruel irony, and he wished Taver hadn't mentioned it. Taver and Lancir had stepped through that same Gate that had broken all his Gifts open, more than twenty years ago. :I know. Stef doesn't have any Mage-potential - but I'm going to block him off completely. If I risked an open energy line between us...: He couldn't even finish the thought. I am not going to risk anything.
He watched energy trickle through his connection to Stefen, and the thought of blocking that link filled him with panic. There'll be someone else to help him, Van told himself firmly. Stef was leaning against the temple's gatepost. He'd made it down the stairs and across the courtyard unaided, without fainting again - but he was so fatigued he could have barely taken another step. I am risking everything. :Could you - watch him, warn me if something's wrong?:
:Of course.:
Van felt Taver's sympathy and his fierce compassion, a ring of light that circled Stef just as much as it did Vanyel himself. He was surprised, and then ashamed - he ought to know by now that Taver cared for him so much as a person that his loved ones, his family, the one who was more than family, had fallen under his care as well. I can barely live up to the office of Monarchs' Own, and I forget our bond means more to him than that - as if he could treat me as just an office-holder any more than I could treat him as a horse.
:Thank you. I love you.: He'd rarely said it so plainly, and Taver Sent him a burst of affection, and snuffled against his hair. :I wish I didn't have to do this,: he admitted. Sometimes he'd found it hard to remind Taver of his weaknesses, but not now. :Gate-energy hurts me. Afterwards I'm going to be...not much good to anyone. I'll be tired. I won't really be myself. Maybe not for days. I'm sorry,: and he tried to impress the apology as deep as he could because he knew when the time came that he most needed to make it, he wouldn't have the strength. If they made it there at all.
:I'll keep you safe,: promised Taver. :But I can't help you find the way.:
:I know.: It could only be Van's own thoughts, his own personal energy that bridged the void. He had as much power in his reserves as he ever would; he'd replenished them from the node as he slept, even while letting a line flow through him to Stef. :I'll find the way. But if the pain tears my mind apart, I'll need you to get Stef through if you can.: Most likely, if the Gate proved beyond his strength, Vanyel would die too fast to know about it.
He walked back to Stef, and tugged him to his feet. "We're almost ready now." He pressed Taver's reins into Stef's hand. "He'll lead you once it's time. Just follow him. Don't worry about me." Barely awake and barely lucid, worry flashed through Stef's eyes. Van already felt himself withdrawing from all they shared, shielding Stef out for all he was worth, and it left him feeling cold and strange inside.
He hadn't done this in four years. He hardly felt like the same person who'd gone to ask Starwind and Moondance's advice on changing the Heraldic web, and he certainly didn't live in the same world. It was hard to imagine seeing them again, much less explaining anything. The last time I Gated was before I knew Stef. Before Savil died. Before Jisa was married. Before she and Treven were crowned.
But he had not forgotten how to make the way. He couldn't; every step was etched in pain in the deepest foundations of his magic. He brushed his hand to one side of the door, then the other, knowing this place, holding it steady in his mind, raising the power, bracing himself against the pain.
It was no good. It cut straight through his mind, stealing all his powers of thought and every point of reference. He desperately held out that throught of the end of his journey - K'Treva Vale, dark stone and green branches and his friends, his wing-kindred - his power reaching for them, straining, crossing the void like a needle in the dark. It was so far, so long ago, and it hurt so much - but it was there, as if juggled at the tip of his fingers, almost to drop and to shatter forever. The power moved, stabbing through his brain. He grasped it, pulling with all his might, then clinging tight as it moved him - clinging to Horn and damned stupid Percey and the birch smoke in mountain air. Kernos' arms spread like trees against the starlight. It was all together. It was close to destroying him.
"Go," he begged, blinded and disoriented by that aberrant touch of matter against matter. "Quickly." He couldn't speak any more. :Just get through, and I can take it down.:
:Van?: He felt Taver's nose on his neck. He hadn't even heard his steps. There was nothing but the pounding ringing lights in his head. :Are you sure this is right?:
He brushed off Taver's concern with the last bit of ruthlessness he had left. :I'm sure, now go.: He had no other choice, and he stepped through the Gate after them, into the soul-scraping pain that he hadn't faced since before -
- before Leareth had torn his life apart.
It was still the same void. The same pain. All pain was the same pain.
All pain was the same pain.
He could join two far-off points together in a Gate because in the void, all places were the same. There was no distance, nor time, no north nor south - the void touched everywhere equally. The oldest wounds were as newly-cut. The oldest nightmares still dreamed and whispered.
Half a step, and Horn seemed impossibly far from his mind. Van buckled from the pain of holding on to the temple door - just for one more step - because if he faltered, if he let that sense of Horn and all it had ever meant to him collapse, or if he forgot all he knew of K'Treva Vale, the Gate would fail and he'd be trapped in the void where nothing marked a path to anywhere.
He reached forward numbly, only emptiness ahead of him. Stef had gone through - and Taver - and soon he'd see Moondance, Starwind, Brightstar, all his Tayledras kindred - soon - but the void had no future. He reached toward his memory of the lush and loving Vale and it shrank from the pain in his touch.
I forgot how hard it is to hold on - it's been so long - not since - and in the dark and the pain he remembered nothing else that had passed in his life - since before Leareth.
The void had no past.
Years nor leagues brought any distance from the pain. There was no before Leareth.
'Surrender.'
Vanyel was fifteen again, ice creeping up his spine. Darkness staring into him.
'Vanyel. You surrendered in my arms come the end. Why bother with this nonsense? Surrender now, and you will never know loss. You will never have aught to lose. You will never have to hurt, Vanyel.'
Van felt every word like a blow to the head, battering him further from the thought of his destination. There was no after Leareth.
'Surrender here, and I will never have to hurt you.'
He felt every loss, every wound tearing him apart - saw anew a body torn open by mechanical claws - a body mutilated and bleeding in the snow - a mind broken and falling from the tower, hitting the earth - 'Spare yourself all this pain. You are quite alone here. Always alone..'
Ice down his back and splitting him open from the inside, on his knees, bound in agony twixt mountain and vale, violating his senses again and again. Van lashed out with the last of his power, and his focus faltered - he was losing where he had come from. Always and only the void. There was no after Leareth.
'You could have surrendered at any time, and had this so much sooner.' The word pressed itself against his lips, forcing Vanyel to taste it, to breathe it in where he was. To remember what he had done in the dark in Leareth's bed. Ice sliding all the way into him, whispering his complicity. 'You allowed me to, you allowed me you allowed me' and the weak flailing of his empty power did nothing. He was just another conduit for darkness, kept alive only by a rage that was near exhausted. He felt the last of it go, lost to the void. There was only pain left. He ached to say farewell, but knew not to whom. He was always alone.
A white shadow rose up in his vision and he heard his shirt tear between snapped teeth. :Vanyel. Stop dreaming. He's dead and gone. You have to move.: Taver dragged him half a step and daylight opened over him.
He felt like his very essence had been scraped away from him. The Gate lingered in his core, numbing and transfixing him with pain. Taver stared into his eyes. :Van. You had a flashback - a nightmare - inside the Gate. Are you with me now?:
He wasn't, really. Kneeling on stone and feeling like nothing meant anything. The warm and the living had gone from him, leaving only his wrongness, his corrupted wounds.
:Van, where are we?:
Vanyel stared around, from tree to rock to archway, a man resting, the shape of a white horse, and felt like he saw nothing at all. He curled in on himself, closing his eyes against the light. If he curled up tight enough for long enough, perhaps the pain would go away.
7
Vanyel was roused from his fugue by a deep, gutteral howl that was fit to cut the wind in two. Its urgency cut through all his lostness, down to his last instinct - someone needs me. The pain made his mind feel like thick water full of debris; it sloshed and scratched against his skull. He rolled to his feet, gasping as if he might drown in it.
He assessed his whole surroundings in a moment. This wasn't what it should be. He was exactly where he meant to be. He knew this shallow cave, the archway that led out of it - this ring of stones - but beyond that, his eyes were lost in desolate undergrowth.
Stef was atop a rock nearby. He crouched like a rangy wolf, shirt rolled up past thin elbows and straggly hair wind-wrapped around his face. The rock's shape was familiar, and its carvings made it look oddly tame - marked out as human territory.
Nothing else here looked as if it had ever been touched by human hands.
He looked up the sheer-walled canyon. In his memory it was wider, huge enough to hold a whole world of strange magic and music and love. Nature softened its walls - roots opening rock, faces overrun with ferns. The great tree at the canyon's centre was overrun with a flowering knotweed. Just in front of them, he saw vines running into a deep, cracked hollow in the stone. He knelt, and reached his hand down to feel the stone curve. He remembered the water, drawn by magic from the deep warm earth. He remembered four years ago, how Moondance had dropped him in there fully clothed to soothe his Gate-addled senses -
He turned back to the inviolate stone archway. It had no capstone; like the pool, it was carved from bedrock by magic. The vines and grasses that crept over the stones seemed to twist and fracture before they could reach it. Unnatural things happened near stone that touched the void.
Taver paced the shallow cave behind the arch, his feet striking rhythmically on the stone. :We walked up to the tree, then came back. Stef saw the entrance to some other abandoned cave-rooms, and there's more trees, that don't seem... Van, where are we?:
Stef stared down at him, not even asking. The wolf was in his eyes, wild beyond questions, beyond fear. "Sorry for the noise. Kyree distress call. Hyrryl taught me." He shifted, pulling his cloak tight around him. "Thought was worth a try. Being as we haven't found any humans around." The air hung warm and stiflingly humid, and sun cut bright shadows through the foliage above them, yet Stef shivered. "This isn't right, is it? Where's Starwind and Moondance and their people?"
Van hadn't even thought about this possibility while he was building the Gate. "They've moved K'Treva Vale."
"What?"
"They're nomadic - they cleanse the land around them, then - then they move on." Van curled his fist against the thankless stone, furious with himself. "I should have guessed."
Stef made a small, empty noise in his throat, and he raised his eyes toward the daylight. "So - can you find where they've gone?"
"I don't know." There was a tool they'd given him for this - a talisman - and it was securely in a drawer in his room in Haven. He could not possibly have been any angrier with himself.
That sound again, some vacant cousin of laughter. "This wasn't on the list of places I expected to die."
"Stef!" Van felt himself teetering into that empty despair, tumbling past those torn-off dead ends in his beloved's memory - a filthy alleyway, a rickety carriage with a red-cloaked stranger, a snowbank high above the Ice Wall, a song sung between Horn's tight walls. A half-dozen times he'd lost all hope of survival. He had never felt this from Stef. It shocked him cold. He hadn't imagined a Stef who could give up - Stef was his optimist, his scrappy luck-hunter. They had come together because Stef couldn't stop hoping.
I'm not giving up. I've been in worse places. No one's trying to hunt me down and kill me. There's probably someone within a few miles that can help us. I'm not physically injured. I can do something, even while I'm still too drained to risk using my Gifts. With magic, he could have found the nearest Tayledras mage in moments. But even trying to reach past his own eyebrows left him dizzy and nauseous. Futilely, he stretched for where the valley node had been - but it was drained, dispersed all around into little rivulets, different and disorienting. "Stef," he said. "I know the lay of the land - if I can find some sign of them..."
Stef sniffed, and he shivered convulsively, clutching his arms around his knees. "They're gone," he muttered.
"They won't be far." Stef didn't respond, only stared up at the archway with lost eyes. A shaft of sun fell upon his pale, sunken face. Van froze. "How long was I out for? How long have we been here?"
Stef blinked slowly, as if he didn't understand such things any more. :A few candlemarks,: said Taver, and Van ran across the stone, grabbing Stef's cold hands in his. Trying to find him. Shaking for the last drop of water in an empty skin. Van clutched his hands, trying to find anything in himself that could sustain him. :Chosen!:
He Felt Taver's energy run through him, and he directed it into Stef's emptiness. A white cloth stained red by a seeping wound. "Taver - can you - I have to try to find where they've gone - if I can't -"
"Gone, gone, gone, gone, ne'er to be seen again," Stef's macabre lullaby echoed through the lost vale.
Van clapped his hands to his ears. He hadn't the strength to block Stef out any more. Pain cut through his every attempt at thought. :Chosen, go. I won't let him fade away from you. Find them.:
Van looked up into Taver's eyes, saw the fire and the promises there. He wouldn't lie to me, but the best he knew was that Taver would try as hard as he could to keep Stef alive. He'd give whatever he had to. Because he loved what Van loved, needed what he needed.
He grabbed his swordbelt from where it hung on Taver's flank, and he turned and stumbled through the wild undergrowth toward the vast tree, feet catching at each step. He had no idea where he was going. What was he looking for? The tree's great limbs looked hollow, like burst waterskins. People had lived there - his friends - his siblings.
Where would they leave a sign? Would they? Surely there would be something for their occasional passers, the other peoples they traded with, the ranging kyree or dyheli migrants, the Shin'a'in? Their new vale would be well hid, even as they ripped the mask from this old home and let the weeds and vermin in. An insect brushed against his hand. It was swealteringly warm, even in the shadow of the great tree. He traced old paths in his mind, along the earth, from tree limb to bridge to ladder. From Moondance's home below to Snowlight's above - and beyond, he saw a sister-tree fallen at the southern tip of the vale, its great roots open to the sky. The first place he'd slept above earth, with a long-ago lover. The vale seemed so small, its winding ways all worn away.
He tore his eyes away from the sky, and scanned the rough ground below the heart-tree. Thick shade kept it clear but for grasses and lichen-strewn stones. A fox's earth between the roots. A warning screech from some small creature, disturbed by his booted feet. There a wider gap, an overgrown step. He forced his way past a falling curtain of vines and ran down the stairs below the earth, not even daring a magelight. He spiralled down until the daylight was out of reach, feeling ahead with each step, until the back of his knuckles hit a solid wall.
He laid his face against the flat stone. Listening to nothing. Seeing nothing.
He collected himself quickly, because he hadn't time. This had been the heartstone chamber, and it was buried. He would have been worried if it hadn't been. Maybe some of the rest of the maze of chambers and work rooms under the vale were still open. He climbed back up the stairs on his hands, and looked for another path underground, picking his way through the wild land outside the tree's shadow. He felt tall grasses stirring, swatted away the insects that stirred around him. A sapling swayed. How long had the Vale been deserted? This looked like years of overgrowth, a ruin from a bygone people. The mages must have forced some of this before leaving. If he'd had half his senses, would he have felt Moondance's work in the earth? Would he have sensed Brightstar's power?
That anguished howl cut the air again, the whole cut of the Vale its soundbox, and Van glared back down at Stef in frustration. He was trying to think -
:Van - he saw something -:
:Where?: Van spun, a hand to his eyes, no idea what to look for when everything looked so wild and wrong. His eyes blurred.
:It's under the tree -:
Van dropped to a crouch, looking. The heart-tree's roots rippled and shimmered.
Ay'gretshk.
Its skin flushed as it moved, a rainbow-shine rising as it absorbed the earth's latent power. Soul eater.
There were creatures that had been Changed by Pelagir magic, or warped to survive amid it, and then there were soul eaters. They ate and drank it, preying on other predators that had adapted to use magic. Preying on mages. It was eyeless, dirt stuck in its ring of silver teeth as it tasted the earth for the steps of its quarry.
Van had seen one only once before - last time, a Tayledras scout killed it before it could get near him. You couldn't fight an ay'gretshk with magic - it lived on magic. Alive, it was even more repulsive - slithering on its trunk like a snake, the four divided coils of its tails flickering over the earth. If he could find where it started and where it began, it might have been twice his length.
He stood so still he hardly dared to breathe. :Stay in the cave,: he implored Taver. :It eats the Gifted and magical beasts. I don't know if it's scented us. If it comes near Stef...: He couldn't say it.
He couldn't ask it and Taver would never make him. :I won't let it get near him.:
Vanyel drew his sword, slow and almost silent. Would that he had a bow. He didn't know what it might do to him up close. He edged nearer, picking through the knee-deep grass with his sword held at guard. How to read something without eyes? The soul eater moved with deceptive grace, sliding fast over the earth, seeming to taste each piece of deadwood or loose stone with its tails before moving on to the next. Had it sensed him at all? Maybe there's not enough left of me to sense - and when it roiled toward him, he barely struck his sword down in time.
