Archive of Our Own ^beta

Beyond the glass door, the morning shone golden. The sliding glass door led to a balcony, which wound around the curve of the building and turned into a flight of spiraling stone steps, leading down into a courtyard.

It was early enough in the year that the ornamental trees were green, and not bloomed, but the tiny courtyard garden, though untended, had a charm to its overgrown, untrimmed state. The grass here, unlike the front courtyard, was lush and deep green, and the stone walls were covered in climbing vines. Green, but touched with purple flecks. Tomasind had not seen their like before, and thought they were not something planted by the elven owner.

Vixelandri led them from this enclosed garden beyond an iron gate, and out into another empty space. A training yard, Tomasind guessed by the targets and dummies. It had probably had this purpose previously, but the new inhabitants were making use of it now, judging by the nicks and gouges.

The ground was either loose dirt or sand of some mythologically ancient ocean that had once pitted its shores against this mountainside. Tomasind shifted her footing as she entered the training yard. 

But the sand hardly stirred under the easy glide of Lord Shahum's footwork as he sparred against his opponent, a yellow-hued draconid about twice Vixelandri's bulk and clearly specialized in skills that did not involve sitting at a desk. They were locked against each other--mace against broken spear--and when Vixelandri cleared his throat, they broke off instantly, not revealing who would have won that contest of strength. Lord Shahum retained the broken spear, while his draconid opponent retained the mace.

Tomasind had not set eyes on Lord Shahum until then. He was one of the Overlord's chimera generals. Or had been, at any rate; still a chimera, hardly a general. A gorgonid, Tomasind had heard them call themselves. She'd also heard they were grown in dark pits, thrown together to fight one another, and whichever survived would have been put in charge of their own troops.

But she'd heard the more plausible explanation from one of the elven arcanists who deigned to speak to the common troops, that the gorgonids were most likely some experiment of the Overlord's, splicing together the characteristics of various creatures he thought were menacing. It was why none of them ever looked like each other, despite ostensibly being treated as the same species.

When Lord Shahum turned towards them, Vivasind twitched, visibly enough that Tomasind saw it out of the corner of her eye. Tomasind wished her cousin had had better control of herself, but there was no helping it now. 

But that reaction seemed to startle Shahum as much as he'd startled Vivasind, and he rolled back a step on the balls of his feet, looking oddly uncertain for someone who'd once been chosen to lead monsters into bloody battle. His feet, Tomasind noticed, were digitigrade, with elongated talons gripping down reflexively. The hems of his loose trousers seemed tied up around his ankles to keep from tripping him. His torso was built along humanoid lines, which Tomasind could see because he wore no shirt.

He was lean, she noticed. Not muscled as heavily as the draconid he'd been sparring, but clearly someone who worked his body even after the war ended. From the sides of his head emerged a pair of back-swept horns, the same black shade as his hair, and he was red. All over. A dark, even shade of crimson that almost hurt to look at in the morning sun, especially since he glinted with sweat.

Tomasind squinted a bit, but at Vixelandri, who was smiling his fanged smile and looking at her in turn, expectant. Had the steward arranged specifically for her to meet Lord Shahum when he was half-dressed and engaged in this flattering form of physical exertion?

If she walked back up the stairs into the solarium, and scoured Vixelandri's bookcases, would she find somewhere in its depths one of those cheap butcher-paper romances that the dwarven printing presses spilled out onto the semi-literate populace for their titillation?

No, Tomasind thought as she narrowed her eyes further at Vixelandri; this one would hide his smut better. In a locked desk drawer, she'd bet. Under the floorboards?

Apparently disappointed at the ineffectiveness of his maneuver (and if he had just asked, Tomasind would have informed him that she'd had her fill of seeing men train shirtless in the army, and quite a few women as well), Vixelandri shifted off from Tomasind's side to Shahum's, opening his arms widely as if to draw everyone in.

"My lord," Vixelandri started, "this is Tomasind, the chieftain from the valley. I've spoken of her to you, if you'll recall." 

"Heed," Shahum said in recognition. Or maybe as a greeting towards Tomasind, by the way his eyes were fixed on her. His tone was neutral, almost unreadable. His expression was blank, but lacking tension. If his face was hiding anything, it was perhaps curiosity; or at least that was the impression Tomasind got.

There was a lapse into silence as Tomasind and Shahum inspected each other. She wondered how she looked in his eyes. She'd once had a very clear image of herself, when she'd been younger and pleasantly curved. The long years of war had bitten out the softness from her features, and then the steady grind towards middle age had given her some heft in exchange. But she'd never been particularly tall, and so she stood up to Shahum's shoulder in height.

The silence was hard on Vixelandri, and as it dragged on, his head swung towards Vivasind, his expression going through contortions of pleading. Vivasind, bless her, did nothing but shrug in his direction. Tomasind watched this interplay out of the corner of her eye, and hoped Lord Shahum was enjoying the show as well.

But perhaps he wasn't paying attention, because his focus seemed to be on her, instead. He tilted his head at her, a strangely elegant gesture with how it was emphasized by the horns. He was a lithe creature, clearly an early creation of the Overlord's. Towards the end of the war, all his gorgonids were bulkier, more monstrous in proportions. Less intelligent, as well, and more pliant to the Overlord's will. Shahum was... a subtler creature, Tomasind thought.

Husband material, though?

Well, the pickings weren't good. The Heed had returned to their homes much reduced in numbers. The farms had been abandoned, or had outlived their occupants. The secret orchards they kept in the mountains mostly still existed, though two of them had been destroyed in the same catastrophic event which had split the mountain pass, and one had been wiped by a landslide. The orchards which remained might feed the depleted Heed, but they would not bear fruit for months yet. Wild grains grew in the mountain, and the hunting was still good, but if the winter was harsh enough, they'd be eating their own goats.

And Shahum... was doing well. She'd heard. The few merchants who braved the pass were eager to give him deference. But nobody knew how he fed his subjects, except that he must have found some way, since his monsters were not raiding the valleys. The Heed had been away from home too long, and now somebody knew something they didn't.

Curiosity, if nothing else. Tomasind had to learn what he knew and that she no longer did about this place. 

Vixelandri, who was near humming with anxiety as he looked back and forth between her and Shahum, was put out of his misery when Lord Shahum turned to him.

"Are we to be married, then?" Lord Shahum asked.

"It is up to you, my lord," Vixelandri replied, clearly trying to keep his exasperation in check. Tomasind got the feeling that they'd discussed the matter intensely, but had both come away from the conversation expecting the other to have the final word on the matter. Shahum was unflappable; Vixelandri was stressed. Tomasind, like any good chieftain, decided to be the tie-breaker.

"We can have the wedding down in the valley," she said.

Shahum's brow furrowed thoughtfully.

"I don't go to the valley," he said, "usually."

"It's an unusual occasion, to be sure," Tomasind said. "It will be a small affair. A very small affair," she added, thinking of how few of her people remained, and swallowing back the pang this provoked. Hundreds, still. But they'd been thousands once.

"Do I... have to bring something?" Shahum asked.

"Only yourself," Tomasind said. "And anyone you'd like to invite. Anything else is optional."

Shahum nodded, his eyes sliding off to look at the fortress behind her, as if already mentally putting together his wedding party. Hopefully he wouldn't invite everyone he knew, but then before Tomasind could worry about it overly much, his eyes slid back to her, attentive and strangely focused. His eyes were a shade of green that didn't quite go with his red complexion.

He gave a bobbing bow--his legs bent oddly with it--and moved his head in that graceful tilt again.

"My lady," he said, and it sounded like something he practiced.

Hardly a lady, but Tomasind at least knew a response to this. She matched his bow.

"My lord," she said in turn.

They parted on these oddly formal terms, and Tomasind went back to Vixelandri's solarium, where she instructed the steward on what the occasion would demand.

Shahum, she thought, probably understood what it meant to matter little. The Overlord had been always had the advantage of numbers, and that made him free-handed with their lives. She'd heard once that the Overlord had promised to make his gorgonid generals into princes of Aefwael once the continent was conquered. Maybe it had even been his true intent. But Shahum clearly hadn't believed it, since he'd defected. Or maybe he had, and given up that promise of power anyway. For what, an old elven hunting cabin filled with monsters?

"He saw me," Tomasind added more quietly, and to herself.

Vivasind snorted, shrugged, and sent the children off to find more flowers.

"They'll strip the meadows clean for your garlands," Tomasind said, amused.

"Let the children have their fun," Vivasind groused back. "When else are they going to see a proper wedding?"

The children were all born after the Heed had left their village, and had only seen weddings in army camps, cobbled together from whatever supplies could be swiped or taken off the land. Vivasind had made flower garlands before, a few times, when they'd been stationed in places that could supply the material for them. When there were no flowers, Vivasind still managed to procure alcohol from the officers' reserves.

Now Vivasind was showing the young ones how to prepare for a wedding, and ordering them about. Tomasind had never seen someone so quickly persuade the little brats to sweep up. The village square had been cleaned of all leaves, and the small decorative fountain was unclogged and filled with clean water.

Later, in the house, Vivasind knocked out more thoughts on the upcoming nuptials.

"The high and mighty lord might not have all that much more than we do," she said, as she deftly let out Tomasind's best dress around the hips.

"I don't think many people do, anymore," Tomasind said. "But he's survived and prospered well enough so far. I'm sure there's something there."

"Need to figure it out, huh?" Vivasind asked, her smile growing lopsided. "Always need to figure things out."

Tomasind shrugged, and Vivasind clicked her tongue to remind her that she needed to stop moving unless she wanted to get stuck with a needle. But Vivasind could accept Tomasind's ravenous curiosity, even if that led Tomasind to binding herself to this strange husband. They didn't need to discuss it to know where they both stood. 

During the war, Tomasind had been a trapbreaker. For everything that was stuck in a magical trap, and couldn't be destroyed or done without, they would call someone exactly like Tomasind to break it open. There was a skill to knowing how to unravel an enchantment, and often there was no overlap between people who could build a trap and people who could open it while leaving the contents undamaged. No overlap, but a fierce game of one-upmanship.

Vivasind, by contrast, had been Tomasind's spotter. It was a relationship of trust, inherently. Trapbreaking was delicate and dangerous work. Tomasind had to trust not only that her spotter could protect her, but that she could work uninterrupted, often during heavy combat. Vivasind hadn't been her first spotter, but she had been the only one to survive the war in that role.

And Vivasind knew her cousin well enough to recognize that she could well enough get herself out of this tangle alone, if she had to. But mercy, back-up was always good to have.

"I used to be a good seamstress, back in the day," Vivasind sighed around the pins she had gripped between her teeth.

"You used to have more fingers, back in the day," Tomasind replied.

Vivasind demonstrated how able her remaining fingers were by making an obscene gesture in Tomasind's direction, and then they both lapsed into snickers.

When they'd left home, they had both been still young enough that they would have gotten their ears tweaked by any elders who saw that vulgar gesture. Now... thirteen years later, and Tomasind wasn't even as old as she felt.

The dress ended up fitting better than Tomasind expected, and she spun in the middle of her bedroom to feel the skirts swing around her. Vivasind watched while propped against the doorframe, a kindly guardian securing the entry against anyone who might barge in and see Tomasind engaged in this brief, girlish game.