It lashed one translucent coil toward him and Van grazed it as he leapt clear, spraying purple-dark blood over the earth. He fell back into the underbrush, feeling his foot catch - feeling its whole bulk tug at him - and he waved his sword at the earth near his own foot. Nothing. Earth raked his skin, and he felt his foot growing numb, felt its wet mouth bite into his boot -
He heard a thud as it disconnected. And another. The second time, he saw the cast stone strike its yawning mouth, saw blood and needle-teeth flying. It reared up, leaving Van reeling, and a white slash cut the air between them in two.
Relief almost stole his breath away. The white bird came up from its stoop dripping with dark blood, and it was so close that Van could be sure. A Tayledras bondbird. And far beyond, he glimpsed the silhouette of a man lying against a bough of the tree, white hair hanging down like a trail of flowering ivy.
:Brightstar,: he Sent, and in return he felt a wave of shock and joy. :You're not hidden enough,: he snapped. For if he would make a nice snack for the soul-eater, Brightstar would be a feast.
:I'm not trying to hide,: Brightstar replied, and his mindvoice was playful as the beast turned to face him. He rose to a crouch on the tree-limb, and waved his hand. :Again, Tawu!:
The beast screeched under his talons. Vanyel saw blood run from its head, and it writhed away - a shallow scratch, but it sagged back miserably as the owl spread his wings wide. Its bloodied head sank, and its extrusions all coiled together, churning the earth beneath the heart-tree.
:They're not brave,: Brightstar observed. :They seek weak or lonely prey. They don't like trouble.:
In moments its head was gone below the earth. Vanyel breathed, not raising his eyes until every inch of it had burrowed away. He felt Tawu's shadow cross him. Brightstar dropped from branch to branch with his hands until he met the earth.
He'd grown tall, easily Starwind's height, and in the heat of the summer day he wore only plain green breeches, a hawking glove that ran up to a strap over his shoulder, and an elaborate necklace, blue beads bright against the gold skin of his bare chest. The owl swooped down to meet him, flapping his wings wide as he alighted on Brightstar's raised arm. Inherited all my gifts, and knows how to make an entrance. Van hadn't the strength to roll his eyes; his every nerve felt pulled tight and he could barely hold them together.
"Father," Brightstar called in Valdemaran, for so he would always greet Vanyel, source of his foreign, stranger blood; gift-born as the Tayledras said. "Did you come without our talisman? It is a good thing I woke, though Tawu will not forgive it." The bird glared at Vanyel, twitching one eartuft in agitation. Nocturnal, he thought dumbly. No longer a boy tied to lessons or his parents' routines, Brightstar would keep the hours that best suited his bondbird. "I sensed a Gate had opened close to our land, and my father told me not to worry on such things unless trouble came to us - you know how he is, he always wants to let things be! But I had to see for myself, and night seemed too long to wait." He broke off abruptly, narrowing his silver eyes at Taver. "I do not know you."
:He doesn't mean to be rude,: Van told his Companion. The Tayledras language had no form of greeting for strangers. Van would have to explain what had befallen him, why Taver was here, and not just to Brightstar but to his parents and all the rest of the clan. I've naught good to bring them, only tragedies and burdens.
:It's alright,: said Taver, and Van wondered how many times he'd endured such awkward introductions.
Brightstar's mind was already elsewhere. "I heard a kyree call in warning, but Tawu saw no kyree. Perhaps the ay'gretshk was hunting some far-ranger who had fallen into trouble -"
"No, that was Stef - he's a Bard - his mind's burning out." Van felt his voice rising in panic. Tawu circled the archway - and Stef - with a hunter's eye; but his human bondmate was a healer, not a killer. Brightstar clasped Vanyel briefly, brushing his lips against his father's forehead, and he ran down to Stef's side.
Stef had clutched his knees to his chest. He seemed barely awake - he looked from Brightstar's face to Vanyel's without expression, and he didn't react as Brightstar laid a hand over his brow.
"I was trying to take him to Moondance while - while he had time," and even as Van spoke he felt that time slip away, spilt over miles or years. If he'd come to the right place - or if K'Treva hadn't travelled - or if Moondance had come himself...
"He is but an ember," the young Healer said. Van had never seen Brightstar look so severe - and it's my fault, I let this happen to my lover... Brightstar shrugged off his hawking glove and knelt, touching Stef at both temples. Van hung back, and he felt Taver step close behind him. He curled in on himself in the darkness. He could barely, barely feel Stef any more. He didn't hope to escape from loneliness again - stranger to think he could ever have anything to hold, anyone who he wouldn't send unto death or drive away from him.
:You aren't alone.:
He felt Taver's eyes on him, blue stone flecked by centuries of storms and footfalls. It was more of him than Van had ever seen before, and he rested on that strength, bare inches from tears, feeling memories of a dozen lost bonds slipping past the place where Taver held his heart inside. There was no solace there. He would lose Van one day too. Knowing didn't help. It had never, ever helped. Yet somehow his love had never been futile.
Brightstar muttered quietly to himself. He raised his head, his eyes still closed. "He has a strange Gift, and has used it to its last edge. He hid the pain that would have been his ally calling warning." He breathed slowly, and Vanyel felt his mind slip toward entrancement. He could sense Brightstar's energies intersecting Stef's, watching how they flowed, where they went. "Here," he murmured - and overlaying the weak remnant of Stef's life-thread, Brightstar's power bloomed in perfect synchrony.
Brightstar didn't move. Van turned to Taver, not quite willing to believe it. :Is he - do you see - ?:
:Yes.: Taver's flanks heaved with relief.
No Valdemaran healer had taken less than several months to learn what Stef did. Brightstar watched Stef's energy with a Healer-Adept's eye, moved as one with it and all at once he had replaced it with his own. "Rest your mind," he murmured, and Van wasn't sure who he spoke to. He was deep in his trance, energy wrapping around the thin edges of Stef's, enclosing his flickering spirit.
It was as sudden as feeling a shutter close on a cold night. The weak flame turned steady, building with Brightstar's every slow breath. Van curled a shaking hand in Taver's mane. Brightstar wouldn't let Stef go. Stef would live through another sundown and every second felt more precious than Van had ever imagined. He was close to delirium. Nothing else mattered, no troubles, no wounds or nightmares. Only watching Stef breathe without pain, without diminishing.
He could barely feel time passing; he knelt, and clasped Stef's hands gently, as if his fragile bones might shatter at his touch. Van breathed around a lump in his throat. He tried to think clearly, but all his thoughts seemed determined to wander untrammelled. Tawu had fallen asleep on a nearby sapling, his head below his hunched wing.
Brightstar stirred, blinking his eyes against the afternoon light. He was quiet for several more moments, collecting himself. "I have done what I can do here. He will not wither, and time will do him well now." He exhaled hard, shaking his head, and he threw an arm over Vanyel's shoulders, tired and exaltant from the Gift that moved through him. "What a frightening wound. He is your shay'kreth'ashke," he noted. Like Moondance, Brightstar was wont to see the unseeable. "Then I think we have made balance." Brightstar lifted his chin, a flash of pride in his silver eyes.
It took Van a moment to understand what he meant, because it was so absurd. Gods, Tran was right about ridiculous young men. He thinks he's proving himself - returned life for life. Van wanted to say that Brightstar had never owed him anything - but that wasn't what the youngling wanted, was it? He wants me to accept it and know him as a man now.
"Then I am destined to go into your debt, for we need shelter," Van replied. "How far is the Vale?"
Brightstar waved his hand, dismissive of Van's concerns. "You are K'Treva, though you forget it. Home is not far. Even at slow pace, we'll be back by sundown." He looked up at Taver. "You carry both of them?" he asked, in stilted Valdemaran.
Taver nodded, and Van looked to him with gratitude. :He's earned that of me,: Taver told him. :And he's little burden.:
"Then I hope you will keep pace with a man afoot. May I know you? I am Brightstar K'Treva." Brightstar reached his arms out to Taver, determined to mimic the Valdemaran politeness though Taver could hardly return the gesture.
"He is Taver," Van said, gathering Stef in his arms. The Companion knelt where the edge of the overgrown land met the bare stone of the terminus. He looked up to Brighstar with warm blue eyes. "He bonded with me after Yfandes died."
Brightstar brought his hands to a clasp over his heart. "When I saw you, I feared as much," he told Taver. Fandes had adored Brightstar, and been adored by him in return. "I wish I did not greet you as a sorrow - it is not well. I hope to be your friend and your brother in time."
"He hopes so too," Van told him. Brightstar's eyes reminded him of those awful first days back in Haven as a Herald trainee - how Savil's friends had looked at him where they'd wanted to see Tylendel. It hurt. The Tayledras said all death became new life in the cycle of the stars, but it was all just hurt and talking about it was unbearable, and he had to. "There's a lot I should tell you." He settled into the saddle, Stef stirring in his arms. Tawu fluttered, indignant at the sun. "I ought to start with the winter after I last saw your fathers..."
It would be a slow ride til sundown.
Vanyel had never seen Starwind distraught before. There went another of his illusions, and without it Vanyel felt bare as a tree in winter. He was exhausted, and Moondance rebuffed his feeble attempt at consolation, while Starwind said nothing after greeting him, only staring mutely, a storm in his eyes that was harsh enough to tear open all of Vanyel's wounds at once. He knew Starwind's emotions as subtle and calm, even in grief; now he radiated despair, and futility, and it shook all that Van knew of the world.
It was a relief when Starwind turned and left them, sweeping up to the above like a wind-chased moth. Brightstar had carried Stef away in his arms. Van sagged into a low chair. He'd come here with so much to ask of Starwind and he couldn't. He'd been a selfish fool and never considered what grief he'd be bringing them in his wake. I wasn't thinking of how he'd feel at all. I was fighting so hard just to get here, as if I could assume someone else would pick up my burdens as soon as I crossed their threshold.
Moondance clasped Vanyel's arm, and Van avoided his eyes. My grand problems can wait. Stef will live, and that's all I really need tonight. I've shared all the news I most dreaded sharing. I'm not alone. Everything else still ached, and Moondance's fingers moved gently over the back of his hamd.
"Starwind needs you," he said awkwardly. This was their time of grief, but his own stirred and tore at him anew. I didn't see her buried in Haven.
Moondance shrugged. "In time he will, but he needs his solitude more right now. In that regard, we differ." He looked up at Vanyel with tired, lonely eyes.
Moondance needs me. And he felt entirely useless as support.
Starwind shared his inner feelings with few; Savil had been one of them. And he thought of what he'd seen in Starwind's eyes and wondered - at his age, and with the lives Tayledras lived - how many more were left save for his lifebonded.
Moondance sat on the ground beside Vanyel, resting his head on one cupped hand. He didn't look at Vanyel, but Van sensed his regard, like a shoot growing in some dark place and trying to seek daylight. Starwind wants to be alone and Moondance doesn't. And I'm no good for either of them.
"I'm so sorry," he tried. "It's been so long I - I'm sorry to be only telling you now."
"Better that we know," Moondance said sadly. "I could have hoped all my days to see her again, and never to say farewell and make the honours. She gave me my life again," he whispered. Tears rolled silently down his cheeks. Van reached for his hand, and felt everything shake - and hurt again, as if Savil had only just left the room, her voice still fading from the air, and there with Moondance's hand warm against his, he didn't hear her imploring him to check his wards - no - he heard her refusing to make a home in the Vale.
"Mine too," was all he could say.
Moondance lifted his hand, stared at it strangely. "You are not so less drained than Stefen," he exclaimed. "Why do you not touch our vale node?" The bright gathering of energy loomed in his consciousness, suffusing the earth below him with a warmth he couldn't touch. His mind lurched with hunger. No. He couldn't, wasn't going to stray from his path now.
"I can't - I was going to ask Starwind to, to," and all his intentions felt like dust in that passing whirlwind. But Moondance's eyes implored him to at least tell him what he'd meant. "I'm not in control. Ever since that winter, I've been failing - I can't trust myself with magic any more. I've made mistake after mistake and it's not going to stop. Gating here almost broke me. I have to ask Starwind to contain my power."
Moondance looked at him in shock. "Why would you ask such a thing? What happened to you?"
His hand felt limp in Moondance's grip. He couldn't expect mercy for this. "I attacked Stef while I slept beside him. If that were to happen again - I couldn't live with myself."
Moondance gasped. "You hurt your lifebonded?"
"I lost control," he said, utterly humiliated. He should never have indulged himself in Stef's company - and to risk something so precious, all because he was broken and wracked by selfish, indecent needs... He felt corrupted from the inside, as if Leareth had taken his faith and replaced it with poison. "I dreamed he was my enemy. He almost died at my hands -"
"Stef was injured, then?" asked Moondance. "You must show me his wounds, that I might heal him."
"No -" Why won't you understand? Moondance stared up at him intentely, as if taking measure of his soul. "I woke up. I held back the power. I barely didn't harm him -"
"You held back the power? But you said you lost control." Moondance replied. "It seems you have very fine control, shayana, even at the worst times. It takes skill and courage to keep others from being harmed by your weaknesses. I see no need to contain your magic."
Vanyel shook. How could he keep being near Stefen if they wouldn't tame his power? "But -"
"Why would you want this? It is not your power that betrays you. Power is only power," said Moondance. "It is something in your mind that you distrust, no?" Vanyel flinched, and his old friend dropped his hand. "Wingbrother, what has befallen you, that you expect harm even from a healer? You do not have to speak of it," he added. "But would you allow yourself to bare that wound to me?"
Why won't you contain me? That would be ten times easier.
He curled his arms around himself. He knew Moondance couldn't reach him, couldn't touch him, without seeing all the foulness in his core. The gentle, blue breeze of Moondance's perception stirred his mind - and fell as flat as the lull before thunder.
I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry
The air stirred at the back of his neck. "Come with me," Moondance commanded, and the litanies of shame pressed in on him til he could barely breathe, barely think.
8
Vanyel knew when he awoke that he was not alone, and he viciously wished that he was. His shame felt like a black scab. For a moment, he couldn't quite remember where he was; he smelt herbs burning, and felt the gentle sway of an ekele shifting in the breeze. Sunlight lashed his eyes through the strange facsimile of glass above. He couldn't see much. He could feel the trace of Moondance in his mind, in the room around him, but not his presence.
It took him a couple of seconds to place that the person near him was Starwind. His hindbrain quailed. Starwind hadn't the nature to tend to the sick. Maybe he does want to contain me -
"No mage who required such containment would ask for it. It was not hard for Moondance to know that you were wounded." Starwind's voice was rough and low as the breeze outside.
Van swallowed hard. His thoughts felt brittle, as if one hard tap from Starwind might shatter his mind. Starwind's mind shaped no words, but Van felt the form of its loss, a scar cut and bleeding away hopes and old confidences. He was locked in a loss that, to Van, was more than a year upon him, and still wont to crease open at every stray twist of thought. "I'm so sorry," he whispered, feeling the weight of his failures all over again.
"No," said Starwind. "All night I have asked myself, what could I have done to make her stay with me here? Had I the gift of words that my son has, could I have persuaded her to stay with us two summers ago? Death makes us such fools. It asks what we could have said, should have... When I honour her I must honour her choice to die as she lived - for Valdemar." He fell quiet again, and after a few slow moments of thought, Van felt him take a sharp breath. "But would that I had aided your reprisal."
Van shivered, even the thought of Leareth seeming to leech corruption into his mind. "How's Stef?" he asked, and his lips felt very dry.
"He rests below. My son tells me he is recovering fast - I heard them sharing songs this morning." Van breathed a deep sigh of relief. He focused on that inner sense of Stefen, and felt the familiar thrum of his love's life linked to his. Not yet strong, but steady and whole. "I fear Brightstar has too much sympathy for him," and he felt the warmth in Starwind's voice. "Because the singer is your shay'kreth'ashke, yes, but also because he was a brave fool."
Stef wasn't usually either of those things. And that tendril of fear came back - if Leareth had first driven Stef to breathtaking courage, the taste for it had remained, and so few men survived tht way for long. "I can't ever repay you for healing him -"
"My son holds that it is you who are repaid. In his vanity," Starwind replied. "I confess, I haven't deterred him from thinking of himself as our brightest treasure. And he is quite satisfied with himself for conducting such a healing." Van had never known Starwind take such joy in anything else as he did in Brightstar, and for a moment that joy was bright enough to chase away the spectres that surrounded them. His eyes cleared; Starwind was sitting on the floor near the end of Vanyel's bed, crosslegged with his bare feet poking out from under a long green robe. No sign of Asheena. It seemed clear that he was not here on a whim, and had no plans to be anywhere else.