Later, Vivasind braided flowers in Tomasind's hair, a few mountain carnations in dramatic red, and some snowdrop lilies that were just going of of season.

"Don't give him that look of yours," Vivasind advised, as she adjusted on last carnation behind Tomasind's ear. "It makes men wilt."

"What look?" Tomasind said, indignant. She thought she knew what Vivasind meant, but she wouldn't play into it so easily.

"The look," Vivasind continued, undaunted. "You know the one. Your thinking face."

"Guess I just won't think, then," Tomasind threw her hands up.

"Don't, then. Too late to change your mind anyway," Vivasind said, gesturing towards the window. "The groom's party is arriving."

Tomasind pressed her hands gently against the flowers in her hair, feeling out their soft petals, and recalling the particular crimson of the carnations as Lord Shahum approached the village.

The houses of the village were heavy timber, their roofs sharply angled to shed snow more easily, but age and weather had given the architecture a soft curve: a worn luster where hands came to rest on banisters or sills, a soft bend of a pillar bowed under heavy weight. It was the look of home to Tomasind, and after following the turns of war across Aefwael from one end to the other, Tomasind had still never encountered a place where she felt such comfort.

The small fountain in the village square was dwarven make, unlike the human-built houses. A souvenir from a wandering engineer who'd once ended up in the Heed village after a string of misadventures. It was something abstractly shaped, but the dwarf had insisted the statuette which spouted water into the basin below represented a bird. Perhaps that was how dwarves saw birds, once they stripped everything to the basest concepts: a sinuous meeting of lines. Aerodynamics, dwarves called it.

It was an odd enough piece that it had been a touchstone in the community. The village Heed and the mountain Heed would both set meetings 'at the bird', and as far as Tomasind remembered, the village did not really have a square until the concept seemed to materialize around the fountain. Was this how dwarven cities became that way? Did they arrange themselves by the markers that dwarves put down? Tomasind couldn't quite wrap her mind around it.

Now the village houses had been decorated with long ropes of flowers, and lamps had been lit in the trees. The long table had been set, along with the benches, and the food was being brought out by efficient adults holding up the plates as the children ran around, reaching with their grubby hands for anything they could grab.

Tomasind couldn't recall having this much cheek at their age, but then, she hadn't grown up fending for herself in a followers' camp.

She couldn't recall ever eating this well since leaving home, either. The village cooks had worked all day to turn forage, flour and choice beef into a proper feast. The foraged fruit and the wild grain flour had been courtesy of the mountain, but the beef, surprisingly, had come from the future in-laws, as the village tactfully called them.

Vixelandri had insisted on contributing to the wedding, and though he mostly had been at the receiving end of a crash course in Heed nuptial traditions, he'd insisted on imposing some entirely draconid concepts of courtship, and thus he had sent ahead a cart full of beef cuts.

Vivasind had pointed out that nowhere outside Lord Shahum's fortress did there appear to be any cows. There were pastures up in the mountains, all of them known to the Heed, but they had not been used by anyone recently. And the fortress had gardens, but they were all too overgrown to indicate the existence of even one cow. Yet Vixelandri had implied that they had a whole herd somewhere, and sending meat down to the village was no problem.

When the beef had arrived, already helpfully quartered for transport by cart, Vivasind had been the first to cook a slice and test it out.

She'd made the most conflicted face while chewing, too.

"Small gods, I can't explain it," Vivasind said between bites. "I see why you'd want to figure them out."

"Is it bad?" Tomasind asked, leaning over to sniff the cooked meat.

"It's delicious," Vivasind burst out, almost outraged. "But where were they hiding cows? Did you know about this?"

Tomasind was just as much at a loss. They ought to have asked Vixelandri when he offered the beef, but both she and Vivasind had been so skeptical, that it had not crossed their minds to entertain the notion. If there'd been cows, the mountain would have told them. They'd been away a long time, but not long enough that they forgot how to listen for something like that.

Now all they could do was cook it, and try to press Vixelandri for details at the wedding.

Luckily, the bridegroom's wedding party included Vixelandri as it came winding down the path. They came by foot into the village, though Tomasind could tell, if she extended her attention towards the copse of trees just beyond the road, that they had traveled down the mountain by some dwarven vehicle, and left it in the forest. Fair enough; those dwarven wagons were loud and spewed a sort of smoke that clung to everything. 

Lord Shahum was now dressed in a set of elven short robes in gold and black that off-set the overwhelmingly crimson shade of his skin nicely. Vixelandri, also in elven robes, though a different set since last time, followed at Lord Shahum's heels like a second shadow.

The other members of the party were... eclectic, to say the least. All of them wore some manner of robes that they'd likely plundered from the abandoned wardrobes of their fortress. Between the dozen of them, there were two more draconids, a couple of eyeless, three spinners, something that Tomasind would have assumed to be a gargoyle but for the lack of wings, and an assortment of chimera, probably unique unto themselves. 

Tomasind's nervous hands kept finding the flowers in her hair, and then drawing away, especially after Vivasind slapped her hand down, hissing 'you'll bruise the petals' in her ear. 

Across the village square, at the other end of the long table, Vivasind's opposite number was busy gently bullying the groom. Brackand, as the eldest unwed young man in the village, would be shadowing Shahum the same way that Vivasind was going to be by Tomasind's side until the wedding's conclusion.

Lord Shahum tolerated with great dignity as Brackand twisted a string of flowers around his horns, though in odd moments, Tomasind suspected he was not entirely at ease. He was cut along sinuous lines, just like the dwarven bird statue. Reduced to his most basic concepts, Tomasind could see how he'd fit into a battlefield. Now he was stepping into matters entirely foreign to the purpose of his existence, and thus the poise he displayed was all to Shahum's credit, and not his former creator's.

Shahum's wedding party was all trying to emulate his poise, but they did so stiffly. Vixelandri flitted nervously on his feet, displaced as he had been from his seat by Brackand, but the entire affair seemed altogether more subdued because of how hard everyone was attempting to stay on their best behavior. Even the children, who'd been shrieking and laughing from the top of their lungs all day, and whose usual role during any wedding proceedings would have been to tease the couple relentlessly, were keeping nervously away from Lord Shahum and, out of a sense of egalitarianism instilled in them by firm lectures earlier that day, they kept away from Tomasind as well, so as to not show favoritism.

Since the chatter wasn't picking up as much as Tomasind would have liked, she signaled for one of the Heed to approach, and whispered a suggestion in his ear. The man--Hannand was his name--perked up, and ran to fetch his fiddle.

In a show of zeal that was slightly misjudged, but much appreciated, Hannand set his fiddle against his shoulder and launched into a blistering jig that managed to startle everyone present.

For at least a few minutes, before a handful of villagers scattered into their houses and returned with their own instruments. Mostly woodwinds, though Tomasind saw Heffin use a stool for percussion.

"Good call," Vivasind said, sharply observing the bridegroom's party as the atmosphere livened considerably.

They were still stiff, but once one of the village women grabbed Vixelandri's arm and commandeered him for a spin on the dance floor, some unseen barrier seemed to have been broken between the two groups. 'Safe to touch,' Tomasind thought dryly, remembering the way she'd signal when a trap was disarmed.

One of the eyeless offered a piece of something shiny to a child, who accepted the offering with suspicion, and then promptly tried to put it in their mouth, much to the eyeless' alarm. Once the item was pried out of the child's mouth, though, all the other children crowded around to see what the shiny thing was. Tomasind couldn't see it properly; some kind of stone, perhaps.

The wingless gargoyle, standing upright with the help of a cane and clad in what Tomasind was sure were funeral robes, left their seat to walk hesitantly up to the fountain, where they peered into the water like it would tell them secrets. Perhaps it would. The water in the fountain was always a burbling, happy thing, and it imparted gossip indiscriminately. The trick was knowing how to listen.

As the music wheeled through several traditional dances, and then through a selection of songs collected from all around the continent and reinterpreted through new instruments, Tomasind was invited to dance by other Heed around her age. They spun her on the dance floor until her head was light, and then a couple of little girls took her hands and dragged her along for a hopping group dance that Tomasind wouldn't have guessed the younger generation knew. When had they been taught it?

And between each dance, she would be taken to a different seat at the long table, and offered tidbits of the feast from other people's plates. 

Shahum was undergoing the same treatment, though he didn't know any of the dances, so when he was dragged off to the dance floor, it was because the music changed, so he would be instructed in some new steps. 

He took to these lessons with a focus that gave him an air of fierceness, but far from intimidating the Heed, this made them all the more eager to teach him. There was a delightful springiness to his step that made him fascinating to watch in motion, and despite the motions of his body, his face remained fixed and serious. Tomasind didn't know if he could even smile, but he seemed to enjoy the dancing more for the exertion, than for anything else.

And, of course, he would also be delivered to some other seat than his own at the long table, and offered little pieces of food, but the wedding party always seemed to time it in such a way that Tomasind and Shahum wouldn't be sitting down at the same time. Tomasind didn't mind; she liked the opportunity to see him dance, and appraise him.

It didn't occur to her that she might be appraised as well, until she was spun a bit too hard, and staggered in a missed step, stopping at the edge of the dance floor to breathe heavily. A flower escaped her braid, and she shook her head uncertainly, testing to see if anything else would fall out. Her eyes fell on Shahum by accident, and their gazes crossed for only a moment before she was stolen into another dance.

But she felt his eyes on her after that, like the lens of his attention left heat against her skin. It was self-consciousness, she suspected.

She didn't have time to unravel the source of these feelings by the time the dancing stopped, and she was once again delivered to a seat at the long table.

She was dizzy from all the spinning she'd endured, and so it took her a moment to notice that she had been placed in the seat next to Shahum.

Tomasind felt a jolt of surprise at this, even though she knew this was what the events of the evening had been leading to. And it was truly evening now. The square was illuminated only by the light of the lanterns which had been hung in the trees whose branches stretched out over the square.

Shahum, perhaps more resigned to being surprised than she was, extended a hand to offer her a flower. Tomasind took it from his palm before she noticed it was one of the red mountain carnations which had been braided in her hair. It had fallen out.

Her entire face was already flushed from all the dancing, but she felt the heat redouble, and twisted in her seat to look at him closely. What a strangely romantic gesture, from a creature meant for war. Where had he learned to do that?

She could ask, perhaps, but she didn't want the charm of the gesture to be undercut by some admission that Vixelandri had instructed Shahum on romance, based on questionable dwarven literature. So instead she smiled at him, and bobbed her head in thanks, and Shahum seemed to shy back, this time he being the one surprised. What an odd man.

'But are we all actually odd to him?' Tomasind wondered.

The music died down. One of the spinners, in a lull between jigs, had taken out a small lyre from somewhere inside her robes.

"May I?" she asked, her voice self-assured, but her demeanor hesitant.

"Do spinners know music?" Tomasind asked, now intrigued by the prospect. 

"They play beautifully," Shahum confirmed, his voice so soft and warm that even though he hadn't come any closer to Tomasind, it still felt as though he'd whispered it into her ear.

The spinner stood up to play, and both humans and their instruments quieted as the first strings were plucked, and the notes turned into a sweet, wavering melody.