:Indeed,: Starwind told him. :I have needed to be with my thoughts; for that, you have been good company. Do you fear me?:
Vanyel tried to sort through his feelings; fear was like a misty haze over everything, filling the air between them. He'd always looked up to Starwind. There were few whose approval meant more to Van, and he trusted Starwind to set his errors right. If he's seen this twisted weapon I've become -
:Wingbrother, I have nothing but love for you.:
He met Starwind's eyes, and saw strength and sanctuary held out to him like an embrace.
He still trusts me, and that thought shook him to his core. Starwind had no tolerance for dangerous mages. I haven't trusted myself since I left Savil alone to die. And Starwind knew. And he did not waver. :Thank you.: Van tried to show the depth of his gratitude. He extended his Othersenses, simply believing in what he saw for the first time in so long - Starwind was a green light beside him, as clear and fixed as a pole star. :I keep failing and making mistakes. I've become so afraid to use my own Gifts.:
:You had a wound you did not understand, and neither did your Healers understand it,: Starwind explained. :Moondance says you suffered a power theft.:
:But that was more than a year ago,: he replied, perplexed and reeling from the memory - that sick feeling of Leareth touching him, taking his essence and claiming everything Vanyel had left as his own -
:The wound was never cleaned. So still you felt the trace of another - a hateful one - and did not trust the places where he had touched. When you were in danger, and when the energy you share with your lifebonded was not what or where you expected - that is when such an unhealed wound will make itself felt. And when you have hurt much -: A thought slipped to him between words, a memory of Savil, years ago, her face creased in pain and Van could only guess why. Starwind retreated from his mind with a propriety that was unusual among Tayledras. "Moondance said he saw other wounds - mind wounds - and he would say no more to me, but he saw that all these wounds run deep together, and when you touch magic, you chance the return of much hurt and unbelonging."
That made a surprising amount of sense. "A lot of what I do with magic is reacting on instinct." And when those instincts felt as tainted and alien as his sexual instincts...
"Yes. For you, power moves with reflex. I have known you to defeat those equal to you in strength simply by being faster than they can be. But now you cannot react, because you have no trust in yourself."
Everything suddenly came into focus. "I've got wary of nodes I don't know well. Leareth had set a trap on a node and he stole my power when he sensed me tapping it." Nodes, of all things. He lived off them as much as he lived off wellwater, and he'd simply accepted his aversion without fighting it.
"Do you know the tale of the Shinai'in warrior who paid no heed to the storm? She rode out into the plains, and when lightning struck near her, her horse threw her from her back. Now she fears her horse, for she lacks the sense to beware the storm. Moondance tells it better," Starwind added. Van didn't doubt it - Speaker he may be, but Starwind was a very dry storyteller. "It goes ill for a mage to touch magic in fear. But the fear left by power theft is too dark to see from within. It consumes what it touches. There is no mage without error - I know not one. The best we can do is tread careful and repair the damage done by our mistakes. But now, when you err because you are distracted or startled, your fear claims it as evidence that your power is still not your own."
Van stared at his hands. He'd spent months thinking through smoke, seeing no more than the troubles in front of him. He'd come to hope the Tayledras would contain him. He still didn't see how else to set things right. "I tried to attack Stef in a nightmare - I can't risk that again."
"After he healed you, Moondance said to me, 'Would that I had once had such control.'" Van gasped, heart-sick. "You see? My shay'kreth'ashke well understands you." Starwind's voice turned grave, and gentle. "When Savil brought him to me, he sought death, and in our work he found renewal and forgiveness, in time." He paused, and for long moments Van felt only his deep loss, a roughness in his every quiet breath. "It hurts to know what death can take from us. Wingbrother, the wounds you have suffered will take a long time to heal in full. And with Stefen, I see you do not believe you have a long time. You don't even believe you have tomorrow. What can you do to trust that you and he will have all the time that you will need?"
Vanyel closed his eyes again. It was always too easy to despair - he'd thought of so many reasons to give up Stef, so many ways he could lose him. And he almost had. Like he'd lost so many others. "What would you do, if you were me?" he dared ask.
"I am not you," Starwind replied. "But in my life I have found an alignment between what is required of me as a mage, and what is required of me as a human. To favour one or the other would make me less of both. Containment is only a solution when that alignment proves impossible. For you it would be no solution at all."
Van felt the truth of that; at many of the lowest points of his life, magic had offered him a purpose and a route back to being part of the world. But it wasn't an answer.
"Today, I can do little," Starwind said, and Van had never heard him sound so tired before, much less old. "Tomorrow I will give honours for my wingsister, and I would have you beside me." It wasn't quite a request, and it wasn't quite his support that Starwind needed. "After, I must return to my work with our valley node, and in that I would ask your aid. We shape it to ease the burden on the land beyond the vale. Your strength would be of value in this. I have never known you to say no to new magical endeavours," Starwind noted.
"And I won't start now," Van agreed. He liked to earn his keep among his K'Treva wingsiblings, and it sounded like exactly the kind of task he'd been avoiding, and he wouldn't be working alone. I haven't had anyone to work magic with since Savil was killed. It would be good to cast peacefully beside friends, and while Starwind would never claim it would be safe, it wouldn't be combat and he wouldn't kill enemies or make new ones. He was so tired of spending his life on killing.
"Moondance said he would speak to you when he is rested." Vanyel's heart felt like thin glass. "But first," Starwind raised one white eyebrow knowingly.
"I need to see Stef." Van stretched, the light sheets slipping from his legs. Starwind waited patiently at as he rolled to his feet, and for a moment he felt dizzy, and he set his feet wide apart, feeling through them to place himself the way Starwind had long ago taught him, through the imperceptible movement of the wind in the branches of the heart-tree, through its roots to the earth, to where its life reached into the mage-stained lands and began their healing. A Tayledras in an ekele always knew where he was.
There was a folded robe by the bed; pulling its ties around himself, he found the dark green silk trailing below his ankles, and Starwind gave him a smile edged by hours-gone tears. This was Brightstar's home, then. That the moving of the Vale had coincided with the Speaker's son fledging wasn't coincidental. Family and magic all moved together here. He dimly remembered climbing up the heart-tree with Moondance what felt like days ago, his wingbrother reassuring him over and over that Stef was safe before Vanyel would accept rest and healing.
Starwind raised the hatchway and lowered himself down the steep steps cut into the limb of the ancient tree. Vanyel took three deep breaths before he followed, tasting summer on the warm wind. He reached out to Taver, not to say anything but to touch that root he had to who he was, to Valdemar, and to share what he felt in that moment. It's been so long since I felt relieved to be alive.
Starwind sent him alone into the chambers cut into the Vale's bedrock at the base of the tree; light shot through the foliage above, refracting all around from the bubbling spring at the centre of the underground room. Life flowed all around him, flowering vines, a dividing curtain that might have been cloth or willow. The sound and the light seemed designed to lull and soothe; with his lingering pain, Van could have merrily stumbled face first into the water.
He sensed presences close to him. The willowy curtain barred the way to the chamber where Moondance slept, and Van trod careful as he passed. Moondance had never relinquished his habit of living on the earth; after the years he'd spent sleeping above when Brightstar was a young child, Van suspected it was his personal affectation at this point, a willful refusal to fully assimilate. Moondance rarely spoke of his past but sometimes Van could sense him holding it in his bones, in his words. Though considering how often Tayledras scouts came home wounded, Van supposed many Tayledras healers maintained some comfortable space that wasn't halfway up a tree.
Another shade was half thrown back over a hollow, letting light into the chamber beyond. Van stepped slowly around the edge of the pool til he could see inside. Stef sat beneath a carved bed-canopy, wrapped in one of the feather-stuffed blankets that Van had only seen the K'Treva use in the dead of winter. He looked lost in its folds - a hollow face, a sharp collarbone, framed between bright blossoms and three-pointed leaves. Van froze, his heart tangled in recriminations. If he would have promised Stef any one thing, it would have been that he'd never, ever know hunger again. That he'd live well all the rest of his days, with or without Van beside him.
But I never have promised him anything.
Stef's bright eyes caught Vanyel's. Van came close and reached for his lover's hands, feeling his warmth, his strength, that deep music that he had been so afraid he would never know again.
"I can feel you," Stef observed, his hand quivering over Vanyel's. Van nodded, daring himself to keep his shields relaxed, and Stef's fear and fatigue and fluttering frustration roiled through the touch of their hands, and under it all, Stef was trying, again, his fire pulling everything together. "I was worried, after the Gate - you were like you weren't there - and when I asked Brightstar he always said you were there-above. Above what?" Stef shook his head in perplexity.
"I'll ask Starwind if I can show you later," he said. "I had to rest."
Stef rubbed at the heels of Van's thumbs with his dry fingertips. "Are you alright?"
"No," and the admission shattered some wall inside him. No, I am not alright. I haven't been alright since it happened - I lost something, something I never knew I had and I don't know how to live or breathe without. I don't know how to be the person I used to be, the person you somehow fell in love with, and the further I go from you the further I am from myself and I don't know the way back.
He shook dust from his eyes, and saw Stef on the other side, as if he had always been there, waiting for Van to see him again. "Neither am I." His eyes were tender red and utterly vulnerable. Stormy and liquid green, hiding nothing. Stef lifted the edge of the blanket, and opened his arms.
Van fell into his embrace and clutched Stef as hard as he dared, warming his whole self around that bright flame, feeling his beloved shake with that terror of having almost lost everything, while Van felt bitter tears sting his eyes for all the loves he had lost.
"I w - wasn't sure - til you touched me, I h - honestly thought I was dead. Or dreaming and dying. This is..." Stef trailed off, and his pointed finger wavered around, capturing the silk-spun bedcurtains and the sunken pool and the roots of the heart-tree beyond. Van caught it and held it tight.
"I know," he murmured. He had found it hard to take in at first, too. And he'd had Moondance to help, who at least remembered well enough being a newcomer and knew what would be strange to him.
"Brightstar w - wouldn't let me go see you - said I needed to get stronger to climb up there - I thought," and he shook his head as if trying to dislodge a metaphor. "The one moment I really believed it was last night when he caught me stumbling around trying to find a chamber pot. I still d - don't know where the kitchen is," Stef stuttered. "There's always been something to eat when I wake up. I've not got track of time. Keep falling asleep, and I saw the edge of the moon, and then sunlight... I just wanted you. Brightstar's usually here. I don't know where he's gone. We've sung and t - talked a lot. He has the Bardic Gift, you know?" Van nodded, relieved to feel such music in Stef's voice again, even in his jumbles and quavers. "So what's wrong, Van-ashke?"
Vanyel sighed, and leaned his head against his lover's. 'Nothing now,' he wanted to say, but Stef didn't need an empty wish, he needed honesty. "Starwind says there was still a trace left in my magical reserves from when Leareth stole power from me. I should have known. I've had bad memories since I left Haven - worse when I was riding east with Favinolieth. Whenever I used magic, something seemed to go wrong and I couldn't stop thinking about him or feeling like..." Van closed his eyes against Stef's implacable kindness. Put into words, it all seemed so banal, not like a nest of black snakes eating up his mind. "Moondance cleansed the wound but - I don't know when I'll feel like I did before. What if it's never?" He was grimly picturing years - or decades - of this erratic barrage of nightmares, atop the ones he'd already had, and he didn't know if he could endure it. He knew Stef deserved better than to live alongside that.
Stef stroked gently at the line where his hair met his forehead. "You're mourning it. Let yourself," he suggested gently. "You keep fighting to be somewhere else. But you're here, and so am I."
"I can't ask you to - to take care of me -"
"You don't have to. Do I have to?" Stef didn't even call him a fool, or flash with tightly leashed anger. He was tired and shaken, and truly asking nothing but to rest in his beloved's presence, and Van could only hold him and silently promise himself he'd try to become whole again, without hiding or pretending.
Eventually, Stef nudged him, with some reluctance. "Brightstar's going to come back and find us like this sooner or later."
"I don't mind that if you don't. He already knows about us," Van told him, and he Felt Stef's surprise, and it gave him a little stab of guilt. Stef had tried to match Van's limits when it came to who knew and who Van preferred did not know, even when he thought it needless. I've worried and politicked him around over so many petty fools.
"Of course I don't mind," Stef replied. "I wasn't sure what he really knew about you. But I'd noticed his fathers aren't so...subtle as us."
"Different taboos," Van replied. "Brightstar would be more affronted if we tried to hide it. Tayledras never admit to finding anything people do together strange." Indeed, Van remembered how angry Brightstar had been when Van told him that to be a gift-child was a taboo in Valdemar, as was any family arrangement outside the most common array of a mother married to a father. He'd been mollified when Van had explained the hypocrisy of this prejudice - Brightstar grudgingly agreed to compare it to the way Tayledras insist that outsiders are uncivilised and best avoided or killed, all the while hailing their Valdemaran friends.
Stef looked up at him with a sudden, intense curiosity. "Have you ever felt jealous of them? Starwind and Moondance, I mean."
The question discomfited him, but he couldn't lie to Stef now. "Yes. Of course. I first met them soon after Tylendel died." Stef's hand tightened on his forearm. "What made you ask?" Stef held his silence, his head resting on Vanyel's shoulder. A breeze stirred the curtain above them. The length of Stef's silence was answer enough. "Are you jealous of them?"
"Very," Stef admitted. "I can't look at them without thinking about how I'm going to go home with you and be discreet and inoffensive again. They act like no one would whisper or laugh about them. They have a son and no one questions it. It's so normal, they might as well be married!"
Stef sounded more mystified than resentful. Van squeezed him gently. "I see your point. I've always wondered how much easier it could have been if...if I'd seen people like them in Valdemar." All those years ago he'd been through anger, through despair and resignation until there had been nothing left but thoughts of the might-have-been where he and 'Lendel had never been taught to hide, never either of them punished for what they were. He could see Stef flickering through similar feelings now, perhaps less bittersweet - just the strangeness of coming to realise that what you'd accepted as the way of things was anything but. And on that note - "You're wrong in one respect, though."
"Oh?"
"They are married. The Tayledras custom is very different," he added, as Stef gaped at him. "I think I told you once that Tayledras trade bondbird feathers as a sign they intend to stay together for the long term? That's the only marriage rite they have. It's not overseen by a priest or a magistrate - it's usually performed in private and they say the world itself serves as witness. They speak a few traditional words, and then they display each other's feather and the rest of the tribe simply recognises the relationship."
Stef's brow creased in bewilderment. "What words?"
A knifeblade shiver ran through him.
He should have expected it. Was this how he would end, his heart stopped by his beloved's inevitable curiosity? Vanyel moved above him, and cradled Stef's face in his hands as he spoke, in Tayledras first because even without Stef's comprehending, he barely dared speak the vow Moondance had once taught him of. Stef didn't reply - how could he? - so he forced it into Valdemaran, feeling clumsy for even trying. "Stefen, would you wear my feather for all the world and skies to see?"
Light danced above them in near silence. Stef reached his thin arms around Vanyel and pulled him down tight against him. "Yes, but of course yes," he answered, so close that their lips brushed, and came together, and it was some while before they spoke again.
For the first time since autumn Van was fully open to their mingled feelings; love, shock, fear and joy and determination and desperate exhuastion. A reassurance he'd never expected. We needed those words, more than I would have ever known.
"I don't have a bondbird," he said eventually, feeling foolish.
"Does it matter?" Stef asked. "Does it - not count if we don't -"
He smiled. "I'm not worried about that. We could do something that made more sense for us. Rings, or somesuch. If you want it."
"Gods," replied Stefen, dazed. "So everyone recognises it, you say? Do we tell people?"
"Who do you want to tell?" he sighed, knowing Stef all too well.
Stef's smile turned shy. "Well, Medren. And Jisa, obviously."
"Obviously." Jisa would be tickled pink that he'd gone and married in private.
"Breda, if you'd not mind."
"She'll be relieved that I made an honest man of you."
Stef laughed weakly. "Relieved and sceptical. Gods and wild dreams, I never knew..."
"Neither did I." Van stroked Stef's hair away from his face. He understood; when Moondance told him of that vow all those years ago, his very first thought was that he would never, ever speak those words to anyone. He'd been so certain he never could. 'Lendel and I didn't dare let anyone see us, and I was sure there'd not be anyone else for me... That's what I had accepted. "I didn't know I'd have you," he said simply. He never knew he could feel so raw and wounded yet so content at the same time. "Much less that you'd stay even after everything went wrong."
"Fool," Stef muttered.
"Then I'll count you a fool for holding on." How many times had he decided it would be easier to give Stef up? I'll never think that again, not after coming so close to losing him. I can't give up on healing now. I owe us that.
"When we get back to Haven, I'm going to commandeer one of those empty suites with two or three bedrooms," he declared.
Stef nodded. "I'd like that. I want to be near you, and if you sometimes need to be alone - honestly, I'd be happy with a study with a place I can curl up and sleep. I'm not so long out of apprentice quarters. I'm not so long out of slums - really, you know I'll come anywhere so long as you were there too."
It took Van long moments to find a reply to that, and it felt difficult and frustrating. "Stef - I might be assigned to Haven, but if everything stays this volatile I'm not always going to be able to be with you -"
"I know that! I'm used to that." Stef scowled. "Just - promise me, this is all I want - promise me you won't shut me out or run away from me if I could help. If this means anything, I think it has to mean that."
Van nodded slowly. "You're right." I thought I was sparing you from the worst of me - but that was never fair to you, was it? You aren't marrying half of me. I pledged you all of me. "I promise."
Stef leaned up and kissed him again, fiercely, fit to melt him and seal the bargain there on his lips. "Good," he whispered, "Because if I ever lose you to this damned war, I want to know we shared everything we could."
The thought wrenched at his heart and his memories, but somehow Van found a smile. "I had Tran offer to Karse that I wouldn't go back to the border or cast magic there again."
Stef blinked at him thrice, slowly, confused then relieved then calculating. "I can see how that would make a useful negotiation play -"
"It took seeing the Shadow-Lover's hands on you to make me think of it." Stef stared back at him in shock. You would never have asked this of me. You know me too well for that. But I've duties more complicated than combat magic - duties to Taver, to Jisa and Treven, and to you. And to myself. Coming so close to being alone again almost broke me. "I - I couldn't think of - of going on without you. I can't make you promise to hide your life away in Haven - but I've never been so afraid."
Determination glinted in Stef's eyes like flecks of glass, softening in the kalaidoscope turn of his expression. "Look, I'm not going to pretend I regret it. But I've had time to think about it now, and I know it was a mistake - maybe one I had to make. I wanted to be involved in something that mattered. After the Karsites trapped us in Horn, I couldn't stop doing what I had to do. I stopped seeing anything else. I remembered who I used to be when I was hungry..." Stef shook his head. "I knew what to do. Everything narrowed to, to that. Does that make sense?"
Too much. Van pulled him tight against him, as if holding one safe moment was all that he dared ask for. I think I deserved for you to do - something.
"That moment you first walked into Percevar's drawing room, I was more glad that Horn had survived than I was to be alive. I'd been so afraid that we'd lose the city and no one would ever hear what had happened. And maybe my being there made a difference, just in one little city for a couple of months, but it wasn't really about me at all - I was only doing what I had to, sharing ideas, things that came into me from, from where I've been and the times I was hungry before and from you and I knew it could hold the world together, even if I was outside of it looking in. I couldn't stand the thought of that being snuffed out of the world - I'd rather have died than lost it. I know I'm not making sense. I would have written it down, but," he shrugged. "Burned all my paper after the birch kindling ran out. But if I could put it into words and music - it would go much further and faster than I could alone. I don't have to be there every time. I can't be."
"You are making sense," Van told him. He could latch on to that last part, at least.
Stef raised an eyebrow, clearly disbelieving. "Well, when I was so terrified I'd die without making anyone understand what happened there, that's a good sign I need to write about it, surely." He paused. "And that I'd never see you again. I was terrified of that too. And dying. I was afraid of nearly everything, those last two weeks. If it's any comfort, I doubt I'll ever be bored again in my life."
"You will," Van sighed. He wanted to believe Stef - it would be a relief - but Tran had been right; even if Stef himself thought that was the end of it, that wasn't so likely. "I won't tell you how to live. But I keep wondering what I would have done differently if I'd known you were in danger. I didn't know, and my mind was - it wasn't where it should have been."
"Van-ashke?" Van felt that compelling softness in him, and he wanted to submit to that healing instinct, to not even reply, just feel until he was safe again - but it wouldn't be right. A marriage might not survive silence, and this was something his - great gods - husband deserved to know.
"Everything felt wrong when I thought aboout you ever since I left Rethwallen - which makes sense now - but I took to dwelling on Tylendel," he admitted. "I even - when I used Farsight to survey Horn Citadel, I thought I saw 'Lendel talking to Percey." Stef's hand fell still against his arm, and his face turned thoughtful in a way that Van couldn't read. "I'd been thinking about him obsessively, and that crossed into my Farsight, somehow."
"I guess that's not surprising," Stef said.
His voice was flat, and Van didn't dare peer too closely at his feelings. Stef waited patiently as Van searched for the words to admit this. "Ashke - I'm not always so fixated - but I always think of him. Wherever I am, no matter what I've been doing, I still think of Tylendel every day."
"Good," Stef said, with feeling. "I'm glad you do. I trust you'd think of me, if I'd..." Van slipped his shaking fingers over Stef's lips, unable to bear the thought right now. Stef kissed them impudently. "Well, I know I'd think of you all my life. So I'm glad for him to stay in your thoughts."
It was a relief to have finally talked about it - he'd never known how to tell Stef, much less think he'd want to know. "I always think of him when I fall asleep - even beside you. And when I wake up. Sometimes in between - even a dozen times in between. Happy thoughts, if I can find them. I've wondered so many times what he'd think of you." With trembling fingers he brushed Stef's hair back behind his ears, and he had to wonder all over again. He would have liked you, but never understood you, Van decided. "It wasn't like this. I didn't have anything else in my life back then. He was everything. I couldn't see when he was going wrong." Stef's lips parted, but he said nothing. Of course he knew, everyone knew, what Tylendel had done. What his rage and power had led to. And it twisted inside him to know that was all Stef could really know of a man who'd been so, so much more. "I'll always love him," and he couldn't explain that burning-bright feeling of being together when the rest of the world was against you - too bright, blinding and destroying.
But he didn't have to. Dry fingertips touched his tears, and he felt Stef's tender understanding enveloping him. "I want you to tell me about him sometime," and that insistence only surprised him because Stef had never been so bold before.
"I will," he promised. "Sometime. And I have a favour I'd beg you in return." He lay back into Stef's pillows, and Stef looked down at him, sharp curiosity in his eyes. "When you write that epic about what happened at Horn, I need you to make Herald Torrall the hero."
"Torrall? Oh gods," Stef muttered. "Yes. I can see why. With what you're always saying about Heralds and Herald-Mages - yes. Torrall," he repeated thoughtfully.
"He hinted that he knew you," Van added, looking up into Stef's flushed face. "So what did you do to him?"
"That's a story." Van stared patiently. "Have you ever played a game of Swift Marauders?"
"Gods. Not since before I got my Whites, and I never really understood the rules."
"There aren't any. But Torrall didn't know that."
"What did you do to him?"
~
-aborted headcanons: it struck me that while we get good descriptions in canon of Starwind & Brightstar's bondbirds, we don't for Moondance's, and i toyed with the thought that he doesn't have one and every time someone brings this up he's like 'bite my immigrant ass' but unfortunately Savil mentions 'their bondbirds' at one point so this is not rly true. Oh well.
-ch 6, esp, has sexual abuse related content - nothing graphic. (Also re. the end of chapter 6: you could take it however you want but my personal stance is that Taver is telling the truth.)
-I think it goes without saying that Van's coping strategies are less than ideal in any way? *sits on hands*
chs 1-4
ch 5
6
It was a warm morning in Horn, with but a light breeze carrying smoke over the courtyard. The keep's fires had been lit all night, as Vanyel had noticed now and then through fitful sleep. He felt the cold dread he'd bottled up deep inside seep into his blood, his fingers. His hands shook as he traced the stone around the temple doorway, trying to feel his way into its heart. I didn't want to do this now. It's too soon, too far. I might not make it. He felt like a cornered fox, with one bolthole left, knowing he'd be trapped for good if he ran. If I go now, we can get there while Stef still has something left. And if Roal thinks the only other option left is just cutting off his Gift and hoping that doesn't kill him, I have to try. I can't lose him.
I don't have a choice. I never, ever had a choice.
But he couldn't stop shaking.
I shouldn't be doing this. It had always given him a little vindication that even mages who tolerated Gates much better than him often shared his horror of them. They might be convenient or, in some tight spots, a necessity, but to move through one was to pass the incomprehensible - it was a violation of Velgarth's natural distance and boundaries. Likely there were mages who'd used them carelessly, but not living ones. I don't trust my magic any more. And I've never been able to trust Gates. The only prospect that could have frightened him more was to do nothing.
Some things he could make sure of. The door of Horn's temple was a solid enough terminus, and magically speaking he knew the land beneath it well, though the building itself gave him an oddly inauspicious feeling; he'd been inside only once before, years ago, Percevar tempting him there one night while the priests slept, insisting that Van should come with him by candlelight to see the great idol of Kernos and the gold-threaded altar cloth. Vanyel prayed rarely and only beneath the stars, but that mattered little: Percey's intent had been thoroughly blasphemous. Exasperated with his posturing, Van had given up to debauchery up to a point - not on the altar - but he was a little wary of stepping within the sanctuary again.
It didn't matter. He had nowhere else to turn.
The past felt like so many crumbs, like nothing.
He opened the door; inside the temple, shafts of coloured light fell across the grey marble floors, over the shining altar, between Kernos's strong open arms, and Vanyel's heart instinctively reached for the wrong god, at the wrong time. Star-Eyed. Please guard me on my way to your land. Am I one of your children?
Am I?
The uncertainty tugged him off balance, teetering at the edge of forsakenness and loss, and he turned away from the temple window before the darkness could sink deeper into his thoughts.
Taver came up close behind him. :Chosen, are you sure of this?: Van realised how hard he was breathing, and he leaned against Taver's shoulder to keep himself from trembling.
:No,: he admitted. :It's very, very far.: Van didn't know how far one could safely Gate - most likely no mage knew for sure, but if one were to pick a number of miles, that number would likely be much smaller than the distance from Horn to K'Treva Vale. There was only one reason Van would dare this; he had long suspected, with much discomfort, that the distance didn't matter at all. The void was all the same, the pain was all the same, so why would it matter how far? And given Stef's state, he couldn't hesitate. But he wouldn't stake Taver's life on his wild fancies. :It would better for you to stay here - you've every reason to, and I don't know how long I might be gone from Valdemar.:
:You aren't going without me,: Taver informed him.
It hurt to even frame his fear into words, even to Taver, who surely knew - he could hardly have avoided knowing. :I'm not going solely for Stef. There's something wrong with my magic. There has been for months. I feel like I can barely hold it together any more. I need to ask Starwind to - to help me. If I can even Gate that distance once, I can't promise I'll be able to Gate back again after.: The truth, cut one careful step at a time. He couldn't share what lay beyond that limit.
:Van, where you go, I go. And where I go, Valdemar is.:
Taver sounded so certain, foundation-stone love set in his words. Van rested his mind against that feeling for a long moment, trying to figure out what he needed to do. :It's not just the distance that's going to be hard. I hate Gating - I only do it when I have to. I haven't done it at all since I bonded with Stef.: He swallowed hard.
:I understand,: and Taver hesitated. :Van, I was there that night too,: he reminded him.
Van stepped away. It was a cruel irony, and he wished Taver hadn't mentioned it. Taver and Lancir had stepped through that same Gate that had broken all his Gifts open, more than twenty years ago. :I know. Stef doesn't have any Mage-potential - but I'm going to block him off completely. If I risked an open energy line between us...: He couldn't even finish the thought. I am not going to risk anything.
He watched energy trickle through his connection to Stefen, and the thought of blocking that link filled him with panic. There'll be someone else to help him, Van told himself firmly. Stef was leaning against the temple's gatepost. He'd made it down the stairs and across the courtyard unaided, without fainting again - but he was so fatigued he could have barely taken another step. I am risking everything. :Could you - watch him, warn me if something's wrong?:
:Of course.:
Van felt Taver's sympathy and his fierce compassion, a ring of light that circled Stef just as much as it did Vanyel himself. He was surprised, and then ashamed - he ought to know by now that Taver cared for him so much as a person that his loved ones, his family, the one who was more than family, had fallen under his care as well. I can barely live up to the office of Monarchs' Own, and I forget our bond means more to him than that - as if he could treat me as just an office-holder any more than I could treat him as a horse.
:Thank you. I love you.: He'd rarely said it so plainly, and Taver Sent him a burst of affection, and snuffled against his hair. :I wish I didn't have to do this,: he admitted. Sometimes he'd found it hard to remind Taver of his weaknesses, but not now. :Gate-energy hurts me. Afterwards I'm going to be...not much good to anyone. I'll be tired. I won't really be myself. Maybe not for days. I'm sorry,: and he tried to impress the apology as deep as he could because he knew when the time came that he most needed to make it, he wouldn't have the strength. If they made it there at all.
:I'll keep you safe,: promised Taver. :But I can't help you find the way.:
:I know.: It could only be Van's own thoughts, his own personal energy that bridged the void. He had as much power in his reserves as he ever would; he'd replenished them from the node as he slept, even while letting a line flow through him to Stef. :I'll find the way. But if the pain tears my mind apart, I'll need you to get Stef through if you can.: Most likely, if the Gate proved beyond his strength, Vanyel would die too fast to know about it.
He walked back to Stef, and tugged him to his feet. "We're almost ready now." He pressed Taver's reins into Stef's hand. "He'll lead you once it's time. Just follow him. Don't worry about me." Barely awake and barely lucid, worry flashed through Stef's eyes. Van already felt himself withdrawing from all they shared, shielding Stef out for all he was worth, and it left him feeling cold and strange inside.
He hadn't done this in four years. He hardly felt like the same person who'd gone to ask Starwind and Moondance's advice on changing the Heraldic web, and he certainly didn't live in the same world. It was hard to imagine seeing them again, much less explaining anything. The last time I Gated was before I knew Stef. Before Savil died. Before Jisa was married. Before she and Treven were crowned.
But he had not forgotten how to make the way. He couldn't; every step was etched in pain in the deepest foundations of his magic. He brushed his hand to one side of the door, then the other, knowing this place, holding it steady in his mind, raising the power, bracing himself against the pain.
It was no good. It cut straight through his mind, stealing all his powers of thought and every point of reference. He desperately held out that throught of the end of his journey - K'Treva Vale, dark stone and green branches and his friends, his wing-kindred - his power reaching for them, straining, crossing the void like a needle in the dark. It was so far, so long ago, and it hurt so much - but it was there, as if juggled at the tip of his fingers, almost to drop and to shatter forever. The power moved, stabbing through his brain. He grasped it, pulling with all his might, then clinging tight as it moved him - clinging to Horn and damned stupid Percey and the birch smoke in mountain air. Kernos' arms spread like trees against the starlight. It was all together. It was close to destroying him.
"Go," he begged, blinded and disoriented by that aberrant touch of matter against matter. "Quickly." He couldn't speak any more. :Just get through, and I can take it down.:
:Van?: He felt Taver's nose on his neck. He hadn't even heard his steps. There was nothing but the pounding ringing lights in his head. :Are you sure this is right?:
He brushed off Taver's concern with the last bit of ruthlessness he had left. :I'm sure, now go.: He had no other choice, and he stepped through the Gate after them, into the soul-scraping pain that he hadn't faced since before -
- before Leareth had torn his life apart.
It was still the same void. The same pain. All pain was the same pain.
All pain was the same pain.
He could join two far-off points together in a Gate because in the void, all places were the same. There was no distance, nor time, no north nor south - the void touched everywhere equally. The oldest wounds were as newly-cut. The oldest nightmares still dreamed and whispered.
Half a step, and Horn seemed impossibly far from his mind. Van buckled from the pain of holding on to the temple door - just for one more step - because if he faltered, if he let that sense of Horn and all it had ever meant to him collapse, or if he forgot all he knew of K'Treva Vale, the Gate would fail and he'd be trapped in the void where nothing marked a path to anywhere.
He reached forward numbly, only emptiness ahead of him. Stef had gone through - and Taver - and soon he'd see Moondance, Starwind, Brightstar, all his Tayledras kindred - soon - but the void had no future. He reached toward his memory of the lush and loving Vale and it shrank from the pain in his touch.
I forgot how hard it is to hold on - it's been so long - not since - and in the dark and the pain he remembered nothing else that had passed in his life - since before Leareth.
The void had no past.
Years nor leagues brought any distance from the pain. There was no before Leareth.
'Surrender.'
Vanyel was fifteen again, ice creeping up his spine. Darkness staring into him.