"Ah," Tomasind breathed out in realization, though she didn't know what she'd realized yet. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Shahum nodding agreement.

Both her rooms and the solarium were part of the original building, so if she reached the cold granite of the new additions, she knew she'd gone too far. The contrast was interesting to judge, however. The cold, hard practicality of the stone husk that had been grown to turn the hunting cabin into a fortress dictated a certain sparsity of decor, but the inhabitants had pressed their own personality into it. There were tapestries hanging from some of the walls, not representing scenes or landscapes as the elven ones did, but instead showing abstract patterns. In odd places, there were resin wall fixtures, pleasantly shaped, but also abstract. The greenish tint of the lighting didn't make it look very reassuring, but it was a harmless kind of odd. She wondered if they were trying to capture some predetermined aesthetic, or if this was something they were exploring all by themselves.

Tomasind found the old corridors easier to navigate, at least. They were still cluttered with plenty of elven nonsense, the heavy rugs and drapes and statues and tapestries that often filled elven spaces to excess, as well as some stuffed and mounted beasts that Tomasind could have done without, but there was an air of subtle neglect to it all, as if all those expensive items were merely something the current residents hadn't bothered to remove or rearrange yet. Out of a kind of shyness, or a failure of imagination?

She found the solarium, eventually, but Vixelandri was not there. It was stifling hot in the room, all the light concentrated on the spot where Vixelandri had placed his desk, though she suspected that was what he liked about it. She peered out onto the balcony, and down into the garden, but Vixelandri was not there, either.

Since she was getting nowhere by herself, Tomasind traced her path back out of the solarium and down the hallway. She'd heard the muffled notes of music from beyond a heavy door, and since there were no bedchambers in this wing, she assumed it must not be anyone's quarters.

She poked her head past the door, and into what appeared to be a music room. There were spinners inside, five of them spread across varying surfaces, a couple holding instruments, one sitting on top of a piano, turned towards the keys so she could still play it. 

Crouched on the floor next to a very large harp was a widowmaker. She wore a whisper-silk veil, which was unusual for a widowmaker, but she was so large that the veil was the size of a tablecloth. Her white dress did look made out of actual tablecloths, and pooled over the odd angles of her anatomy.

Tomasind swallowed to help her suddenly dry mouth, but didn't back out. She didn't enter the room fully, either, though, and the spinners, their instruments fallen silent, regarded her without saying anything.

"I'm sorry to interrupt," Tomasind said, "but I don't suppose any of you know where Vixelandri is? I can't find him in the solarium."

The smaller worker caste spinners didn't say anything, though they subtly shifted their heads in a way that suggested they were looking to the widowmaker. Tomasind had never seen the warrior caste spinners be anything but brutal and unforgiving towards the worker caste, but if they seemed scared of anyone, it was of Tomasind.

Moving ponderously slow, the widowmaker extended one of her serrated forelimbs to pluck a single note on her harp, which Tomasind assumed was the only instrument large enough that she could play comfortably. The widowmaker didn't start playing, however. It was a distracted gesture, more than anything, as she tilted her head in thought. The whisper-silk veil brushed against her shoulders with a hiss.

"Vixelandri will be fretting on the doorsteps until the master returns," the widowmaker replied eventually, her voice a pleasant lilt that came as a surprise to Tomasind. The smaller spinners had voices like the grind of stone against stone. The widowmakers Tomasind had encountered on the battlefield hissed and clicked. And the few defectors Tomasind had come across spoke not a word.

"Thank you," Tomasind replied, and after a moment offered, "I'm Tomasind-heed-Arping."

"We know," the widowmaker replied, plucking another string. An amused high note, this time.

"I thought you might tell me your names, if you had them," Tomasind continued. Perhaps this was not a conversation to be had while she was creeping by the doorframe, but now she was curious.

One of the smallers spinners threw one of her hands up, and Tomasind was startled until she realized it was only meant to draw attention.

"I have one," she said, sounding almost proud. "Arletta. It was given to me."

"Nice to meet you, Arletta," Tomasind replied.

Arletta turned to the other spinners, with a pedagogical air about her.

"That is what you are supposed to say when someone tells you her name," Arletta said in a perfectly even tone. "Not 'why'."

One of the other spinners looked tweaked by this comment, and turned half away indignantly.

The widowmaker plucked out two notes, one high and one lower, and whatever she communicated through this, it was perceived by the other spinners with amusement.

"I am Candablera," the widowmaker imparted.

"Nice to meet you too, then," Tomasind replied. "And thank you for your help."

"Yes, you have said already." Candablera waved her forelimb vaguely. Unlike the worker castes, she didn't have much of a hand to speak of, but Tomasind sensed it was dismissal.

She nodded once and retreated out of the music room, closing the door behind her. She was going to have to find out how the spinners selected their names, because 'Arletta' was a perfectly ordinary elven name, but 'Candablera' was a type of dwarven chamber music.

Shahum pulled on the reins and his mount halted in front of the steps. He rode without a saddle, which Tomasind wouldn't have guessed was practical on top of the smooth carapace, but his feet were gripped against some ridge between the carapace and the warcricket's belly, and Tomasind decided she wasn't going to look too closely, because analyzing the anatomy of a warcricket felt like trying to mentally disassemble a dwarven engine. Independently, all the pieces looked absurd, but they somehow worked together to great result.

Whatever Vixelandri was going to say to Shahum, Tomasind's presence turned out to be inhibiting, because despite the fact that he'd been waiting the entire time for Shahum to return, the draconid only hunched his shoulders and touched the tips of his fingers together, leaning forward with a question in his eyes.

Shahum shook his head, and this wasn't like his delicate head tilts, it was a visceral gesture, like the shudder of self-loathing bubbling up. It ruffled his hair, which was already falling to his shoulders in tousled black waves from the ride.

"What is happening?" Tomasind asked.

Vixelandri's eyes darted to her. Shahum, conversely, looked at some spot far above Tomasind's head.

"What did you lose?" she tried again. "I'm certain I could help you find it, if it's anywhere on the mountain."

This seemed to get their attention at least, and they exchanged a look that seemed to encompass an entire conversation. After a few moments, Vixelandri broke off the gaze and cleared his throat.

"One of the spinners is... missing," he said, not quite meeting Tomasind's eyes. "I was certain she was there when we were all getting into the wagon, but when we arrived, she was not... present."

"You went back to the village to look for her?" Tomasind turned to Shahum, surprised. Mercy, what would they think about his return to the village when they'd just seen him off? Especially riding one of... those things.

"They didn't see me," Shahum replied.

"So you didn't ask anyone if they'd seen her, either," Tomasind said.

Awkward silence again. Vixelandri was the one to brave an answer.

"We... don't want to make it seem like we suspect the Heed of any wrong-doing," Vixelandri spoke carefully.

"But you don't want to rule out that any wrong-doing was committed," Tomasind filled in the rest.

Now things were properly awkward. Tomasind almost relished it, for how easy to read they were. 

"She's my responsibility," Shahum said slowly.

"She's mine too, then," Tomasind said, and walked down the steps. "The village is the last place she was seen?"

"She was there when we were boarding the wagon," Vixelandri confirmed.

Shahum merely watched Tomasind, his face unreadable but his eyes tracking every step that Tomasind took down the twenty stairs of the front entrance.

When she reached the bottom, she turned to give Vixelandri an inquiring look.

"I don't suppose Vivasind sent my goat here, too," she said.

"No," Vixelandri answered, surprised.

"Didn't think so," Tomasind muttered to herself, and shook her head. She trotted up to Shahum's warcricket instead, giving its head a wide berth and approaching along the side.

When she extended her hand to him, Shahum stared at it without seeming to understand.

"We'll take your ride down to the village," Tomasind said, and kept her hand outstretched to him.

He paused for a moment longer after he understood, gripped by some hesitation whose source she couldn't pinpoint, but he finally took her hand and then, stirred to action, leaned down to help her climb up on the warcricket.

Tomasind regretted the choice of skirt now that she was in the position of having to ride sidesaddle on a giant bug without the benefits of an actual saddle, but at that point it was a matter of principle, and she couldn't be entirely sure that time wasn't a factor. 

Her side was up against Shahum's front, and as he drew the warcricket around, she held on with an arm around his waist, gripping onto the back of his shirt for dear life with one hand, and to the front of his shirt with the other. He'd shed the outer robes he'd been wearing at the wedding, leaving only the soft silken undershirt, black in color, and she hoped it wasn't going to tear, because there was no chance she was going to let go until they were fully stopped. The warcricket had a smoother stride than she expected, as smooth as a glide, but it also went faster than she was prepared for, and the way the landscape became a blur when it picked up speed was making her nervous.

She closed her eyes, but the smooth, rapid steps of the warcricket combined with the whipping wind against her side were such an alien experience to any mode of transportation she was used to, that she didn't know if not seeing anything actually helped. She didn't open them, though, turning her face into Shahum's chest for good measure. He smelled of something herbal--most likely because of the clothes he wore, since elves often stored pouches of plants to keep pests away. But there was a stringent note under that smell that Tomasind associated with infirmaries. Disinfectant, she thought. It struck her as strange.

The way from the fortress down to the village wasn't terribly long, and in the intervening years before the Heed returned home, someone had cut a path--not quite a road--from the fortress all the way through the woods and down into the valley, winding off a little ways off the village roads. But when the warcricket came to a skittering stop, it surprised Tomasind with how quickly they'd reached their destination.

She recognized the woods outside the village. They were still, with nothing but the chirp of insects and the beams of sunlight through the trees. Most of the villagers were still asleep, or if not, then cleaning up after the previous night's festivities. And for any soul that wandered near, Tomasind knew how to be so quiet that not even the attuned magical senses of other Heed could sense her.

Shahum didn't know this, and did not ask. He shifted his weight on top of the warcricket, raising his head to peer around like a beast scenting the wind.

"Does she have a name?" Tomasind asked. "The spinner."

"No," Shahum said, and Tomasind got the sense that he internally winced at his own brusque tone, because he added more gently, "The spinners don't always think of themselves like that."

"Like the kind of people who have names?"

"Like people at all," Shahum said.

Well, wasn't that interesting. What was all that business in the music room, then? Surely they were not so far apart from people that the distance could not be crossed, going either way.

Tomasind slipped down the rounded carapace of the warcricket and landed on her feet soundlessly. There was shrubbery nearby, and she reached into the leaves for a cobweb she'd spotted, managing to separate a string of it. A blade of grass or a piece of string would have worked just as well, but the cobweb felt more appropriate.

Shahum watched her curiously, and when she gestured for him, he dismounted without crunching a single dry leaf under his feet. The cricket let out a subvocal chirr, and he hushed it.

"Give me your hand," Tomasind said, and he offered it without hesitation, palm up.

He had broad hands, calloused and solid. Workman's hands, which amused Tomasind in someone who would have been a prince in a different world. She brushed a thumb across his palm, for no other reason than to feel his skin--it was warm and no different in texture than human skin, but for its red coloration--and then she took her little string of cobweb and spooled it around his index finger.

"Think of her clearly for a moment," Tomasind instructed, "and then in your head, tell her to come."

It was a come-hither, the kind of simple magic that some babies could do by themselves in the cradle, though almost all children forgot as they grew out of toddlerhood, and then had to relearn by themselves as they grew older. It was not a magic with very long range, more useful if you needed to call someone from the next room, or give them a tug to visit you from across the street. Like all human magic, it depended on how well you could manipulate ambient magic, but this mountain was lousy with familiar magics, and Tomasind had always been just a rung more talented than anyone else at it.

Doing it for someone else was an interesting exercise, and not one she'd had the opportunity to engage in very often, but she noticed that, even though she had not specifically told him to, Shahum closed his eyes as he thought very fiercely on calling the spinner.

His eyes opened again as he looked at his hand. The cobweb was gone, so delicate that it had been burnt up by its use in the cantrip, but he looked around almost dismayed that the spinner hadn't materialized before him.

"Did it work?" he asked.

Tomasind had felt the imaginary line grow taut just before the cobweb disappeared, so she rather thought so. But she suspected he was used to more spectacular magic. Mountain-splitting magic.

"We wait and see," she said.

Shahum's face grew tight; displeased, or impatient? More puzzled than anything, Tomasind decided in the end. As she looked up at him, she noticed he didn't stand quite so tall over her as he had the first time they'd met. The bend of his strange legs was more pronounced--more relaxed, she thought--and that brought him a few inches lower. This amused her for some reason, and her lips pressed together in a smile that she wasn't sure she wanted to contain.

He blinked, and twisted his head to look away from her, like a boy who wasn't ready to kiss and pretended to hear something far off to disguise the fact. Or, he was looking around for the spinner. Tomasind had her guess.

The sound of feet shuffling through leaves brought them both to attention, and Tomasind knew a few moments before she appeared into sight that it was the spinner.

The spinner had shed the elven robes she'd worn at the wedding, and returned to the typical spinner appearance: the white whisper-silk veil, and the loose cream dress that was draped on her body like a shroud. But there was a small crown of wilting flowers across her brow, speckled petals in a multitude of colors.

She stepped out from between the trees, and paused ten steps away, her hands clasped before her tightly.

Shahum stepped towards her, but stopped when the warcricket made to follow. She was not approaching, and the cricket was making no effort to step quietly, so the skitter of its legs was a harsh assault of noise in the quiescent forest. Tomasind ended Shahum's impasse by offering to take the reins, and Shahum released them with a thankful nod.

The warcricket turned its disturbing eyes towards Tomasind, and chirred unhappily at her. 

'Same to you,' Tomasind thought towards the warcricket.

Shahum advanced on the spinner like he was going to pick her up in a hug, but instead he stopped just within arm's length and looked her up and down.

"Are you injured?" he said, his hands hovering, palms open towards her but not reaching yet.

"No, my lord," the spinner said.

"What happened?" Shahum asked.

Tomasind could wager a guess based solely on the flower crown the spinner wore, but she was saved from offering the suggestion by the appearance of one of the Heed girls from the village.

"She didn't want to go back," Elsind said, stepping out next to the spinner.

Shahum turned his head towards her very abruptly, which was his version of a flinch, Tomasind suspected, and shifted his body like he was ready to interpose himself between the spinner and the girl.

Tomasind sighed to herself, and wished she had tied off the cricket to a tree instead of holding its reins. Elsind was only a slip of a girl, barely old enough to remember the village before the Heed left it behind, but her ability to get into trouble on others' behalf far outsized her wits. At least Tomasind knew by Elsind's appearance that this was only a bit of nonsense, and not real trouble.

"I'm sorry," the spinner said, hanging her head in a practiced facsimile of shame that didn't usually come naturally to spinner body language. The flower crown on her head slipped forward, almost fell off, and the spinner brought her hands up quickly, holding it in place.

Shahum rolled back on the balls of his feet, leaning away from the spinner like distance could help him get more perspective. Tomasind couldn't see his face, but she could see the line of his shoulders, and the knot of tension building there.

"Why didn't you say?" Tomasind asked across the distance, and it took the spinner a beat to understand that she was the one being addressed.

In the time it took to put together an answer, Elsind beat her to it.

"Because you would have said no!" Elsind said, looking to Shahum.

"Would have, or could have?" Tomasind asked.

Elsind's cheeks flushed. Not enough sense to fill a thimble, people always told her. 'Oh, but loyalty instant and in droves,' added Tomasind mentally. 'Like a flood: sudden and surprising, and easy to be swept away by it. Every spring it comes, and every spring we are surprised.'

Having enough of the warcricket's malevolent presence at her shoulder, Tomasind threw the reins over a nearby branch, and approached the others. Elsind was defensively hunched. Shahum was not hunched, but Tomasind suspected he was defensive as well. The spinner still held onto her flower crown, like someone would steal it from her if she didn't.

"If she is safe in the village," Tomasind said, turning to look at Shahum, "can the spinner stay?"

"Of course," Shahum replied with no hesitation.

"But... I wouldn't be doing any work for you," the spinner said, her voice cracking along the edges; reluctant to draw attention to the fact, but compelled to. Worker caste spinners, Tomasind recalled, were once the backbone of the Overlord's army, though nobody saw them as such. They'd once not had time for anything but work, and it was not surprising that they'd had little time to explore anything outside of that until the war ended. 'But it is ended now,' Tomasind thought.

"Help around the village, if you'd like," Tomasind suggested. "That would be like doing work for Lord Shahum by proxy."

"Would it?" the spinner asked. Suspicious that she was being tricked.

"Of course," Tomasind said. "We're married, he and I. That means our families are connected through us."

"I am not... related to Lord Shahum," the spinner said, still unconvinced, but willing to have her mind changed.

"Neither am I related by blood to most of the Heed," Tomasind said. "But we each have our people. And now our people are connected. Do you see?"

"I don't understand," the spinner confessed, lowering her hands from her flower crown. "But if it is true, then can I stay with Elsind?"

Elsind grabbed the spinner's free hand, and turned a face shining with aching hope towards Tomasind. And Tomasind, in turn, looked to Shahum, tilting her head in a question.

Shahum found himself under the concentrated attention of everyone present, and straightened himself up under the weight of it. He looked to Tomasind first, eyes narrowing just slightly, but he managed to nod his acquiescence to the spinner.

Elsind gasped in pleased surprise.

"Thank you, my lord!" she declared, bobbing into a quick bow. Now this was a turn of phrase that Tomasind knew for sure the girl had picked up from the spinner, because Elsind had never called anyone 'my lord' ever in her life, even when the situation demanded it.

The spinner was less obvious about her excitement, but she bowed as well to Shahum, so low that the edge of her veil nearly swept the ground.

Elsind grabbed her hand and the two returned to the village, with Elsind chattering happily the entire way. Shahum watched them go, perplexed, and his face was still set in a thoughtful frown as they climbed back onto the warcricket.

The return trip had none of the urgency of their mad dash the other way, so Shahum kept the warcricket at a steady trot that meant Tomasind wasn't clinging to him like a choking vine because she was trying not to fall off. She still had an arm around his waist, but her palm laid smooth against his back, feeling the shift of muscles as he guided the warcricket.

Shahum held the reins in one hand, but his other hand was laid against Tomasind's side to hold her steady. It was an light touch, mirroring the position of Tomasind's own hand against his back, as if he had learned from Tomasind that this was an appropriate spot to touch, but he did not want to push his luck.

With her temple against his collarbone, Tomasind was free to hide a smile, but she sucked in her bottom lip anyway to stop it from spreading across her face. Did he realize what he was doing? Did Vixelandri ever make him read one of those romance novels that she was certain the steward had to be hiding somewhere?

Tomasind's eyes fluttered closed, still feeling grainy from her uneven sleep, but she let Shahum's presence wash over her senses, trying to get a feel for him. If gorgonids were really spliced together from parts that the Overlord mashed together, then it had to be fine work, because there were no seams. Shahum was a single coherent presence, like a warm black stone in a tight fist, smooth to the touch one way, but sharp if you brushed against it the other direction. Strange, but not entirely impossible to grasp.

If she lifted her head just slightly, she could press her lips against his throat, right over his pulse, and yet she knew for certain that would startle him more than if she took up a weapon to attack him. Would he know what to do with a kiss? Not to mention anything more than...

Now this was sending Tomasind's thoughts down strange spirals. She pulled back a bit, feeling the rush of cold air against her side as she put a few inches of distance between herself and his warmth. When she tilted her head to look up at him, his face was screwed up in thought, more expressive than she'd seen so far. Without people looking at him, it seemed Shahum had less of a mask to put on.

But the expression wiped from his face quickly as Tomasind caught his eye; so quickly she might have imagined it.

"Why let her stay in the village?" Shahum asked, revealing what he had been thinking on so fiercely.

"Because she wanted to," Tomasind said.

"She didn't say she wanted to stay to work for them," Shahum continued, his expression drawing even more closed.

"But she was uncomfortable staying otherwise," Tomasind said. And at any rate, it wasn't like a guest in the village would be put to hard work. It would be some token tasks, by tradition. She pulled away a bit more from him, though it was to turn around and more properly face him. "Why don't spinners think of themselves as people?" she asked. "What do they think they are otherwise?"

"Members of the hive," Shahum replied.

'Hive?' Tomasind wondered. 'I thought they were spiders, not bees. Are they bees? But they have castes like ants.'

Tomasind shook her head, as she realized that the Overlord had probably had only scattered knowledge of insects. It was an amusing thought, that someone so powerful would show such blatant gaps in his knowledge.

"Extensions of a greater whole," Shahum tried again. "Or... not extensions. Elements. Things that keep the whole in motion."

"Gears?" Tomasind asked.

Shahum thought about it, but shook his head.

"If a gear breaks, it can break the greater machinery as well," he said. "Spinners are more..."

"Expendable?" Tomasind suggested, though she wished dearly it wasn't correct.

Shahum's lips pressed together, and he looked over Tomasind's head, pretending he was watching the road. But the warcricket knew the way well enough.

"We all were," he said eventually. "It concerns something we keep trying to leave behind, and failing."

"Maybe leave it behind one piece at a time, then," Tomasind said, keeping her voice soft. "And replace each piece along the way."

Shahum looked at her properly, then, and with a tug on the reins he stopped the warcricket in its track. Tomasind was grateful, because although the carapace was flatter and softer on top than she first suspected, it still made it a bit tricky to balance on it. This was a conversation best had when not trying to avoid spilling into the dirt.

But the conversation itself seemed to have reached some grand conclusion for Shahum, because he looked at Tomasind as if he'd achieved some sort of epiphany.

"You know how to do that?" he asked.

"Do what?" Tomasind asked, perplexed. What had she given him the idea that she could do?

He waved his hand vaguely, like he referred to something she ought to already know.

"The leaving behind," he said. "The replacing. Explaining to others how it's done."

"That-- that's healing, I suppose," Tomasind said, unsure of what she was getting herself into. "And to be honest, it's not something I'm precisely an expert at." 

'Do not entrust this to me,' she thought in a panic, 'I can't even do it for myself, much less others.'

"But you have more practice at being a person," Shahum said, and all the things that implied twisted a spike through Tomasind's heart.

"You've always been a person," Tomasind replied.

"No," he said matter-of-factly, "but it's better that you should think so."

The rest of the ride back was spent in silence.

"Yes?" he said.