'Vanyel. You surrendered in my arms come the end. Why bother with this nonsense? Surrender now, and you will never know loss. You will never have aught to lose. You will never have to hurt, Vanyel.'
Van felt every word like a blow to the head, battering him further from the thought of his destination. There was no after Leareth.
'Surrender here, and I will never have to hurt you.'
He felt every loss, every wound tearing him apart - saw anew a body torn open by mechanical claws - a body mutilated and bleeding in the snow - a mind broken and falling from the tower, hitting the earth - 'Spare yourself all this pain. You are quite alone here. Always alone..'
Ice down his back and splitting him open from the inside, on his knees, bound in agony twixt mountain and vale, violating his senses again and again. Van lashed out with the last of his power, and his focus faltered - he was losing where he had come from. Always and only the void. There was no after Leareth.
'You could have surrendered at any time, and had this so much sooner.' The word pressed itself against his lips, forcing Vanyel to taste it, to breathe it in where he was. To remember what he had done in the dark in Leareth's bed. Ice sliding all the way into him, whispering his complicity. 'You allowed me to, you allowed me you allowed me' and the weak flailing of his empty power did nothing. He was just another conduit for darkness, kept alive only by a rage that was near exhausted. He felt the last of it go, lost to the void. There was only pain left. He ached to say farewell, but knew not to whom. He was always alone.
A white shadow rose up in his vision and he heard his shirt tear between snapped teeth. :Vanyel. Stop dreaming. He's dead and gone. You have to move.: Taver dragged him half a step and daylight opened over him.
He felt like his very essence had been scraped away from him. The Gate lingered in his core, numbing and transfixing him with pain. Taver stared into his eyes. :Van. You had a flashback - a nightmare - inside the Gate. Are you with me now?:
He wasn't, really. Kneeling on stone and feeling like nothing meant anything. The warm and the living had gone from him, leaving only his wrongness, his corrupted wounds.
:Van, where are we?:
Vanyel stared around, from tree to rock to archway, a man resting, the shape of a white horse, and felt like he saw nothing at all. He curled in on himself, closing his eyes against the light. If he curled up tight enough for long enough, perhaps the pain would go away.
7
Vanyel was roused from his fugue by a deep, gutteral howl that was fit to cut the wind in two. Its urgency cut through all his lostness, down to his last instinct - someone needs me. The pain made his mind feel like thick water full of debris; it sloshed and scratched against his skull. He rolled to his feet, gasping as if he might drown in it.
He assessed his whole surroundings in a moment. This wasn't what it should be. He was exactly where he meant to be. He knew this shallow cave, the archway that led out of it - this ring of stones - but beyond that, his eyes were lost in desolate undergrowth.
Stef was atop a rock nearby. He crouched like a rangy wolf, shirt rolled up past thin elbows and straggly hair wind-wrapped around his face. The rock's shape was familiar, and its carvings made it look oddly tame - marked out as human territory.
Nothing else here looked as if it had ever been touched by human hands.
He looked up the sheer-walled canyon. In his memory it was wider, huge enough to hold a whole world of strange magic and music and love. Nature softened its walls - roots opening rock, faces overrun with ferns. The great tree at the canyon's centre was overrun with a flowering knotweed. Just in front of them, he saw vines running into a deep, cracked hollow in the stone. He knelt, and reached his hand down to feel the stone curve. He remembered the water, drawn by magic from the deep warm earth. He remembered four years ago, how Moondance had dropped him in there fully clothed to soothe his Gate-addled senses -
He turned back to the inviolate stone archway. It had no capstone; like the pool, it was carved from bedrock by magic. The vines and grasses that crept over the stones seemed to twist and fracture before they could reach it. Unnatural things happened near stone that touched the void.
Taver paced the shallow cave behind the arch, his feet striking rhythmically on the stone. :We walked up to the tree, then came back. Stef saw the entrance to some other abandoned cave-rooms, and there's more trees, that don't seem... Van, where are we?:
Stef stared down at him, not even asking. The wolf was in his eyes, wild beyond questions, beyond fear. "Sorry for the noise. Kyree distress call. Hyrryl taught me." He shifted, pulling his cloak tight around him. "Thought was worth a try. Being as we haven't found any humans around." The air hung warm and stiflingly humid, and sun cut bright shadows through the foliage above them, yet Stef shivered. "This isn't right, is it? Where's Starwind and Moondance and their people?"
Van hadn't even thought about this possibility while he was building the Gate. "They've moved K'Treva Vale."
"What?"
"They're nomadic - they cleanse the land around them, then - then they move on." Van curled his fist against the thankless stone, furious with himself. "I should have guessed."
Stef made a small, empty noise in his throat, and he raised his eyes toward the daylight. "So - can you find where they've gone?"
"I don't know." There was a tool they'd given him for this - a talisman - and it was securely in a drawer in his room in Haven. He could not possibly have been any angrier with himself.
That sound again, some vacant cousin of laughter. "This wasn't on the list of places I expected to die."
"Stef!" Van felt himself teetering into that empty despair, tumbling past those torn-off dead ends in his beloved's memory - a filthy alleyway, a rickety carriage with a red-cloaked stranger, a snowbank high above the Ice Wall, a song sung between Horn's tight walls. A half-dozen times he'd lost all hope of survival. He had never felt this from Stef. It shocked him cold. He hadn't imagined a Stef who could give up - Stef was his optimist, his scrappy luck-hunter. They had come together because Stef couldn't stop hoping.
I'm not giving up. I've been in worse places. No one's trying to hunt me down and kill me. There's probably someone within a few miles that can help us. I'm not physically injured. I can do something, even while I'm still too drained to risk using my Gifts. With magic, he could have found the nearest Tayledras mage in moments. But even trying to reach past his own eyebrows left him dizzy and nauseous. Futilely, he stretched for where the valley node had been - but it was drained, dispersed all around into little rivulets, different and disorienting. "Stef," he said. "I know the lay of the land - if I can find some sign of them..."
Stef sniffed, and he shivered convulsively, clutching his arms around his knees. "They're gone," he muttered.
"They won't be far." Stef didn't respond, only stared up at the archway with lost eyes. A shaft of sun fell upon his pale, sunken face. Van froze. "How long was I out for? How long have we been here?"
Stef blinked slowly, as if he didn't understand such things any more. :A few candlemarks,: said Taver, and Van ran across the stone, grabbing Stef's cold hands in his. Trying to find him. Shaking for the last drop of water in an empty skin. Van clutched his hands, trying to find anything in himself that could sustain him. :Chosen!:
He Felt Taver's energy run through him, and he directed it into Stef's emptiness. A white cloth stained red by a seeping wound. "Taver - can you - I have to try to find where they've gone - if I can't -"
"Gone, gone, gone, gone, ne'er to be seen again," Stef's macabre lullaby echoed through the lost vale.
Van clapped his hands to his ears. He hadn't the strength to block Stef out any more. Pain cut through his every attempt at thought. :Chosen, go. I won't let him fade away from you. Find them.:
Van looked up into Taver's eyes, saw the fire and the promises there. He wouldn't lie to me, but the best he knew was that Taver would try as hard as he could to keep Stef alive. He'd give whatever he had to. Because he loved what Van loved, needed what he needed.
He grabbed his swordbelt from where it hung on Taver's flank, and he turned and stumbled through the wild undergrowth toward the vast tree, feet catching at each step. He had no idea where he was going. What was he looking for? The tree's great limbs looked hollow, like burst waterskins. People had lived there - his friends - his siblings.
Where would they leave a sign? Would they? Surely there would be something for their occasional passers, the other peoples they traded with, the ranging kyree or dyheli migrants, the Shin'a'in? Their new vale would be well hid, even as they ripped the mask from this old home and let the weeds and vermin in. An insect brushed against his hand. It was swealteringly warm, even in the shadow of the great tree. He traced old paths in his mind, along the earth, from tree limb to bridge to ladder. From Moondance's home below to Snowlight's above - and beyond, he saw a sister-tree fallen at the southern tip of the vale, its great roots open to the sky. The first place he'd slept above earth, with a long-ago lover. The vale seemed so small, its winding ways all worn away.
He tore his eyes away from the sky, and scanned the rough ground below the heart-tree. Thick shade kept it clear but for grasses and lichen-strewn stones. A fox's earth between the roots. A warning screech from some small creature, disturbed by his booted feet. There a wider gap, an overgrown step. He forced his way past a falling curtain of vines and ran down the stairs below the earth, not even daring a magelight. He spiralled down until the daylight was out of reach, feeling ahead with each step, until the back of his knuckles hit a solid wall.
He laid his face against the flat stone. Listening to nothing. Seeing nothing.
He collected himself quickly, because he hadn't time. This had been the heartstone chamber, and it was buried. He would have been worried if it hadn't been. Maybe some of the rest of the maze of chambers and work rooms under the vale were still open. He climbed back up the stairs on his hands, and looked for another path underground, picking his way through the wild land outside the tree's shadow. He felt tall grasses stirring, swatted away the insects that stirred around him. A sapling swayed. How long had the Vale been deserted? This looked like years of overgrowth, a ruin from a bygone people. The mages must have forced some of this before leaving. If he'd had half his senses, would he have felt Moondance's work in the earth? Would he have sensed Brightstar's power?
That anguished howl cut the air again, the whole cut of the Vale its soundbox, and Van glared back down at Stef in frustration. He was trying to think -
:Van - he saw something -:
:Where?: Van spun, a hand to his eyes, no idea what to look for when everything looked so wild and wrong. His eyes blurred.
:It's under the tree -:
Van dropped to a crouch, looking. The heart-tree's roots rippled and shimmered.
Ay'gretshk.
Its skin flushed as it moved, a rainbow-shine rising as it absorbed the earth's latent power. Soul eater.
There were creatures that had been Changed by Pelagir magic, or warped to survive amid it, and then there were soul eaters. They ate and drank it, preying on other predators that had adapted to use magic. Preying on mages. It was eyeless, dirt stuck in its ring of silver teeth as it tasted the earth for the steps of its quarry.
Van had seen one only once before - last time, a Tayledras scout killed it before it could get near him. You couldn't fight an ay'gretshk with magic - it lived on magic. Alive, it was even more repulsive - slithering on its trunk like a snake, the four divided coils of its tails flickering over the earth. If he could find where it started and where it began, it might have been twice his length.
He stood so still he hardly dared to breathe. :Stay in the cave,: he implored Taver. :It eats the Gifted and magical beasts. I don't know if it's scented us. If it comes near Stef...: He couldn't say it.
He couldn't ask it and Taver would never make him. :I won't let it get near him.:
Vanyel drew his sword, slow and almost silent. Would that he had a bow. He didn't know what it might do to him up close. He edged nearer, picking through the knee-deep grass with his sword held at guard. How to read something without eyes? The soul eater moved with deceptive grace, sliding fast over the earth, seeming to taste each piece of deadwood or loose stone with its tails before moving on to the next. Had it sensed him at all? Maybe there's not enough left of me to sense - and when it roiled toward him, he barely struck his sword down in time.
It lashed one translucent coil toward him and Van grazed it as he leapt clear, spraying purple-dark blood over the earth. He fell back into the underbrush, feeling his foot catch - feeling its whole bulk tug at him - and he waved his sword at the earth near his own foot. Nothing. Earth raked his skin, and he felt his foot growing numb, felt its wet mouth bite into his boot -
He heard a thud as it disconnected. And another. The second time, he saw the cast stone strike its yawning mouth, saw blood and needle-teeth flying. It reared up, leaving Van reeling, and a white slash cut the air between them in two.
Relief almost stole his breath away. The white bird came up from its stoop dripping with dark blood, and it was so close that Van could be sure. A Tayledras bondbird. And far beyond, he glimpsed the silhouette of a man lying against a bough of the tree, white hair hanging down like a trail of flowering ivy.
:Brightstar,: he Sent, and in return he felt a wave of shock and joy. :You're not hidden enough,: he snapped. For if he would make a nice snack for the soul-eater, Brightstar would be a feast.
:I'm not trying to hide,: Brightstar replied, and his mindvoice was playful as the beast turned to face him. He rose to a crouch on the tree-limb, and waved his hand. :Again, Tawu!:
The beast screeched under his talons. Vanyel saw blood run from its head, and it writhed away - a shallow scratch, but it sagged back miserably as the owl spread his wings wide. Its bloodied head sank, and its extrusions all coiled together, churning the earth beneath the heart-tree.
:They're not brave,: Brightstar observed. :They seek weak or lonely prey. They don't like trouble.:
In moments its head was gone below the earth. Vanyel breathed, not raising his eyes until every inch of it had burrowed away. He felt Tawu's shadow cross him. Brightstar dropped from branch to branch with his hands until he met the earth.
He'd grown tall, easily Starwind's height, and in the heat of the summer day he wore only plain green breeches, a hawking glove that ran up to a strap over his shoulder, and an elaborate necklace, blue beads bright against the gold skin of his bare chest. The owl swooped down to meet him, flapping his wings wide as he alighted on Brightstar's raised arm. Inherited all my gifts, and knows how to make an entrance. Van hadn't the strength to roll his eyes; his every nerve felt pulled tight and he could barely hold them together.
"Father," Brightstar called in Valdemaran, for so he would always greet Vanyel, source of his foreign, stranger blood; gift-born as the Tayledras said. "Did you come without our talisman? It is a good thing I woke, though Tawu will not forgive it." The bird glared at Vanyel, twitching one eartuft in agitation. Nocturnal, he thought dumbly. No longer a boy tied to lessons or his parents' routines, Brightstar would keep the hours that best suited his bondbird. "I sensed a Gate had opened close to our land, and my father told me not to worry on such things unless trouble came to us - you know how he is, he always wants to let things be! But I had to see for myself, and night seemed too long to wait." He broke off abruptly, narrowing his silver eyes at Taver. "I do not know you."
:He doesn't mean to be rude,: Van told his Companion. The Tayledras language had no form of greeting for strangers. Van would have to explain what had befallen him, why Taver was here, and not just to Brightstar but to his parents and all the rest of the clan. I've naught good to bring them, only tragedies and burdens.
:It's alright,: said Taver, and Van wondered how many times he'd endured such awkward introductions.
Brightstar's mind was already elsewhere. "I heard a kyree call in warning, but Tawu saw no kyree. Perhaps the ay'gretshk was hunting some far-ranger who had fallen into trouble -"
"No, that was Stef - he's a Bard - his mind's burning out." Van felt his voice rising in panic. Tawu circled the archway - and Stef - with a hunter's eye; but his human bondmate was a healer, not a killer. Brightstar clasped Vanyel briefly, brushing his lips against his father's forehead, and he ran down to Stef's side.
Stef had clutched his knees to his chest. He seemed barely awake - he looked from Brightstar's face to Vanyel's without expression, and he didn't react as Brightstar laid a hand over his brow.
"I was trying to take him to Moondance while - while he had time," and even as Van spoke he felt that time slip away, spilt over miles or years. If he'd come to the right place - or if K'Treva hadn't travelled - or if Moondance had come himself...
"He is but an ember," the young Healer said. Van had never seen Brightstar look so severe - and it's my fault, I let this happen to my lover... Brightstar shrugged off his hawking glove and knelt, touching Stef at both temples. Van hung back, and he felt Taver step close behind him. He curled in on himself in the darkness. He could barely, barely feel Stef any more. He didn't hope to escape from loneliness again - stranger to think he could ever have anything to hold, anyone who he wouldn't send unto death or drive away from him.
:You aren't alone.:
He felt Taver's eyes on him, blue stone flecked by centuries of storms and footfalls. It was more of him than Van had ever seen before, and he rested on that strength, bare inches from tears, feeling memories of a dozen lost bonds slipping past the place where Taver held his heart inside. There was no solace there. He would lose Van one day too. Knowing didn't help. It had never, ever helped. Yet somehow his love had never been futile.
Brightstar muttered quietly to himself. He raised his head, his eyes still closed. "He has a strange Gift, and has used it to its last edge. He hid the pain that would have been his ally calling warning." He breathed slowly, and Vanyel felt his mind slip toward entrancement. He could sense Brightstar's energies intersecting Stef's, watching how they flowed, where they went. "Here," he murmured - and overlaying the weak remnant of Stef's life-thread, Brightstar's power bloomed in perfect synchrony.
Brightstar didn't move. Van turned to Taver, not quite willing to believe it. :Is he - do you see - ?:
:Yes.: Taver's flanks heaved with relief.
No Valdemaran healer had taken less than several months to learn what Stef did. Brightstar watched Stef's energy with a Healer-Adept's eye, moved as one with it and all at once he had replaced it with his own. "Rest your mind," he murmured, and Van wasn't sure who he spoke to. He was deep in his trance, energy wrapping around the thin edges of Stef's, enclosing his flickering spirit.
It was as sudden as feeling a shutter close on a cold night. The weak flame turned steady, building with Brightstar's every slow breath. Van curled a shaking hand in Taver's mane. Brightstar wouldn't let Stef go. Stef would live through another sundown and every second felt more precious than Van had ever imagined. He was close to delirium. Nothing else mattered, no troubles, no wounds or nightmares. Only watching Stef breathe without pain, without diminishing.
He could barely feel time passing; he knelt, and clasped Stef's hands gently, as if his fragile bones might shatter at his touch. Van breathed around a lump in his throat. He tried to think clearly, but all his thoughts seemed determined to wander untrammelled. Tawu had fallen asleep on a nearby sapling, his head below his hunched wing.
Brightstar stirred, blinking his eyes against the afternoon light. He was quiet for several more moments, collecting himself. "I have done what I can do here. He will not wither, and time will do him well now." He exhaled hard, shaking his head, and he threw an arm over Vanyel's shoulders, tired and exaltant from the Gift that moved through him. "What a frightening wound. He is your shay'kreth'ashke," he noted. Like Moondance, Brightstar was wont to see the unseeable. "Then I think we have made balance." Brightstar lifted his chin, a flash of pride in his silver eyes.
It took Van a moment to understand what he meant, because it was so absurd. Gods, Tran was right about ridiculous young men. He thinks he's proving himself - returned life for life. Van wanted to say that Brightstar had never owed him anything - but that wasn't what the youngling wanted, was it? He wants me to accept it and know him as a man now.
"Then I am destined to go into your debt, for we need shelter," Van replied. "How far is the Vale?"
Brightstar waved his hand, dismissive of Van's concerns. "You are K'Treva, though you forget it. Home is not far. Even at slow pace, we'll be back by sundown." He looked up at Taver. "You carry both of them?" he asked, in stilted Valdemaran.
Taver nodded, and Van looked to him with gratitude. :He's earned that of me,: Taver told him. :And he's little burden.:
"Then I hope you will keep pace with a man afoot. May I know you? I am Brightstar K'Treva." Brightstar reached his arms out to Taver, determined to mimic the Valdemaran politeness though Taver could hardly return the gesture.
"He is Taver," Van said, gathering Stef in his arms. The Companion knelt where the edge of the overgrown land met the bare stone of the terminus. He looked up to Brighstar with warm blue eyes. "He bonded with me after Yfandes died."
Brightstar brought his hands to a clasp over his heart. "When I saw you, I feared as much," he told Taver. Fandes had adored Brightstar, and been adored by him in return. "I wish I did not greet you as a sorrow - it is not well. I hope to be your friend and your brother in time."
"He hopes so too," Van told him. Brightstar's eyes reminded him of those awful first days back in Haven as a Herald trainee - how Savil's friends had looked at him where they'd wanted to see Tylendel. It hurt. The Tayledras said all death became new life in the cycle of the stars, but it was all just hurt and talking about it was unbearable, and he had to. "There's a lot I should tell you." He settled into the saddle, Stef stirring in his arms. Tawu fluttered, indignant at the sun. "I ought to start with the winter after I last saw your fathers..."
It would be a slow ride til sundown.
Vanyel had never seen Starwind distraught before. There went another of his illusions, and without it Vanyel felt bare as a tree in winter. He was exhausted, and Moondance rebuffed his feeble attempt at consolation, while Starwind said nothing after greeting him, only staring mutely, a storm in his eyes that was harsh enough to tear open all of Vanyel's wounds at once. He knew Starwind's emotions as subtle and calm, even in grief; now he radiated despair, and futility, and it shook all that Van knew of the world.
It was a relief when Starwind turned and left them, sweeping up to the above like a wind-chased moth. Brightstar had carried Stef away in his arms. Van sagged into a low chair. He'd come here with so much to ask of Starwind and he couldn't. He'd been a selfish fool and never considered what grief he'd be bringing them in his wake. I wasn't thinking of how he'd feel at all. I was fighting so hard just to get here, as if I could assume someone else would pick up my burdens as soon as I crossed their threshold.
Moondance clasped Vanyel's arm, and Van avoided his eyes. My grand problems can wait. Stef will live, and that's all I really need tonight. I've shared all the news I most dreaded sharing. I'm not alone. Everything else still ached, and Moondance's fingers moved gently over the back of his hamd.
"Starwind needs you," he said awkwardly. This was their time of grief, but his own stirred and tore at him anew. I didn't see her buried in Haven.
Moondance shrugged. "In time he will, but he needs his solitude more right now. In that regard, we differ." He looked up at Vanyel with tired, lonely eyes.
Moondance needs me. And he felt entirely useless as support.
Starwind shared his inner feelings with few; Savil had been one of them. And he thought of what he'd seen in Starwind's eyes and wondered - at his age, and with the lives Tayledras lived - how many more were left save for his lifebonded.
Moondance sat on the ground beside Vanyel, resting his head on one cupped hand. He didn't look at Vanyel, but Van sensed his regard, like a shoot growing in some dark place and trying to seek daylight. Starwind wants to be alone and Moondance doesn't. And I'm no good for either of them.
"I'm so sorry," he tried. "It's been so long I - I'm sorry to be only telling you now."
"Better that we know," Moondance said sadly. "I could have hoped all my days to see her again, and never to say farewell and make the honours. She gave me my life again," he whispered. Tears rolled silently down his cheeks. Van reached for his hand, and felt everything shake - and hurt again, as if Savil had only just left the room, her voice still fading from the air, and there with Moondance's hand warm against his, he didn't hear her imploring him to check his wards - no - he heard her refusing to make a home in the Vale.
"Mine too," was all he could say.
Moondance lifted his hand, stared at it strangely. "You are not so less drained than Stefen," he exclaimed. "Why do you not touch our vale node?" The bright gathering of energy loomed in his consciousness, suffusing the earth below him with a warmth he couldn't touch. His mind lurched with hunger. No. He couldn't, wasn't going to stray from his path now.
"I can't - I was going to ask Starwind to, to," and all his intentions felt like dust in that passing whirlwind. But Moondance's eyes implored him to at least tell him what he'd meant. "I'm not in control. Ever since that winter, I've been failing - I can't trust myself with magic any more. I've made mistake after mistake and it's not going to stop. Gating here almost broke me. I have to ask Starwind to contain my power."
Moondance looked at him in shock. "Why would you ask such a thing? What happened to you?"
His hand felt limp in Moondance's grip. He couldn't expect mercy for this. "I attacked Stef while I slept beside him. If that were to happen again - I couldn't live with myself."
Moondance gasped. "You hurt your lifebonded?"
"I lost control," he said, utterly humiliated. He should never have indulged himself in Stef's company - and to risk something so precious, all because he was broken and wracked by selfish, indecent needs... He felt corrupted from the inside, as if Leareth had taken his faith and replaced it with poison. "I dreamed he was my enemy. He almost died at my hands -"
"Stef was injured, then?" asked Moondance. "You must show me his wounds, that I might heal him."
"No -" Why won't you understand? Moondance stared up at him intentely, as if taking measure of his soul. "I woke up. I held back the power. I barely didn't harm him -"
"You held back the power? But you said you lost control." Moondance replied. "It seems you have very fine control, shayana, even at the worst times. It takes skill and courage to keep others from being harmed by your weaknesses. I see no need to contain your magic."
Vanyel shook. How could he keep being near Stefen if they wouldn't tame his power? "But -"
"Why would you want this? It is not your power that betrays you. Power is only power," said Moondance. "It is something in your mind that you distrust, no?" Vanyel flinched, and his old friend dropped his hand. "Wingbrother, what has befallen you, that you expect harm even from a healer? You do not have to speak of it," he added. "But would you allow yourself to bare that wound to me?"
Why won't you contain me? That would be ten times easier.
He curled his arms around himself. He knew Moondance couldn't reach him, couldn't touch him, without seeing all the foulness in his core. The gentle, blue breeze of Moondance's perception stirred his mind - and fell as flat as the lull before thunder.
I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry
The air stirred at the back of his neck. "Come with me," Moondance commanded, and the litanies of shame pressed in on him til he could barely breathe, barely think.
8
Vanyel knew when he awoke that he was not alone, and he viciously wished that he was. His shame felt like a black scab. For a moment, he couldn't quite remember where he was; he smelt herbs burning, and felt the gentle sway of an ekele shifting in the breeze. Sunlight lashed his eyes through the strange facsimile of glass above. He couldn't see much. He could feel the trace of Moondance in his mind, in the room around him, but not his presence.
It took him a couple of seconds to place that the person near him was Starwind. His hindbrain quailed. Starwind hadn't the nature to tend to the sick. Maybe he does want to contain me -
"No mage who required such containment would ask for it. It was not hard for Moondance to know that you were wounded." Starwind's voice was rough and low as the breeze outside.
Van swallowed hard. His thoughts felt brittle, as if one hard tap from Starwind might shatter his mind. Starwind's mind shaped no words, but Van felt the form of its loss, a scar cut and bleeding away hopes and old confidences. He was locked in a loss that, to Van, was more than a year upon him, and still wont to crease open at every stray twist of thought. "I'm so sorry," he whispered, feeling the weight of his failures all over again.
"No," said Starwind. "All night I have asked myself, what could I have done to make her stay with me here? Had I the gift of words that my son has, could I have persuaded her to stay with us two summers ago? Death makes us such fools. It asks what we could have said, should have... When I honour her I must honour her choice to die as she lived - for Valdemar." He fell quiet again, and after a few slow moments of thought, Van felt him take a sharp breath. "But would that I had aided your reprisal."
Van shivered, even the thought of Leareth seeming to leech corruption into his mind. "How's Stef?" he asked, and his lips felt very dry.
"He rests below. My son tells me he is recovering fast - I heard them sharing songs this morning." Van breathed a deep sigh of relief. He focused on that inner sense of Stefen, and felt the familiar thrum of his love's life linked to his. Not yet strong, but steady and whole. "I fear Brightstar has too much sympathy for him," and he felt the warmth in Starwind's voice. "Because the singer is your shay'kreth'ashke, yes, but also because he was a brave fool."
Stef wasn't usually either of those things. And that tendril of fear came back - if Leareth had first driven Stef to breathtaking courage, the taste for it had remained, and so few men survived tht way for long. "I can't ever repay you for healing him -"
"My son holds that it is you who are repaid. In his vanity," Starwind replied. "I confess, I haven't deterred him from thinking of himself as our brightest treasure. And he is quite satisfied with himself for conducting such a healing." Van had never known Starwind take such joy in anything else as he did in Brightstar, and for a moment that joy was bright enough to chase away the spectres that surrounded them. His eyes cleared; Starwind was sitting on the floor near the end of Vanyel's bed, crosslegged with his bare feet poking out from under a long green robe. No sign of Asheena. It seemed clear that he was not here on a whim, and had no plans to be anywhere else.
:Indeed,: Starwind told him. :I have needed to be with my thoughts; for that, you have been good company. Do you fear me?:
Vanyel tried to sort through his feelings; fear was like a misty haze over everything, filling the air between them. He'd always looked up to Starwind. There were few whose approval meant more to Van, and he trusted Starwind to set his errors right. If he's seen this twisted weapon I've become -
:Wingbrother, I have nothing but love for you.:
He met Starwind's eyes, and saw strength and sanctuary held out to him like an embrace.
He still trusts me, and that thought shook him to his core. Starwind had no tolerance for dangerous mages. I haven't trusted myself since I left Savil alone to die. And Starwind knew. And he did not waver. :Thank you.: Van tried to show the depth of his gratitude. He extended his Othersenses, simply believing in what he saw for the first time in so long - Starwind was a green light beside him, as clear and fixed as a pole star. :I keep failing and making mistakes. I've become so afraid to use my own Gifts.:
:You had a wound you did not understand, and neither did your Healers understand it,: Starwind explained. :Moondance says you suffered a power theft.:
:But that was more than a year ago,: he replied, perplexed and reeling from the memory - that sick feeling of Leareth touching him, taking his essence and claiming everything Vanyel had left as his own -
:The wound was never cleaned. So still you felt the trace of another - a hateful one - and did not trust the places where he had touched. When you were in danger, and when the energy you share with your lifebonded was not what or where you expected - that is when such an unhealed wound will make itself felt. And when you have hurt much -: A thought slipped to him between words, a memory of Savil, years ago, her face creased in pain and Van could only guess why. Starwind retreated from his mind with a propriety that was unusual among Tayledras. "Moondance said he saw other wounds - mind wounds - and he would say no more to me, but he saw that all these wounds run deep together, and when you touch magic, you chance the return of much hurt and unbelonging."
That made a surprising amount of sense. "A lot of what I do with magic is reacting on instinct." And when those instincts felt as tainted and alien as his sexual instincts...
"Yes. For you, power moves with reflex. I have known you to defeat those equal to you in strength simply by being faster than they can be. But now you cannot react, because you have no trust in yourself."
Everything suddenly came into focus. "I've got wary of nodes I don't know well. Leareth had set a trap on a node and he stole my power when he sensed me tapping it." Nodes, of all things. He lived off them as much as he lived off wellwater, and he'd simply accepted his aversion without fighting it.
"Do you know the tale of the Shinai'in warrior who paid no heed to the storm? She rode out into the plains, and when lightning struck near her, her horse threw her from her back. Now she fears her horse, for she lacks the sense to beware the storm. Moondance tells it better," Starwind added. Van didn't doubt it - Speaker he may be, but Starwind was a very dry storyteller. "It goes ill for a mage to touch magic in fear. But the fear left by power theft is too dark to see from within. It consumes what it touches. There is no mage without error - I know not one. The best we can do is tread careful and repair the damage done by our mistakes. But now, when you err because you are distracted or startled, your fear claims it as evidence that your power is still not your own."
Van stared at his hands. He'd spent months thinking through smoke, seeing no more than the troubles in front of him. He'd come to hope the Tayledras would contain him. He still didn't see how else to set things right. "I tried to attack Stef in a nightmare - I can't risk that again."
"After he healed you, Moondance said to me, 'Would that I had once had such control.'" Van gasped, heart-sick. "You see? My shay'kreth'ashke well understands you." Starwind's voice turned grave, and gentle. "When Savil brought him to me, he sought death, and in our work he found renewal and forgiveness, in time." He paused, and for long moments Van felt only his deep loss, a roughness in his every quiet breath. "It hurts to know what death can take from us. Wingbrother, the wounds you have suffered will take a long time to heal in full. And with Stefen, I see you do not believe you have a long time. You don't even believe you have tomorrow. What can you do to trust that you and he will have all the time that you will need?"
Vanyel closed his eyes again. It was always too easy to despair - he'd thought of so many reasons to give up Stef, so many ways he could lose him. And he almost had. Like he'd lost so many others. "What would you do, if you were me?" he dared ask.
"I am not you," Starwind replied. "But in my life I have found an alignment between what is required of me as a mage, and what is required of me as a human. To favour one or the other would make me less of both. Containment is only a solution when that alignment proves impossible. For you it would be no solution at all."
Van felt the truth of that; at many of the lowest points of his life, magic had offered him a purpose and a route back to being part of the world. But it wasn't an answer.
"Today, I can do little," Starwind said, and Van had never heard him sound so tired before, much less old. "Tomorrow I will give honours for my wingsister, and I would have you beside me." It wasn't quite a request, and it wasn't quite his support that Starwind needed. "After, I must return to my work with our valley node, and in that I would ask your aid. We shape it to ease the burden on the land beyond the vale. Your strength would be of value in this. I have never known you to say no to new magical endeavours," Starwind noted.
"And I won't start now," Van agreed. He liked to earn his keep among his K'Treva wingsiblings, and it sounded like exactly the kind of task he'd been avoiding, and he wouldn't be working alone. I haven't had anyone to work magic with since Savil was killed. It would be good to cast peacefully beside friends, and while Starwind would never claim it would be safe, it wouldn't be combat and he wouldn't kill enemies or make new ones. He was so tired of spending his life on killing.
"Moondance said he would speak to you when he is rested." Vanyel's heart felt like thin glass. "But first," Starwind raised one white eyebrow knowingly.