"Have you eaten this evening? We could have dinner together."

He blinked, some of the tension seeping off into surprise; like she'd turned on a tap and let the pressure bleed off.

"Yes," he said, and then, "No, I haven't eaten. Yes, we could. Have dinner."

"Only," Tomasind continued, tapping her chin thoughtfully, "I don't know who I'd talk to about meals." Did Dented Peak have servants in the conventional sense? There were spinners everywhere, but Tomasind didn't know how much of a grasp they had on food preparation. In her experience, they tended to eat people raw. This kicked off another fear about the beef.

"Ixenkhi, in the kitchens," Shahum said.

"I don't believe I've met Ixenkhi yet."

"He didn't introduce himself, but do you remember, the first time you came? The one I was sparring with?" Shahum said.

"That was Ixenkhi?" Tomasind blurted out in surprise, recalling the muscled draconid with the mace. Unless it'd been a meat mallet instead of a mace, and she simply hadn't noticed. 

"Yes," Shahum replied, unsure why this would surprise her.

"You spar with the cook?"

"Who else would I spar?"

"...Well-- alright, fair enough." Tomasind shook her head to dismiss any gruesome images of what the kitchens might look like. "I don't quite know where the kitchens are, either."

"I can show you," Shahum said.

"Thank you."

Despite this exchange, however, they both remained in place, Tomasind with her back against the door, rocking on her heels as she watched Shahum, and Shahum simply standing there, watching her. Waiting.

Tomasind raised an eyebrow, and Shahum inhaled sharply, nearly bursting with words.

"Vixelandri says I should kiss you," he finally blurted out.

Tomasind bit on the inside of her cheek to stop herself from laughing--he'd take it the wrong way, she was sure--but she couldn't help the smile twisting at her lips.

"You should," she confirmed, raising her chin expectantly.

"Right," he said, visibly gathering himself. "I should," he added, more to himself.

He leaned forward, leaned in, his gaze moving down to her lips, and his face pinched in concentration like he was devising a battle plan. Tomasind could see he was going to take a while, so she didn't intrude on his process, but then he raised his arm to brace himself against the doorframe next to Tomasind's shoulder.

The silken undershirt he wore was sleeveless, so Tomasind noticed--just out of the corner of her eye--a bit of unexpected color, and she turned her head to inspect his forearm, inadvertently blocking his angle of approach as she did.

"What's this?" she asked, tracing the pattern of colors on the inside of his forearm.

"...What?" Shahum was jarred for a moment before he mentally caught up with the question.

He shifted his stance back, releasing the doorframe so he could show Tomasind his forearm properly. 

There were striated bands of color on the inside of his forearm, in a slash between the crook of his elbow and his wrist: a line of burnt orange, another of ruddy brown, a thin suggestion of gold like a vein of pyrite. The lines were uneven, but distinct from each other.

Tomasind traced the colors with her fingers, but it didn't feel like paint, only like bare skin. 

"Oh," Shahum said, unsurprised. "That happens, once in a while. The skin changes, if I've been exposed to magic."

Tomasind looked at him in surprise, and then back to his arm. When she'd done the come-hither earlier, to find the spinner, this was the arm she'd used.

"Do you mean you haven't always been red?" she asked.

"Not always," Shahum said. "I suppose I won't be for long, now. Once the change starts, it tends to spread."

Tomasind traced the lines again, and when she pressed a thumb down against the skin, it did seem the band of burnt orange thickened, and the thread of gold took on more of a luster. 

"Did I do this?" she asked quietly.

"Probably," he said, watching the path of her fingers against his skin, standing frightfully still under her touch. "Or some stray mountain magic."

Tomasind nodded, distracted. 'This is the seam,' she thought, and recalled another gorgonid general, early in the war, who'd swallowed a volley of arcane lightning like it was nothing. The Overlord had made his gorgonid chimera capable of absorbing vast amounts of magic, even if they could not use it. The intended purpose of this was probably a military one, yet, what an unexpectedly beautiful effect it now created in Shahum.

When her fingers reached his wrist, instead of continuing their circuit back up his arm, this time they slipped lower, over his open hand, and she turned her hand until they were palm heel to palm heel, and she slipped her fingers between his, until their hands hung down between them, interlaced.

Shahum was looking down, his fingers curling into the grasp experimentally, fingertips barely touching the back of her hand. When Tomasind looked up, his face was angled just right that she barely had to lean up in order to bring her lips to his. There was barely a brush of skin, because she felt his sudden tension, from the tips of his fingers and moving up his arms to knot behind his shoulders, and she pulled back to look into his tight face. He was frozen like prey animals in the grass, afraid that any motion would bring undue attention.

She rocked back on her heels, not letting go of his hand--that part, he didn't seem to mind--and hummed to herself.

"You can-- you can kiss me," he said, looking puzzled that she stopped. But the moment had passed, and anyway, he had quailed from it.

"No, I think I'd rather you showed me the kitchens," she said, and tugged him along as she headed down the hall.

"But--"

"Aren't you hungry? I am," she said, continuing on. "You're not going to starve me, are you?"

"No," he replied dumbly, too surprised to do anything but let her drag him along.

The smells mixed together thickly, and the heat and humidity in the room felt like a waxy coat against the skin, but although it seemed like an army of cooks had used the kitchen to produce food for an army in the literal sense, the only presence in the kitchens was a draconid turning the spit, where a side of beef was coming along nicely.

"Ixenkhi," Shahum said softly, and the draconid turned to the sound of his name, his thick arm continuing to turn the spit.

Ixenkhi was considerably bigger than Vixelandri, and in the steam-thick air of the kitchens, his scales gleamed gold and cream. The ridges along his head were more pronounced than Vixelandri's, and had something like rudimentary feathers, which were ruffled the way a human's hair might be after a long day at work.

"My lord!" Ixenkhi boomed in greeting, and then, his gaze falling on Tomasind, added in a more subdued voice, "My lady."

"Tomasind will do," she said.

"Lady Tomasind," Ixenkhi continued, "come to sort out the kitchens? Shake down the kitchen boys? Put the kitchenmaids on notice?" He gestured widely to the empty kitchens, and one of the nearby pots began whistling with steam. "Well, as you can see, that won't be practicable, seeing as I am the entirety of the kitchen staff, and those tiny aprons the kitchenmaids wear don't fit me!"

He picked up a ladle, and not stopping from turning the spit, reached out to knock the lid off the whistling pot. The contents of the pot, from what Tomasind could see bubbling up through thick brown broth, was some sort of meat-based... she was going to guess stew, for lack of any other point of reference. There were things besides meat in there that she couldn't entirely identify.

"I was just hungry, actually," she said.

Ixenkhi brightened up considerably at this.

"I'll have something ready for you at once!" he declared, and pumped hard on the lever of the spit, in a way that she suspected the spit was not designed for--but he turned it so hard that it send the beef into a dizzying spin that continued even as he released the lever and rushed away.

With a speed that Tomasind would not have suspected from someone so big, Ixenkhi rushed by an oven, hitting it with the heel of his foot so the door unlatched itself and fell open, popped over an overhead cabinet to take out a plate, and then, with a fork that she didn't even see him reach for, he began picking up things from pots and out of trays set to cool, lining varied slices of meats on one side of the plate, before dropping the fork to pick up a ladle from a pot, and slop vegetables and sauce into the plate.

When he passed by the oven he'd kicked over earlier, he reached in with his bare hand and took out a whole loaf of bread, apparently unbothered by the heat, and he put this on the side of the plate as well.

The entire thing happened in seconds, and by the time he put the plate down and returned to the spit, the beef hadn't even stopped spinning.

Tomasind was rendered speechless by the entire sequence of events, and also shaken down to her very core. Shahum, on the other hand, looked impassive as always, and she suspected his glib acceptance was because he had never seen how kitchens were usually run, and had to accept it on face value that what Ixenkhi was engaged in counted as real cookery. 

"You could have left the beef roasting by itself for how long it took you to put that plate together," Tomasind said faintly.

"Nope! Notes say, keep the beef spinning!" Ixenkhi said seriously. "So I keep it spinning."

Tomasind could already see, in her mind's eye, the day he would turn that spit and the fatigued metal would snap, sending an entire cow flying through the kitchens. 'Though I suppose there won't be anybody in the kitchens to get hurt. Small mercies...?'

She approached the plate with trepidation that should have really been undercut, considering some of the slop she'd had to consume in the army, and then later on the road back. She knew, when food had to be produced for a large number of people, quality tended to take a hit, and Ixenkhi had an entire fortress of people to feed. Presumably. Did they all eat?

The plate was messy, laden with a mismatch of meats and vegetables. Some of the cuts of meat were glossy with fat, others were lean and glazed, but they were all splattered with a green-brown sauce, and bits of chopped vegetables. Drops of oil gleamed greasily here and there.

The bread was an odd size, not quite big enough for a loaf, not small enough for a bun, but it smelled marvelously. Yet its surface was dotted with seeds that she didn't recognize.

It didn't smell bad, precisely, but it did smell foreign. She couldn't recognize all the vegetables, and not all the meats were beef. 

"That's a bit more than I can eat at one time," she said, resisting the urge to point out that she suspected the plate was a serving platter and not meant to be eaten off of. "I think it's more than I eat in a week," she added a bit more doubtfully.

"Oh, that's alright then," Ixenkhi replied, cheerful. "You'll leave enough for someone else."

Tomasind looked over to Shahum, trying to gauge if she was being hazed or tested in some way. But Shahum seemed as impassive as ever, like this was all normal. Perhaps when one did not have a baseline for comparison, this did seem normal.

But there was no use passing judgment before she'd even taken a bite, and so she took the plate and went over to one of the low tables where servants might have once eaten together. It was almost the opposite side of the kitchen from Ixenkhi, but it was also out of his way, so she didn't think he'd take offense.

She broke off a piece of some sort of bird meat, and tried it with a piece of cut vegetable she didn't recognize--it was a bit like a potato, but had been baked with its green skin still on, and sprinkled with sweet seeds--and then she tried a bit of the sauce. She rotated through the contents of the platter feeling increasingly strange about the entire thing, and then when the bread cooled down, she broke off a piece and ate a bit of that too.

Shahum sat across from her, but he didn't eat, instead watching her intently.

"Do you like it?" he asked, and Tomasind could understand the root of his interest. Ixenkhi was one of his people, of course he was invested in his cook's success.

"That's a complicated question to answer," Tomasind said. "Who taught him to cook?"

"Nobody," Shahum said. "He figured it out himself, with the old cook's notes."

That was a worrisome answer in some ways, but actually explained a lot more than Tomasind expected.

"The pots, I presume, were left over from the old owner?" she asked.

"He found them in the kitchen, yes," Shahum said. "Is the food not good?"

"The food is..." She considered her word choice for a moment, "unlike anything I've had before."

Elven pots were enchanted to never allow the food to burn, but if you left things to cook in them too long, the enchantment tended to imbibe the food with an after-taste that those sensitive to magic would feel. Elves would have turned their noses up at such food immediately. Some humans would have detected the taste, and perhaps been a bit puzzled by it, as humans did not put enchantments on their pots, of all things. Mostly Tomasind found it distracting, but if she tweaked the magic just a bit and rendered it inert as she ate, the taste would be easy to dismiss.