"I need to see Stef." Van stretched, the light sheets slipping from his legs. Starwind waited patiently at as he rolled to his feet, and for a moment he felt dizzy, and he set his feet wide apart, feeling through them to place himself the way Starwind had long ago taught him, through the imperceptible movement of the wind in the branches of the heart-tree, through its roots to the earth, to where its life reached into the mage-stained lands and began their healing. A Tayledras in an ekele always knew where he was.
There was a folded robe by the bed; pulling its ties around himself, he found the dark green silk trailing below his ankles, and Starwind gave him a smile edged by hours-gone tears. This was Brightstar's home, then. That the moving of the Vale had coincided with the Speaker's son fledging wasn't coincidental. Family and magic all moved together here. He dimly remembered climbing up the heart-tree with Moondance what felt like days ago, his wingbrother reassuring him over and over that Stef was safe before Vanyel would accept rest and healing.
Starwind raised the hatchway and lowered himself down the steep steps cut into the limb of the ancient tree. Vanyel took three deep breaths before he followed, tasting summer on the warm wind. He reached out to Taver, not to say anything but to touch that root he had to who he was, to Valdemar, and to share what he felt in that moment. It's been so long since I felt relieved to be alive.
Starwind sent him alone into the chambers cut into the Vale's bedrock at the base of the tree; light shot through the foliage above, refracting all around from the bubbling spring at the centre of the underground room. Life flowed all around him, flowering vines, a dividing curtain that might have been cloth or willow. The sound and the light seemed designed to lull and soothe; with his lingering pain, Van could have merrily stumbled face first into the water.
He sensed presences close to him. The willowy curtain barred the way to the chamber where Moondance slept, and Van trod careful as he passed. Moondance had never relinquished his habit of living on the earth; after the years he'd spent sleeping above when Brightstar was a young child, Van suspected it was his personal affectation at this point, a willful refusal to fully assimilate. Moondance rarely spoke of his past but sometimes Van could sense him holding it in his bones, in his words. Though considering how often Tayledras scouts came home wounded, Van supposed many Tayledras healers maintained some comfortable space that wasn't halfway up a tree.
Another shade was half thrown back over a hollow, letting light into the chamber beyond. Van stepped slowly around the edge of the pool til he could see inside. Stef sat beneath a carved bed-canopy, wrapped in one of the feather-stuffed blankets that Van had only seen the K'Treva use in the dead of winter. He looked lost in its folds - a hollow face, a sharp collarbone, framed between bright blossoms and three-pointed leaves. Van froze, his heart tangled in recriminations. If he would have promised Stef any one thing, it would have been that he'd never, ever know hunger again. That he'd live well all the rest of his days, with or without Van beside him.
But I never have promised him anything.
Stef's bright eyes caught Vanyel's. Van came close and reached for his lover's hands, feeling his warmth, his strength, that deep music that he had been so afraid he would never know again.
"I can feel you," Stef observed, his hand quivering over Vanyel's. Van nodded, daring himself to keep his shields relaxed, and Stef's fear and fatigue and fluttering frustration roiled through the touch of their hands, and under it all, Stef was trying, again, his fire pulling everything together. "I was worried, after the Gate - you were like you weren't there - and when I asked Brightstar he always said you were there-above. Above what?" Stef shook his head in perplexity.
"I'll ask Starwind if I can show you later," he said. "I had to rest."
Stef rubbed at the heels of Van's thumbs with his dry fingertips. "Are you alright?"
"No," and the admission shattered some wall inside him. No, I am not alright. I haven't been alright since it happened - I lost something, something I never knew I had and I don't know how to live or breathe without. I don't know how to be the person I used to be, the person you somehow fell in love with, and the further I go from you the further I am from myself and I don't know the way back.
He shook dust from his eyes, and saw Stef on the other side, as if he had always been there, waiting for Van to see him again. "Neither am I." His eyes were tender red and utterly vulnerable. Stormy and liquid green, hiding nothing. Stef lifted the edge of the blanket, and opened his arms.
Van fell into his embrace and clutched Stef as hard as he dared, warming his whole self around that bright flame, feeling his beloved shake with that terror of having almost lost everything, while Van felt bitter tears sting his eyes for all the loves he had lost.
"I w - wasn't sure - til you touched me, I h - honestly thought I was dead. Or dreaming and dying. This is..." Stef trailed off, and his pointed finger wavered around, capturing the silk-spun bedcurtains and the sunken pool and the roots of the heart-tree beyond. Van caught it and held it tight.
"I know," he murmured. He had found it hard to take in at first, too. And he'd had Moondance to help, who at least remembered well enough being a newcomer and knew what would be strange to him.
"Brightstar w - wouldn't let me go see you - said I needed to get stronger to climb up there - I thought," and he shook his head as if trying to dislodge a metaphor. "The one moment I really believed it was last night when he caught me stumbling around trying to find a chamber pot. I still d - don't know where the kitchen is," Stef stuttered. "There's always been something to eat when I wake up. I've not got track of time. Keep falling asleep, and I saw the edge of the moon, and then sunlight... I just wanted you. Brightstar's usually here. I don't know where he's gone. We've sung and t - talked a lot. He has the Bardic Gift, you know?" Van nodded, relieved to feel such music in Stef's voice again, even in his jumbles and quavers. "So what's wrong, Van-ashke?"
Vanyel sighed, and leaned his head against his lover's. 'Nothing now,' he wanted to say, but Stef didn't need an empty wish, he needed honesty. "Starwind says there was still a trace left in my magical reserves from when Leareth stole power from me. I should have known. I've had bad memories since I left Haven - worse when I was riding east with Favinolieth. Whenever I used magic, something seemed to go wrong and I couldn't stop thinking about him or feeling like..." Van closed his eyes against Stef's implacable kindness. Put into words, it all seemed so banal, not like a nest of black snakes eating up his mind. "Moondance cleansed the wound but - I don't know when I'll feel like I did before. What if it's never?" He was grimly picturing years - or decades - of this erratic barrage of nightmares, atop the ones he'd already had, and he didn't know if he could endure it. He knew Stef deserved better than to live alongside that.
Stef stroked gently at the line where his hair met his forehead. "You're mourning it. Let yourself," he suggested gently. "You keep fighting to be somewhere else. But you're here, and so am I."
"I can't ask you to - to take care of me -"
"You don't have to. Do I have to?" Stef didn't even call him a fool, or flash with tightly leashed anger. He was tired and shaken, and truly asking nothing but to rest in his beloved's presence, and Van could only hold him and silently promise himself he'd try to become whole again, without hiding or pretending.
Eventually, Stef nudged him, with some reluctance. "Brightstar's going to come back and find us like this sooner or later."
"I don't mind that if you don't. He already knows about us," Van told him, and he Felt Stef's surprise, and it gave him a little stab of guilt. Stef had tried to match Van's limits when it came to who knew and who Van preferred did not know, even when he thought it needless. I've worried and politicked him around over so many petty fools.
"Of course I don't mind," Stef replied. "I wasn't sure what he really knew about you. But I'd noticed his fathers aren't so...subtle as us."
"Different taboos," Van replied. "Brightstar would be more affronted if we tried to hide it. Tayledras never admit to finding anything people do together strange." Indeed, Van remembered how angry Brightstar had been when Van told him that to be a gift-child was a taboo in Valdemar, as was any family arrangement outside the most common array of a mother married to a father. He'd been mollified when Van had explained the hypocrisy of this prejudice - Brightstar grudgingly agreed to compare it to the way Tayledras insist that outsiders are uncivilised and best avoided or killed, all the while hailing their Valdemaran friends.
Stef looked up at him with a sudden, intense curiosity. "Have you ever felt jealous of them? Starwind and Moondance, I mean."
The question discomfited him, but he couldn't lie to Stef now. "Yes. Of course. I first met them soon after Tylendel died." Stef's hand tightened on his forearm. "What made you ask?" Stef held his silence, his head resting on Vanyel's shoulder. A breeze stirred the curtain above them. The length of Stef's silence was answer enough. "Are you jealous of them?"
"Very," Stef admitted. "I can't look at them without thinking about how I'm going to go home with you and be discreet and inoffensive again. They act like no one would whisper or laugh about them. They have a son and no one questions it. It's so normal, they might as well be married!"
Stef sounded more mystified than resentful. Van squeezed him gently. "I see your point. I've always wondered how much easier it could have been if...if I'd seen people like them in Valdemar." All those years ago he'd been through anger, through despair and resignation until there had been nothing left but thoughts of the might-have-been where he and 'Lendel had never been taught to hide, never either of them punished for what they were. He could see Stef flickering through similar feelings now, perhaps less bittersweet - just the strangeness of coming to realise that what you'd accepted as the way of things was anything but. And on that note - "You're wrong in one respect, though."
"Oh?"
"They are married. The Tayledras custom is very different," he added, as Stef gaped at him. "I think I told you once that Tayledras trade bondbird feathers as a sign they intend to stay together for the long term? That's the only marriage rite they have. It's not overseen by a priest or a magistrate - it's usually performed in private and they say the world itself serves as witness. They speak a few traditional words, and then they display each other's feather and the rest of the tribe simply recognises the relationship."
Stef's brow creased in bewilderment. "What words?"
A knifeblade shiver ran through him.
He should have expected it. Was this how he would end, his heart stopped by his beloved's inevitable curiosity? Vanyel moved above him, and cradled Stef's face in his hands as he spoke, in Tayledras first because even without Stef's comprehending, he barely dared speak the vow Moondance had once taught him of. Stef didn't reply - how could he? - so he forced it into Valdemaran, feeling clumsy for even trying. "Stefen, would you wear my feather for all the world and skies to see?"
Light danced above them in near silence. Stef reached his thin arms around Vanyel and pulled him down tight against him. "Yes, but of course yes," he answered, so close that their lips brushed, and came together, and it was some while before they spoke again.
For the first time since autumn Van was fully open to their mingled feelings; love, shock, fear and joy and determination and desperate exhuastion. A reassurance he'd never expected. We needed those words, more than I would have ever known.
"I don't have a bondbird," he said eventually, feeling foolish.
"Does it matter?" Stef asked. "Does it - not count if we don't -"
He smiled. "I'm not worried about that. We could do something that made more sense for us. Rings, or somesuch. If you want it."
"Gods," replied Stefen, dazed. "So everyone recognises it, you say? Do we tell people?"
"Who do you want to tell?" he sighed, knowing Stef all too well.
Stef's smile turned shy. "Well, Medren. And Jisa, obviously."
"Obviously." Jisa would be tickled pink that he'd gone and married in private.
"Breda, if you'd not mind."
"She'll be relieved that I made an honest man of you."
Stef laughed weakly. "Relieved and sceptical. Gods and wild dreams, I never knew..."
"Neither did I." Van stroked Stef's hair away from his face. He understood; when Moondance told him of that vow all those years ago, his very first thought was that he would never, ever speak those words to anyone. He'd been so certain he never could. 'Lendel and I didn't dare let anyone see us, and I was sure there'd not be anyone else for me... That's what I had accepted. "I didn't know I'd have you," he said simply. He never knew he could feel so raw and wounded yet so content at the same time. "Much less that you'd stay even after everything went wrong."
"Fool," Stef muttered.
"Then I'll count you a fool for holding on." How many times had he decided it would be easier to give Stef up? I'll never think that again, not after coming so close to losing him. I can't give up on healing now. I owe us that.
"When we get back to Haven, I'm going to commandeer one of those empty suites with two or three bedrooms," he declared.
Stef nodded. "I'd like that. I want to be near you, and if you sometimes need to be alone - honestly, I'd be happy with a study with a place I can curl up and sleep. I'm not so long out of apprentice quarters. I'm not so long out of slums - really, you know I'll come anywhere so long as you were there too."
It took Van long moments to find a reply to that, and it felt difficult and frustrating. "Stef - I might be assigned to Haven, but if everything stays this volatile I'm not always going to be able to be with you -"
"I know that! I'm used to that." Stef scowled. "Just - promise me, this is all I want - promise me you won't shut me out or run away from me if I could help. If this means anything, I think it has to mean that."
Van nodded slowly. "You're right." I thought I was sparing you from the worst of me - but that was never fair to you, was it? You aren't marrying half of me. I pledged you all of me. "I promise."
Stef leaned up and kissed him again, fiercely, fit to melt him and seal the bargain there on his lips. "Good," he whispered, "Because if I ever lose you to this damned war, I want to know we shared everything we could."
The thought wrenched at his heart and his memories, but somehow Van found a smile. "I had Tran offer to Karse that I wouldn't go back to the border or cast magic there again."
Stef blinked at him thrice, slowly, confused then relieved then calculating. "I can see how that would make a useful negotiation play -"
"It took seeing the Shadow-Lover's hands on you to make me think of it." Stef stared back at him in shock. You would never have asked this of me. You know me too well for that. But I've duties more complicated than combat magic - duties to Taver, to Jisa and Treven, and to you. And to myself. Coming so close to being alone again almost broke me. "I - I couldn't think of - of going on without you. I can't make you promise to hide your life away in Haven - but I've never been so afraid."
Determination glinted in Stef's eyes like flecks of glass, softening in the kalaidoscope turn of his expression. "Look, I'm not going to pretend I regret it. But I've had time to think about it now, and I know it was a mistake - maybe one I had to make. I wanted to be involved in something that mattered. After the Karsites trapped us in Horn, I couldn't stop doing what I had to do. I stopped seeing anything else. I remembered who I used to be when I was hungry..." Stef shook his head. "I knew what to do. Everything narrowed to, to that. Does that make sense?"
Too much. Van pulled him tight against him, as if holding one safe moment was all that he dared ask for. I think I deserved for you to do - something.
"That moment you first walked into Percevar's drawing room, I was more glad that Horn had survived than I was to be alive. I'd been so afraid that we'd lose the city and no one would ever hear what had happened. And maybe my being there made a difference, just in one little city for a couple of months, but it wasn't really about me at all - I was only doing what I had to, sharing ideas, things that came into me from, from where I've been and the times I was hungry before and from you and I knew it could hold the world together, even if I was outside of it looking in. I couldn't stand the thought of that being snuffed out of the world - I'd rather have died than lost it. I know I'm not making sense. I would have written it down, but," he shrugged. "Burned all my paper after the birch kindling ran out. But if I could put it into words and music - it would go much further and faster than I could alone. I don't have to be there every time. I can't be."
"You are making sense," Van told him. He could latch on to that last part, at least.
Stef raised an eyebrow, clearly disbelieving. "Well, when I was so terrified I'd die without making anyone understand what happened there, that's a good sign I need to write about it, surely." He paused. "And that I'd never see you again. I was terrified of that too. And dying. I was afraid of nearly everything, those last two weeks. If it's any comfort, I doubt I'll ever be bored again in my life."
"You will," Van sighed. He wanted to believe Stef - it would be a relief - but Tran had been right; even if Stef himself thought that was the end of it, that wasn't so likely. "I won't tell you how to live. But I keep wondering what I would have done differently if I'd known you were in danger. I didn't know, and my mind was - it wasn't where it should have been."
"Van-ashke?" Van felt that compelling softness in him, and he wanted to submit to that healing instinct, to not even reply, just feel until he was safe again - but it wouldn't be right. A marriage might not survive silence, and this was something his - great gods - husband deserved to know.
"Everything felt wrong when I thought aboout you ever since I left Rethwallen - which makes sense now - but I took to dwelling on Tylendel," he admitted. "I even - when I used Farsight to survey Horn Citadel, I thought I saw 'Lendel talking to Percey." Stef's hand fell still against his arm, and his face turned thoughtful in a way that Van couldn't read. "I'd been thinking about him obsessively, and that crossed into my Farsight, somehow."
"I guess that's not surprising," Stef said.
His voice was flat, and Van didn't dare peer too closely at his feelings. Stef waited patiently as Van searched for the words to admit this. "Ashke - I'm not always so fixated - but I always think of him. Wherever I am, no matter what I've been doing, I still think of Tylendel every day."
"Good," Stef said, with feeling. "I'm glad you do. I trust you'd think of me, if I'd..." Van slipped his shaking fingers over Stef's lips, unable to bear the thought right now. Stef kissed them impudently. "Well, I know I'd think of you all my life. So I'm glad for him to stay in your thoughts."