But the flavor combinations... Small gods, how had Ixenkhi thought to mix sweetness and bitterness like this? What were these seeds that covered everything, and why did they taste different on every bite? What kind of bird did this meat come from, and why was its skin purplish-yellow, like a bruise? That shouldn't be appetizing at all, but Tomasind couldn't decide if she liked it or not.

"Ixenkhi," she called out, "you don't cook with anything found on the mountain, do you?"

"If you mean anything hunted or scavenged, no," Ixenkhi replied. He was apparently done with the spit, because he approached, wiping his hands on a towel.

"Would you mind if someone from the village came up to teach you some Heed recipes?" Tomasind asked, hoping the suggestion wouldn't offend.

Far from being offended, Ixenkhi perked up at the suggestion, his feathered ridges rising in interest.

"Why, that would be a fantastic addition to my repertoire!" he said. "If that's alright with you, my lord," he added to Shahum.

Shahum's eyes flicked to Tomasind, before turning back to Ixenkhi. With a marginal nod, he approved, and Ixenkhi seemed pleased down to his toes by this plan, bouncing in place like an eager child who'd been promised a gift.

"When can they come?" Ixenkhi asked.

"As soon as feasible," Tomasind said, taking another small bite from her plate. It filled her mouth with a distinctly green sort of taste, despite being a bite of something red. She didn't know if it had been meat or vegetable, or some third, mysterious category. She wondered if she could convince Ixenkhi to just fry her an egg next time. With her luck, the egg would not be from any kind of bird.

"It wasn't what you were used to," Shahum said, as he walked Tomasind back to her room.

"The bread was," Tomasind said, though even the bread had had some sort of seeds baked inside. A bit like pumpkin seeds, but larger. Chewier. Not entirely bad.

"If you'd like a Heed cook," Shahum started, and Tomasind squeezed his arm.

"I'd like Ixenkhi to learn from one," she said, "but I think... only the technical skills."

"The... technical skills?" Shahum repeated, brows lowering into a frown. "What was wrong with his technique?"

"I could tell you, or we could wait until Mamma Bevven comes and explains it to Ixenkhi. You're likely to hear her from the other side of the fortress once she gets started."

"That sounds... uncharitable of you," Shahum said.

It was the first piece of criticism Tomasind had ever gotten from him, and she could understand why he would think she was being mean by bringing someone in to yell at his cook.

"She yells at everyone," Tomasind replied. "You'll know she's really angry at people when she stops speaking to them completely."

"Ah," Shahum said, quelled. "She has a... personality."

Tomasind almost laughed at his tone, and then thought better of stopping herself from doing so, which was how a giggle escaped her.

"She has partial deafness," Tomasind corrected. "She loses track of her volume."

"Ah," Shahum said again, this time even more emphatically. "But she's fine like that?"

"Mercy, please never suggest she isn't. Not to her face, at least," Tomasind made a face that would have sent Vivasind in giggles, but Shahum was new to this shared joke, so instead he only earnestly promised not to bring it up.

Tomasind glanced down to the arm she was holding, inspecting Shahum's forearm with renewed interest. The slash of colors was spreading, spilling across his palm and up his arm, the bands of color jostling each other. She wondered how he would look when this was all over. Like a statue carved from tiger iron? Would the thread of gold, still so thin even as it lengthened, form glittering patterns across his body?

When she brushed her fingers over his skin, she still expected to feel a difference between each stretch of color, but it was smooth, like skin ought to be.

"There is one thing I forgot to ask," Tomasind said. 

"Hm?" Shahum's hand came to cover her exploratory touch, stilling the repetitive motion of her fingers for now.

"Where does all the beef come from?"

Seeing a court of spinners working together was like witnessing dancers to a piece of music only they could hear. There was a grace and coordination that came to them effortlessly, and though Tomasind didn't think they practiced, there was something almost choreographed in their motions.

But the work their hands produced was very real. Shahum took her through the rooms where they worked the webs, churning out webbings which they made into silk, and to her surprise, there were also large wool looms that they worked at. Tomasind stopped a moment to inspect the thick gray material they worked with.

"I thought all they could make was silk and netting," Tomasind remarked.

"Only when they don't have enough time," Shahum said, waiting a few steps away; everything in the room was already familiar to him. "They have time now."

Tomasind trailed after him as he took her through the next room, and here there was webbing from floor to ceiling, which a few spinners were adjusting, or perhaps plucking at the strings. Large spiders, the size of Tomasind's hand, stark white but fuzzy, skittered up and down the webs. One was sitting on the shoulder of a spinner as she plucked on the strings of the web.

"Those aren't regular spiders, are they?" Tomasind asked, as one of them reached out its front set of legs towards her, waving them in the air as if demanding to be picked up.

"Those are male spinners," Shahum replied.

Tomasind stepped away from the web, and a spinner--a female one--came to pick up the spider instead, plopping it--him--on her shoulder.

They continued on to the next room, and this time, though Tomasind was prepared for ever greater heights of strangeness, she stopped in the doorframe, her feet refusing to progress. There were more webs here, layered so thick that they were opaque, and on each web a giant cocoon; a wrapping of webs around something living inside, something expanding and retracting with regular breaths.

She breathed in slowly, and exhaled sharply on the off-beat with the cocoons' rhythms, trying to cut off the panic that was already clenching at her lungs.

Shahum noticed, and doubled back, holding his hands up, palms open towards her even though he didn't touch her. He was trying to appear calm, perhaps, but Tomasind saw the nearest thing to panic his face had ever shown in the short time she knew him, and it was not reassuring, until she realized it was on her account.

"It's not people inside," he said quickly. "It's not people in any of them. I promise, I promise."

The spinners working in the room--just a handful tending the cocoons--froze in place all at the same time, their attention now turned to Tomasind.

Shahum gestured to the nearest spinner, who'd been in the process of cutting open a cocoon.

"Show her," he said.

The spinner nodded, and with a bone knife, she slit the cocoon longwise, cutting it to reveal short white fur, an udder, the torso of a cow--but no legs and no head and no tail, only fur grown over stubs where those limbs would have grown in a real cow.

Tomasind felt bile rise to her throat a moment before she turned on her heel and ran back through the rooms. It was a straight shot through the rooms and to the exit, and she didn't stop until she was out in the hallway, pressing her forehead against the smooth stone of the wall opposite the door.

Shahum matched her step for step, but she didn't even notice until she'd stopped; her head was buzzing, blocking out her awareness of everything but the cool stone in front of her eyes. She breathed to stop herself from losing the food she'd just eaten, and the great noise in her ears receded just enough that she became aware of Shahum's rapid-fire apologies.

He still hesitated to touch her, but his hand was hovering just near her elbow, like he intended to catch her if she fell, and though she felt senseless, Tomasind turned to grab onto that hand. Her fingers curled like talons into his wrist, but he didn't react except to offer his other hand as well, and she grabbed onto that one as well, tottering on her feet drunkenly.

He pulled her into a tight hold--not quite a hug, but tight enough to ground her.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he kept whispering into her hair.

"We used to... we used to have... cocoon duty after battles, if we... if there was a... nest," Tomasind explained, though her thoughts felt watery and the words kept running together in her head. "We had to cut them out. We had to cut open all of them. We... do you know how... do you know what happens to them in..."

Shahum's hand sank into her hair, the tips of his fingers pressings against the skin at the nape of her neck.

"It's not the same thing, I promise," he said.

And Tomasind was sure that when she calmed down, she would believe him, and approach this rationally. But for now, the pulsating cocoons in her head were splitting open to reveal half-digested comrades and dream-drunk survivors with empty eyes, and she kept having to open the next, and the next, and the next.

When Tomasind finished her tea, she promised to come back for more regularly, if the spinners could also add some light snacks to their offering, and they immediately jumped on this notion of 'snack cakes' that Tomasind told them about. 

As the conversation wound down, Arletta was ready to lead Tomasind back down to the room that had so shaken her the evening before.

This time Tomasind had prepared herself, and she knew what she would be heading into, and... at any rate, the room would haunt if she did not do this. It would carve itself a space of fear in Tomasind's head, unless she went down and understood it. She had always been better at confronting things if she was allowed to unravel and understand them. She would not live under a roof with rooms she feared.

She was so intent on the task before her, with her heart beating from more than the potency of the tea she'd had, that she was already stepping out of the music room when she noticed Shahum right in front of her.

She didn't know what deep thoughts Shahum had been wrangling with, because by his startle, he only just noticed her as well a second before they stumbled into one another, and they both pulled back to give the other wild-eyed stares.

Overnight, his skin had continued to change, so that the colors reached all the way up his throat, stopping to a sharp point over his chin. The bands of color thickened as Tomasind traced them lower, past a well-sculpted collarbone and disappearing under the conservative neckline of his soft silk shirt. He dressed not in black, this time, but a more earthy tan shirt, and matched brown pants. It softened him, though it clashed with the parts of his skin still red.

"What are you doing here?" Shahum asked, his eyes darting to the door behind Tomasind, and then to Arletta.

Before Tomasind could give an answer that might defuse his suspicion--for example, an innocuous quip about having tea--Arletta beat her to it.

"I am taking the lady to the meat room," Arletta said.

Shahum turned the full weight of his attention to Tomasind then, gathering himself up in response to this information.

"You don't have to go there ever again," he said, his tone even, almost soothing.

With one of his own people, it would have perhaps come across as reassuring. But Tomasind was not willing to be handled, and knowing herself well enough, she also knew that she did in fact have to go back to that room if she was going to foster peace of mind.

Tomasind set her hands on her hips the way her mother did when she'd be annoyed with her, but the significance of the gesture seemed to pass Shahum right by, given how unmoved he was by it.

"I need to go," Tomasind said, "if I'm to live under this roof."

Shahum recoiled in surprise, and then covered it by crossing his arms and looking down to Tomasind. From the corner of her eye, Tomasind could see Arletta's ramrod posture lapsing into uncertain; apparently, Tomasind was also missing the significance of Shahum's gesture.

"One has nothing to do with the other," he said. "You don't need to see the inside of every room to live here." His expression... did not soften, precisely, but it shifted into something more like worry. "You don't need to do things that scare you for the sake of it."

Tomasind sighed. The problem, she thought, was that he just didn't know her. They didn't know each other. They hadn't talked about anything but the most superficial of subjects, and two days into a marriage wasn't far enough along to have built all the trust that she needed from him at the moment.

She uncoiled slowly from her tense posture, and leaned forward to grasp his forearm. Corded muscles were like steel under her fingers, and he might have been as unmoved as a wall if she tried to barrel through.

"Come with me," Tomasind said.

"Where to?" Shahum asked cautiously.

She'd meant for him to come with her to the meat room, and for a moment she was annoyed that it wasn't evident to him that was the only place she could have meant, but thinking better of it, she decided to take the long way around. You didn't approach some things head on. You went the opposite way to come from the right direction, as one of her old scout troop leaders had once said.

"A ride in the mountains," she replied, feeling the ghost of a smile on her lips. It was an impulsive suggestion, but the more she thought about it, the more it seemed like a good idea.