It was a relief to have finally talked about it - he'd never known how to tell Stef, much less think he'd want to know. "I always think of him when I fall asleep - even beside you. And when I wake up. Sometimes in between - even a dozen times in between. Happy thoughts, if I can find them. I've wondered so many times what he'd think of you." With trembling fingers he brushed Stef's hair back behind his ears, and he had to wonder all over again. He would have liked you, but never understood you, Van decided. "It wasn't like this. I didn't have anything else in my life back then. He was everything. I couldn't see when he was going wrong." Stef's lips parted, but he said nothing. Of course he knew, everyone knew, what Tylendel had done. What his rage and power had led to. And it twisted inside him to know that was all Stef could really know of a man who'd been so, so much more. "I'll always love him," and he couldn't explain that burning-bright feeling of being together when the rest of the world was against you - too bright, blinding and destroying.
But he didn't have to. Dry fingertips touched his tears, and he felt Stef's tender understanding enveloping him. "I want you to tell me about him sometime," and that insistence only surprised him because Stef had never been so bold before.
"I will," he promised. "Sometime. And I have a favour I'd beg you in return." He lay back into Stef's pillows, and Stef looked down at him, sharp curiosity in his eyes. "When you write that epic about what happened at Horn, I need you to make Herald Torrall the hero."
"Torrall? Oh gods," Stef muttered. "Yes. I can see why. With what you're always saying about Heralds and Herald-Mages - yes. Torrall," he repeated thoughtfully.
"He hinted that he knew you," Van added, looking up into Stef's flushed face. "So what did you do to him?"
"That's a story." Van stared patiently. "Have you ever played a game of Swift Marauders?"
"Gods. Not since before I got my Whites, and I never really understood the rules."
"There aren't any. But Torrall didn't know that."
"What did you do to him?"
~
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Date: 2018-04-21 12:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-21 12:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-22 03:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-21 05:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-22 03:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-22 02:40 pm (UTC)Niofo
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Date: 2018-04-22 04:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-24 05:09 pm (UTC)As always mentions of Savil makes me very emotional so I’m glad you didn't forget about her given how long ago in this timeline she had died.
Last but not least, there was a great moment when Van and Stef talked about that cultural differences and that they felt jealous of Tayledras, bc it's so real for me. That was not stressed enough in the books. It hit me hard this time, bc I would totally stay there and never deal with the homophobic bullshit ever again in my life and of course Van and Stef have different priorities, but it nice that they're at least thinking about it.
(I have a feeling that I'm really incoherent, but whatever).
Niofo
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Date: 2018-04-25 04:07 am (UTC)I honestly didn't think of Van & Stef getting married as the 'end' of this AU until after I posted it...I am def not ruling out adding more stuff in the future, though I've not got any ideas down for after this point - however I have like 3 Van/Stef scenes from the year before this, which I'd probably just insert by slapping another chapter or two onto With Promises. (I have like ~8000 words of contiguous text that I haven't posed literally bc I keep getting stuck on the healing cock scene. Why.)
Re. Savil - I figured she was the best way to really honour Starwind's role in this fic, especially. I really did NOT want the Tayledras characters to just show up as convenient plot devices who clean up Van's disasters and dispense wisdoms - that's a big reason these 3 chapters took so long to come together. :/
You are NOT incoherent - I think your perspective is much more in line with where canon is coming from, and I grew up in that world too; the LHM is a handful of years younger than me, and I first read it in 2001 when I lived in a homophobic rural area in northern England. It dreams big but offers crumbs; there's that revelatory quality of showing us a little of Starwind & Moondance's lives, without ever making it possible for Vanyel, the protagonist, to have that. It's a small act of cruelty, that happiness - and equality - are seen but out of reach, or exist in brief idylls outside Van's 'real' life. I've come to distrust these idylls; I need queer normalcy. And the older I get, the more I find the lack of queer community in Van's life troubling. And YEP that's some canon straightness that is difficult to deal with - rather than staying near Starwind & Moondance in the Tayledras culture that will grant him dignity and equality, Van chooses to go back to Valdemar, and instead of having a queer community he gets close to his former bullies and abusers? Eeeeeesh. This is why I really, really value
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Date: 2018-04-24 04:22 am (UTC)Things I enjoyed in particular:
-Percey and his debauchery ahahaha this is great.
-The bit of exploration around how Gating works is really interesting!
-Stef doing the kyree call for help. This just felt like a very appropriate little bit of characterization.
-“The Tayledras language had no form of greeting for strangers.” I don’t know if this is from canon, but I really like it.
-Brightstar wanting to prove himself to Vanyel. This makes a lot of sense, and is a neat bit of characterization I am tempted to steal.
-“He didn't look at Vanyel, but Van sensed his regard, like a shoot growing in some dark place and trying to seek daylight.” Super poetic line.
-“When I honour her I must honour her choice to die as she lived - for Valdemar." OMG *cries*
-“And maybe my being there made a difference, just in one little city for a couple of months, but it wasn't really about me at all - I was only doing what I had to, sharing ideas, things that came into me from, from where I've been and the times I was hungry before and from you and I knew it could hold the world together, even if I was outside of it looking in. I couldn't stand the thought of that being snuffed out of the world - I'd rather have died than lost it.” This is beautiful and it feels like a really important core part of Stef that he would have this motivation.
-"But Torrall didn't know that." / "What did you do to him?" PERFECT ENDING.
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Date: 2018-04-24 04:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-25 05:09 am (UTC)-Ngl Percey was tons of fun to write.
-Stef+kyree - I like to think of this as a part of who he is. My non-AU headcanon is that wherever Stef goes, kyree periodically show up to check on him or just to hang out, and it's one of those little things about him that make people extremely nervous. He's rumoured to be a Changewolf, which is to say, he started this rumour himself because he didn't feel like explaining the real story.
-Brighstar: Savil tells Jaysen that Tayledras are 'secretive and territorial' & if he walked into Tayledras land they'd probably just kill him on sight - that's where I was coming from. Figures that Brightstar isn't used to meeting strangers. The only bit we get of him in canon involves him being convinced he owes Van, sooooo. I don't think the desire to prove himself is a stretch. XD (One other thing I was trying to work in there but which never hit the page: Brightstar didn't initially assume that Yfandes's death was violent or even unusual, because it's normal for a mage to have several bondbirds over the course of his life).
-I mentioned this upthread, but yeah I really needed Starwind to dig into his relationship with Savil.
-I really hope that when I edit this, I can make Stef's arc more clear, because I don't think it's distinct enough until he explains it to Van there at the end. I'll keep that explanation though XD
-Ngl I have no actual idea what he did to Torrall. It can remain a mystery.
100% agree about amorphous - structurally this fic is hanging from 2 bits of string and a dream, and some scenes are very thin (Van & Moondance at the end of ch 7, for example - there is some important stuff going on there but this is not a solid scene yet). I've a feeling that the main problem is that there are SO many characters who get 1 or 2 scenes each, and they all switch off in the middle, and I'm not sure there's any help for that other than strengthening their individual arcs. Stef needs a ton of work, but that'll be fun work. I know my brain, so I'm planning to let this fic sit for a couple of months before opening its guts again.
I did NOT miss your huge post btw....I've just had a hard time getting brainspace lately. REALLY hope I can dig into it over the next few days bc I am stoked <3
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Date: 2018-04-25 06:10 am (UTC)Also DID YOU KNOW about the absolutely amazing Tayledras wedding vows from one of the later books? (I think the Owlmage trilogy). They are so good, my husband and I literally used them in our anniversary ceremony in the woods and it was the best thing ever. I super want to set it up so I can have Van & Stef get married in my version, just so I can use them.
“This bond, this joining, is not meant to be a fetter. A joining is a partnership, not two people becoming one,” the second Elder said, though not as sternly as Starfall had said it the first time they took their vows. “Two minds cannot fuse, two souls cannot merge, two hearts cannot keep to the same time. If two are foolish enough to try this, one must overwhelm the other, and that is not love, nor is it compassion, nor responsibility. You are two who choose to walk the same path, to bridge the differences between you with love. You must remember and respect those differences and learn to understand them, for they are part of what made you come to love in the first place. Love is patient, love is willing to compromise—love is willing to admit it is wrong.
"There will be hard times; you must face them as bound warriors do, side by side, not using the weapon of your knowledge to tear at each other. There will be sadness as well as joy, and you must support one another through the grief and sorrow. There will be pain—but pain shared is pain halved, as joy shared is joy doubled, and you each must sacrifice your own comfort to share the pain of the other. And yet, you must do all this and manage to keep each other from wrong actions, for a joining means that you also pledge to help one another at all times. You must lead each other by example. Guide and be willing to be guided. Being joined does not mean that you accept what is truly wrong; being joined means that you must strive that you both remain in the light and the right. You must not pledge yourselves thinking that you can change each other. That is rankest folly, and disrespectful, for no one has the right to change another. You must not pledge yourselves thinking that there will be no strife between you. That is fantasy, for you are two and not one, and there will inevitably come conflict that it will be up to you to resolve. You must not pledge yourselves thinking that all will be well from this moment on. That is a dream, and dreamers must eventually wake.
"You must come to this joining fully ready, fully committed, and fully respectful of each other. Now you will no longer fear the storm, for you find shelter in each other. Now the winter cannot harm you, for you warm each other with love. Now when strength fails, you will be the wind to each other’s wings. Now the darkness holds no danger, for you will be the light to each other’s path. Now you will defy despair, for you will bring hope to each other’s heart. Now there will be no more loneliness, for there will always be a hand reaching out to aid you when all seems darkest. Where there were two paths, there is now one. May your days together be long upon the earth, and each day blessed with joy in each other.”
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Date: 2018-04-25 12:21 pm (UTC)different eyes see different things
different hearts beat on different strings
but there are times for you and me when all such things agree.
(For Van/Lendel I got Something I Will Never Have by Nine Inch Nails, ouch).
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Date: 2018-04-27 04:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-05-04 03:10 am (UTC)But then they got *married* and Van *talked* to to him! *-* *flailing*
*ahem* Also, I loved Brightstar, I loved that he got to save the day, with the magic-eater and with Stef, I loved that he got to hang out with Stef and that they seemed to get along well, and I think you did a really good job giving him that *just* on this side of adulthood pride/seriousness/stubbornness. I really liked how you wrote all three of them, actually, Brightstar, Moondance, and Starwind, (Moondance is maybe the one who felt the least clear to me?) but Brightstar is definitely my favorite in this part.
It is still a little painful how grateful Stef feels for every concession he gets from Van, and the understandable jealousy for Starwind and Moondance is kind of a lot painful but.... they’re *married!!!* xD
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Date: 2018-05-05 01:21 pm (UTC)I am also glad that Brightstar ex machina wasn't a flop - Van is necessarily a bit passive there and he keeps fucking things up, so I kept wondering if there was a more impactful way to play all that. But on the other hand, BRIGHTSTAR. He has so much presence in that tiny scene he gets in canon - he's 3 years older now but I figured he wouldn't QUITE have grown up. I deleted a line where Van was fretting abt how Stef & Brightstar are basically the same age and Brightstar may well be older ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Also a line abt how Stef taught Brightstar all of Valdemar's dirtiest songs so he could go impress all the girls with his exotic learnings.
Yeah, I undersold Moondance in a hurry to get this all online and I will need to breathe more life into that scene. I adore Moondance, but I find him harder to do justice to than Starwind, maybe bc Starwind gives no fucks.
Underrated painful bits from canon; Van originally never wanted to keep his relationship with Lendel secret, but in that scene with Savil the morning after, that expectation of dignity dies, and it stays dead. You see him fall into compliance with his society even while fighting to assert his humanity - he
Another thing I find VERY interesting is that he assumes people avoid him bc homophobia, but Tantras thinks this isn't true. I think canon thinks Tantras is correct (because Van's assumptions about people are always faulty) - which says a lot about canon - but it's also telling us that Van has set this expectation of not having any dignity or safe openness about his life. Whereas Stef is something of a contrast to that - canon makes this allusion but doesn't play it too strongly on the page, other than Stef wondering if Van's heard about his total lack of shame - but he still has to defer to Van's expectations, mostly. So I felt like, while Van would see Starwind & Moondance and just mope, Stef would be like 'I want that, how do I get that'. SO ANYWAY NOW THEY'RE MARRIED, AND JISA IS GONNA GO SPARE WHEN SHE FINDS OUT. GOD THEY'RE SO MARRIED. THAT WAS LIKE LITERALLY THE FIRST PART OF THIS I EVER WROTE, LOOK AT HOW MUCH PAIN & SUFFERING I HAD TO PILE ONTO VAN IN ORDER TO GET HIM MARRIED.
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Date: 2018-05-05 05:27 pm (UTC)Very much related, yeah "Van originally never wanted to keep his relationship with Lendel secret, but in that scene with Savil the morning after, that expectation of dignity dies, and it stays dead. You see him fall into compliance with his society" was a punch in the gut. I honestly never saw it that way? Or at least didn't understand the *weight* of that death-of-hope. But it's so, painfully true. There was a lot in the differences between Van and Stef that canon never *had* to get into because... you know... they were together about a minute before Van was dead. I definitely read it all differently at this point in my life, with my current understanding of the world, than I did the first time when I was 11, or the dozens of times I reread it through high school, but this is something I truly never fully grasped, but legit, I appreciate you drawing my attention to this aspect...even if it hurts... ;-;
And in light of his lifelong snowballing internalized everything, it's not surprising it would take crashing into a mountain to shake some of that packed-in trauma and self-doubt and internalized shame off enough to get him and Stef *MARRIED* (still SQUEEEEEEEEEEEIIIIINNNNNGGGG) I didn't know how much I needed this, I'm usually pretty indifferent to the romantic trappings on the outside of a relationship as long as the goopy, lovey core is there xD ...but it was such a goopy, lovey moment and I loved it and now they're married and Van was talking about getting rooms where they could live together and Stefen can be his husband and he can be Stef's and they can be together and it was worth EVERY SECOND OF THE PAIN!!! <3 <3 <3
*clutches fic, heart-eyed and crying*
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Date: 2018-05-06 03:06 pm (UTC)(other headcanons: after Van reconciled with Withen, he came back to Stef all tearful & told him about it and they had their first real, ugly argument. Stef would NOT have been pleased about Van's offer to Withen, much less that Van hadn't talked to him about it.)
The man is never not suicidal, ever, surrounded by healers and mind-healers and empaths and telepaths, and the best anyone can ever seem to do for him is convince him he shouldn't die right now because everyone needs him alive to save them... - I wonder about this a lot. I wondered if it's demonstrating the limits of Mindhealing, or that Van is catastrophically bad at self care, but it is so painfully clear that no one reached in for him, not really, or realised that his baseline 'normal' was really not okay. And what he offers Stef - there's that wrenching feeling on multiple levels - yes that's all Van knows, but it's also all canon has to offer. this is why i need this fandom to live ;___;
Now I'm thinking of Van's argument with Jisa when she got married & how she said he would have defied anyone to have Lendel - which is a truth that he'd lost touch with. Earlier in the book he'd been like 'yeah it's sad but Treven & Jisa get it, Duty > Love' and it doesn't even occur to him that duty isn't even a problem here (whereas Treven has an Actual Shipping Grid pinned to his wall & has spent the last year keeping fanatical tabs on every royal romance rumour on the entire continent, and while he didn't actually hire an assassin to deal with that one recalcitrant Hardornen princess he DID throw a party when she died of the flu. Jisa has never nudged any of these visiting foreign princesses to hook up with someone else, because that would be Unethical, but there's nothing wrong with a bit of girl talk about their options, is there? I think the depth of research Trev put into this issue is under-discussed. The man's a machine.)
ANYWAY I always figure Van's low expectations for personal happiness never did him any favours - apart from anticipating homophobic reactions, I figure he got in bed with more than a few assholes - one of Gilda's early fics has Van talking about his shitty ex Alexei and I totally embrace this headcanon.
'Magical metaphors for Real Shit' is another trope I love... My go-to example is Jessica Jones & how the show uses superpowers to demonstrate how everyone will enable your abuser. (: Also, it is funny how much of this fic got inspired by me struggling with a shoulder injury for the last year & that being a wake up call abt how bad I am at taking care of myself etc etc *hides*
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Date: 2018-05-07 05:48 am (UTC)And I'm glad you got such a gorgeous fic out of it, with such a perfect ending to this part. ...I do very look forward to the part where Jisa finds out and is beside herself with joy and with frustration that it happened *without* her there >;)
(I can totally see Treven with a shipping grid/wall--that is a terrible and hilarious image, lol.)
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Date: 2018-06-21 01:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-22 01:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-22 06:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-25 01:56 am (UTC)Omfg I NEED THIS BADLY. Holy fuck. Would he ever forgive him? How unrepentant is Lendel exactly? *popcorn*