When war had swept over Vanniannan, most of the population had retreated to the more defensible inner city, and hidden behind an arcane barrier. The outlying buildings, therefore, had ended up being plundered, and then vindictively knocked over. The civilian population could not continue living in the overcrowded center--which had already seen arcane fatigue and disease breaking out--but neither had they gotten the opportunity to rebuild anything while the war had been going on and resources had been short.

As a result of several political convolutions, the details of which Tomasind did not fully grasp and did not care to, it was decided that instead of awaiting for aid and resources to rebuild, the city would begin the reclamation project itself. As a concession to its dire straits, the remaining army recruits--which was to say, nearly all of them human, because the elves got to go home--were brought in to aid with the project.

What Tomasind learned, however, was that 'helping' in this case meant performing backbreaking manual labor under the unforgiving and ungrateful scrutiny of elven overseers. The Heed were assigned to a ramshackle camp on the edge of the city, built hastily and poorly. The Heed set to modify it almost immediately.

The tasks given to them were simple. They were assigned the former neighborhood of Hrivesti to reclaim. This involved retrieving each intact brick one by one, and any other valuable construction material that could yet be recovered. Metal would be melted and reforged, enchanted glass would be ground to powder. It was a tedious task, slowed by insufficient carts or wheelbarrows.

It was a decently paid one in the beginning, however. The Heed had never received pay while the war was in progress, instead having ration slips for things such as food, equipment, supplies and medicine. The ration slips varied depending on whether one was a combatant or a non-combatant, but they were also supplemented by a robust black market.

Now the Heed would receive coins at the end of every month, proportionate to the volume of building material they recovered.

The flipside, of course, was that now they were required to go into the city to purchase food for themselves. They hunted and foraged in the beginning, but city authorities came out against it hard, and by the end of the first month, the Heed settled themselves to purchasing food, as their hosts demanded.

The first months were pocked by minor incidents. Some elven vendors would try to run up the prices on Heed customers, until they discovered that the Heed were prone to enact petty and financially devastating revenge. More than one shifty elven vendor had come to their shop in the morning to find their door and windows bricked up, and the Heed offering their services in brick removal for a modest fee. Some of the vendors tried to remove the bricks themselves, only to find that the Heed had an unexpectedly able use of magic, and knew how to make these improvised walls stick together even in the absence of cement.

A local magistrate and three novice arcanists had to be involved following complaints, but once all the vendors in the city understood the consequences of trying to trade in bad faith with the Heed, things mostly settled into a routine. The Heed worked, and the Heed got paid, and then the Heed came to spend their money in the city, and leave as soon as they had everything.

Until four months into the arrangement, when the Heed were not paid as promised. Almost a quarter of the sum was simply not delivered to the Heed, and when questioned about it, the city functionaries in charge of delivering pay had simply shrugged.

At that point, Tomasind was not chieftain yet. Her great-uncle Ruckand-heed-Rampang was. He went to have a talk with the overseer, and from afar, Tomasind could see her uncle's agitated gestures, and the overseer fetching her superior to talk to Ruckand.

Tomasind didn't know how the conversation transpired, but Ruckand came back into camp so upset, that he'd lapsed into a wet, hacking coughing fit. He'd had the cough since the campaign across the Riverland swamps, when they'd lost fifteen people to lungrot, but she'd never seen her uncle so upset and so affected by the disease at the same time, and one was clearly feeding into the other. 

Ruckand called everyone to explain that the city's coffers were empty at the moment, and so the elves could not make full pay. The Heed would pool together whatever coin they'd saved, and tighten their belts for a few months, until the elves received promised aid from their capital. If things remained unresolved and the elves failed to pay in full, much less backpay, for any longer than that, then they would petition the city for hunting rights, and would likely be granted such.

So the Heed carried on. They worked. They made progress at taking apart the mounds of collapsed buildings and turning them into neat stacks for the elves to take away and rebuild. The next month, once again, a quarter of the sum they were entitled to was withheld by the city. Ruckand's illness advanced as well, and he wasted away as he declined food in favor of letting it go to the children. Tomasind suspected it was not so much a lack of appetite, as knowledge of impending death. He subsisted on goat milk and the broth from stews for weeks before he finally succumbed.

The month before Ruckand died, the pay did not come at all. Tomasind didn't know if the two were related. Ruckand had grown too weak to go and chew the overseer's ear off each payday, so the overseer may well have interpreted this as a kind of resignation on the Heed's part, when on the contrary, the Heed were only growing more discontent.

The next month, pay once more didn't come. The coin ran out. The Heed had to buy things on tab, while smirking elven vendors penciled in absurd interest rates into their ledgers. Hunting right were still not granted, and the elves did not even acknowledge the petition, much less deny it.

Ruckand died, and three months had passed without pay. The Heed cremated him, and collected his ashes and charred bone into a satchel, refusing to let him rest in this place where his memories had been of suffering and wasting disease, under the sight of uncaring allies.

"We could leave," the Heed would say every day. "There is nothing for us here."

But the elven overseers quite disagreed. Completely aware that the Heed had been buying food on credit, they informed the humans that leaving without paying out their tabs would qualify as theft, and they would be hunted down by elven enforcers.

Tomasind was there when they explained this--the direct overseer, Raletta, and her superior Arravi, had asked for a chieftain and been told there was none, and so they elected simply to drop this warning into the laps of the gathered throng of Heed.

Shouts and murmurs rose from the Heed, whose mood took a sudden sharp turn into angry that was fueled more by hunger and the fatigue of backbreaking labor.

Tomasind, afraid that the entire thing would end with the two overseers getting strung up by their heels on the city walls, raised her voice to cut over the unhappy murmur.

"Overseer," she said, drawing the attention of both elves, "we understand what you say, though conversely you must understand that the reason we cannot return the favor is because you've no place to run. If not paying what is owed is theft, then it is theft when you do it to us as well, and I will remind you that you began digging yourself in debt with us long before we started becoming indebted to you."

Raletta's expression darkened with rage instantly.

"How dare you! What is owed?" she hissed, outraged. "You owe us the victory in this wretched war, and you should by rights be doing this work for free!"

Arravi, more staid than Raletta, placed a hand on her shoulder and shook their head.

"We are both in a difficult position," they said, looking to Tomasind. "But there is nothing we can do differently at the moment, and so we can only continue the course."

"What about hunting rights?" Tomasind asked.

"Hunting is not permitted," Arravi said, raising their voice to make themselves clear. "Not now, not ever."

"So you'll have us both work and starve for you?" Vivasind burst into the conversation, outraged to the extreme.

Arravi maintained their calm as they looked to Vivasind.

"There is nothing stopping you from continuing to eat your fill on credit," Arravi said. "You will be paid and then you will be able to pay the bills that you owe. You must only be patient."

But Tomasind had her suspicions that patience was only going to bury them deeper.

On a suspicion that she hoped was wrong, or at least overly paranoid, Tomasind used her day of rest to go into the city, to every elven vendor the Heed went to shop with, and request credit slips of what they owed.

Some vendors were more recalcitrant than others, and Tomasind made note of the ones who she thought might fudge the numbers, but eventually, after traveling to every baker, grocer, apothecary, clothier and blacksmith the Heed had a line of credit with, Tomasind put together a ledger of her own.

She stayed well into the night with one of the number girls, and the results were dire indeed.

Again, Tomasind wondered how much the overseers knew, because by Tomasind's reckoning, even if the Heed started being paid again, they would not be able to pay back their lines of credit in full. Backpay would have to be paid in the next month or two in full for the interest rates to not balloon beyond their ability to pay, and Tomasind was certain no backpay was forthcoming. They would come out of the affair in debt, and, once the task was finished, with no way of garnering the money to pay that debt.

Tomasind felt a chill at this prospect, and searched through Ruckand's papers until she found his copy of the contract the Heed had signed with the elves. Perhaps she'd been wildly hoping that the contract would be nullified by his death, but that eventuality had been covered by some clause or another, and it seemed that, between the contract and the debt, the Heed were now stuck.

Tomasind swore the numbers girl to silence, and the dour-faced youth had nodded in agreement to it, already resigned to the fate that so far only she and Tomasind knew about.

Two weeks, Tomasind agonized over what the solution to this issue might be. She stayed up late in the night, poring over the contract, sneaking back into the tent she shared with Vivasind long after her cousin was asleep. On her rest days she went to the only elven library still operating in the city in order to read on elven law. When they did not have what she needed, she went to bookstores, and read legal treatises under the pretense of browsing, though she was aware by the number of times she got ushered out that she fooled nobody.

And Tomasind had to wake at each dawn, her limbs heavy with fatigue and despair, and go to haul bricks until evening.

No solution was forthcoming, but in the end, the situation came to a head. Not because of any trick or accounting or legal loophole, but because of something they uncovered while digging out the rubble.

Tomasind knew something happened only because one of the children came running for her, claiming that they'd found a living elf in the ruins.

This seemed, at its face, absurd. The only elves they found in the rubble tended to be dead ones, and even that was rarely. Most of the corpses had been recovered and given funeral rites by that point.

But Tomasind followed anyway, and she was brought through cracked roads and skeletal remains of old houses to what had once been a more affluent part of the neighborhood. The manse the Heed was taking apart had lost its top two levels, but the bottommost one, half-buried in the ground, had survived somewhat intact, save for the cracked foundation. It was being kept together by the iron framing of its windows more than anything.

Heed were gathered by the entrance to some sublevel, their faced grim and forbidding even as Tomasind was shown down a flight of stairs to what had to be a basement.

There were sconces on the walls that had once held magelight crystals, but the crystals themselves were shattered pieces on the floor by this point. One of the Heed, carrying a torch, showed her past a series of alcoves in the wall, where small shrines to gods or ancestors had been set up and still remained, and to the other end of the basement.

When Tomasind first saw the outline of the elf, bent over with his arms hanging limp, she thought he was ill, or supporting himself against the pillar. In the uncertain flicker of the torchlight, she almost thought she was mistaken when it appeared the elf's torso was emerging from the stone of a pillar, but the closer she got, the more clear the horrifying tableau became.

The pillar had broken at some point, cracked in two from the ceiling to the foundation. The elf, as he was mounted into the pillar, had slipped half out through the crack, like a worm crawling to the surface after a rain. His flesh was wrinkled, mummified; but also drained of color, albino-white where it could be seen through the elf's ragged clothes. The former luxury of the clothing was hinted at only by the elaborate circlet the elf still wore, its fat blue jewel gleaming in the torchlight.

When he turned eyes towards Tomasind, the pupils were burning blue with magelight. His lips, so dry and tight that his teeth jabbed out awkwardly, moved with great difficulty as the elf spoke.

"Hesst... anavo... ha..." he mouthed out slowly, painstakingly.

It sounded like Old Aefwaeli, and Tomasind didn't know that most elves would have been able to decipher it, but then, if it was, how long had the elf been there, that this was the language he spoke?

She took his hand, with some half-wild ideas about pulling him out, but the web of enchantments he was caught in was, even damaged, so thick and complex that it sent Tomasind's head spinning. This was not a job for a trapbreaker, this was a job for a team of magic-trained archaeologists, and she could tell right away that anything she attempted would only make things worse.

When she emerged out of the basement and into the dust-clogged air of the ruined city above, Tomasind still felt the clinging stench of necromancy on her skin.

"Did someone notify the authorities?" Tomasind asked, and the nearest Heed confirmed that in fact they had.

Then the same child who had come to fetch Tomasind to see the elf appeared again, apologetic.

"You have to come quick, it's Vivasind."

"What did she do now?" Tomasind asked, too heartsick to feel like attending to Vivasind's latest fit.

"She's going to kill a magistrate!"

That made Tomasind move quicker than anything, because although any elven magistrate would no doubt have it coming, Tomasind also did not wish for the rest of the Heed to suffer the consequences.

She arrived to the sight of Vivasind holding a magistrate by the collar of his shirt and shaking bodily. Though the elf was much taller, Vivasind was much stouter, and had spent years at war while the magistrate most likely sat at home and kept his robes clean and pressed.

At a shout from Tomasind, Vivasind released the magistrate, retreating a few steps with a look of disgust on her face.

"You talk to the lout," Vivasind said, crossing her arms and planting herself behind Tomasind, where she stood glowering.

The magistrate adjusted his robes fussily, more flustered by the manhandling than hurt, and seemed distinctly cross with his ill treatment. Yet Tomasind was plenty cross herself.

"He says," Vivasind put in before the magistrate, "that the trapped elf is meant to be there!"

Tomasind felt her blood run cold at the notion, and looked to the magistrate for confirmation.

"He is a household protector," the magistrate said, and then went on to explain that this was a respected ancient practice, enacted in only the most noble of elven households, and that the Heed's overreaction was completely unjustified.

"It's a crime!" Vivasind spat at the magistrate, who gave her a frosty glare in return.

"It is not," the magistrate insisted. "It's a protected cultural practice."

Tomasind had had quite enough by that point, and to prevent Vivasind from strangling the magistrate, she sent Vivasind to their shared tent, to fetch Tomasind's papers that she kept at the bottom of the trunk.

Vivasind went, and Tomasind talked to the magistrate, politely but persistently requesting to see someone higher up the city's hierarchy than him. He was dismissive at first, and then unsure as Tomasind used the phrase 'diplomatic incident', and then increasingly alarmed as she pulled out and correctly used a few terms of elven law that he must have been sure a human wouldn't know.

By the time Vivasind returned with all of Tomasind's papers--not just the Heed contract with the city, but also the ledger of her calculations, and all the credit slips she'd gathered from vendors across the city.

With a bit more cajoling, Tomasind managed to convince the magistrate to take her to see the adjunct secretary to the city's autocrat, and unwilling to let herself be put off for a moment more, followed the magistrate directly to the town center and the town hall where this secretary could be found.

The adjunct secretary was understandably dismayed to see Tomasind walk into his office, covered in dust and sweat from a day's work, and with a ledger stuffed with papers under her arm, but she jumped directly to the point with such verve, that he did not have time to mount any sort of defense.

Tomasind put her papers right on his desk and began her volley with the Heed contract, which she'd previously gone over with a fine toothed comb in order to find some way out. And here in the contract was a clause that stated the contract could be dissolved in the eventuality that one of the parties was involved in any serious criminal endeavors. She emphasized this part, that the contract said either parties, and so this meant the contract could be dissolved if the elves committed any crimes by Heed law.

The adjunct secretary, of course, sputtered that the practice of having household protectors was not a crime.

"Ah, but according to Heed laws, it is," Tomasind replied. "It's unjust entrapment."

The secretary tried to backtrack and claim that the contract only referred to crimes against elven laws, but Tomasind pointed out, line by line, that the contract did not specify elven law, and she requested that he stop attempting to rewrite the clauses after it was signed.

Having him at wit's end, Tomasind continued on the next thrust of her attack, and explained that the punishment for the crime of unjust entrapment, by Heed law, was paying restitution proportionate to the time of imprisonment. Since the elf in the pillar spoke a language that hadn't been the elven standard in well over two millenia, the restitution would indeed be far in excess of what the city could even pay.

As the secretary began sweating profusely, Tomasind took out the credit slips from all the elven vendors and explained that, of course, if the city were to underwrite all the credit the Heed owed in the city, she was willing to count it as restitution, and not even force the city to hand over all the backpay that the city had failed to pay over the past months.

This was when the adjunct secretary found out the Heed had not been paid in months, and his face took on a sheen of terror as he realized how much less solid his side's ground was. Tomasind had not brought it up because she thought the Heed's lack of pay was common knowledge by this point, but by his reaction, dropping this tidbit into his lap at the very end was even better. He looked like he suspected the barbarians were going to storm the gates if he did not throw them a bone.

Tomasind, of course, pointed out for his peace of mind that what the Heed owed to the vendors of the city was actually a much smaller sum than what the city owed the Heed in backpay, with the calculations to back it up. And, suspecting that a man with a solid gold paperweight on his desk was concerned with his position, she also pointed out that his superiors might be impressed with how he dealt with this situation, if he managed to get the city's debt to the Heed paid off completely at a fraction of its actual worth.

This, the adjunct secretary seemed to find an intriguing prospect indeed. He left the office for a bit, and returned with a heavy seal, and he proceeded to underwrite every single credit slip for Tomasind. By word of the office of the autocrat, the city promised to fulfill all financial responsibilities towards parties owed.

Tomasind left the office quickly after that, before the secretary could take a closer look and realize that he had not accounted for interest, and that the bankrupt city was going to have to pay the vendors quickly if they did not want the sums owed to balloon spectacularly. She made the rounds of the city on her way back, handing the signed and ratified credit slips to every single vendor the Heed owed money to, and pointing out that their own city was perhaps a more trustworthy debtor than a human clan. 

When she finally reached the Heed camp in the evening, sad and dusty faces turned to her, the way they had once turned to Ruckard after he came back from arguing with the overseers. Over the months, they had stopped believing anything would truly change or improve.

Tomasind told them to pack the camp, and they stared at her like they couldn't believe they'd heard right, until Tomasind repeated herself, raising her voice. They jumped to obey with unbelievable zest, and they were packed and ready to leave by the next dawn. This suited Tomasind just fine, since she didn't want the Heed to be there in the morning, if any of the vendors thought to knock down the autocrat's office to demand their debts. She was certain whoever was in charge of the budget for the city was more likely to notice the absurd interest rates on the credit slips.

"But the contract," Vivasind tried to say.

"The contract is dissolved if either side commits a crime," Tomasind replied. "And they have certainly done so."

And Vivasind grinned like a snarling animal in response, filled with malicious glee and more than ready to return home.

They stayed quiet for a while after Tomasind finished her tale. The sun, crawling ever higher over the course of the day, was now at its zenith and beating down on their heads with a heat that cut even through the cool mountain air.

"So that's that," Tomasind said, and, feeling like she'd been scoured clean on the inside with the telling, she sprawled back on the cloak, and stretched her hands over her head.

Shahum turned to peer down at her over his shoulder, and after a hitch of hesitation, he lied down on the cloak as well, stretching out next to her with his hands folded almost primly across his abdomen. Green and purple mottled his face, like a watercolor painting of irises in a field, but much darker. He adjusted his head carefully, mindful of his own horns; they were just short enough that they didn't jab into the ground.

"I understand," he said. He didn't elaborate on what he understood, but he said it with a great deal of finality, and Tomasind rather thought that he must have understood at least some.

But before she could formulate a reply, he flipped over and on top of her. One of his knees came to rest between her knees and on top of her skirt, effectively pinning her legs in place, and his hands found hers, fingers lacing together above her head. Tomasind was startled only by the suddenness of the motion, but she froze in place either way. Despite ostensibly being at a disadvantage, she felt any small motion would scare him off, and like watching a bird on the windowsill, she stayed still and did not think too loudly lest she startle away the very creature that held her interest.

Shahum froze as well, though in his case, Tomasind suspected it was because he hadn't thought about his next move. They looked at each other, surprise etched over both their faces, until Shahum's expression melted into a self-deprecating smile. His gaze lowered, tracing the line of her jaw instead.

"I wish," he said slowly, "that I found it as easy as you did to speak of the past."

'You thought that was easy?' Tomasind thought but did not say aloud. Shahum's gaze now stalled at her lips, and he teetered on the edge indecision for not long at all, before he lowered his head and pressed his mouth to her.

If anything seemed strange about the situation to Shahum, it was that he'd waited so long to kiss Tomasind. He'd worried a great deal over something that in the end turned out to be fairly straightforward. Only a press of the lips. Her skin was warm, and she tasted like salt, and a bit like how the mountain smelled. Earthy, was probably the word for it. She waited patiently for him to grow more daring, and for his short kisses to turn to lingering ones. He felt her fingers sink into his hair as she tilted his head just so, and he tried to match the motion of her lips.

His anxiety didn't quite turn to boldness the longer this went on, but it was replaced with a strange exhilaration as his heart beat in his chest with the force of a hammer striking against an anvil. He thought he might be enjoying it, though he couldn't understand how something that made his body so high-strung could be so pleasant at the same time. Terror never tasted so sweet on the tongue before.

When he pulled back, his breathing was ragged, and reflexively he tried to even it out, the way he would rush to hide any weakness. But Tomasind's dark gaze fixed on him, and there was always something it strong deep enough to sink him. He inhaled unevenly and pushed himself off of her, sitting up on his haunches. Sheer mountain wall before him, and a deadly drop behind him, and yet it was the soft folds of Tomasind's body that felt like they held his doom.

She propped herself up on her elbows to look at him, quiet and waiting. There was a depth to her eyes that always made Shahum feel like a shallow pond in comparison; the deep groove that life had worn into Tomasind, he suspected. The experience of being born and raised, instead of created and assembled. Self-consciousness had not been a problem for him, before he started attempting to be a person, and now he could not say he liked the experience much.

But Tomasind was cruel enough not to kick him off the mountain and spare him the misery of social awkwardness, and so she only smiled at him.

"Do you want to go back?" she asked.

Well, that was at least the next best thing to being hurled down the mountainside, Shahum thought. He nodded, slow enough that he did not appear too eager to leave. He couldn't bear to have her think he didn't enjoy her company, though at the moment he found it overwhelming.

She gathered herself up and brushed off her skirts, and he picked up her cloak from the ground. She turned around, and he took the flash of a smile she cast to him over her shoulder to mean he ought to place the cloak on her shoulders. He did so, and she shook out her hair from under the collar of the garment. It smelled a bit like grass.

He followed her to the riding goat, though unenthusiastically. The goat gave him a withering glare, and he responded in kind, but Tomasind ignored them both as she hoisted herself into the saddle, and then extended a hand to him as well. Against his better judgment, he climbed in the saddle as well.

How anyone would consider a goat a sensible thing to ride went beyond Shahum's understanding. The creature--even putting aside its foul disposition--was steady-footed in a way that strained credibility. Shahum would have considered it a feat of magic, save for the fact that he would have sensed magic right away.

The goat traversed the sheer side of the mountain as easily as if it had been horizontal, its hooves somehow managing to grasp onto the flimsiest of dents in the stone. Tomasind was enduring the ride with a lack of alarm that Shahum was finding unnerving, but that also proved at the moment to be his only source of reassurance. 

He assumed she must know what she was doing. She often leaned one way or the other, rebalancing herself according to some input she probably received from the goat, but Shahum could not discern her method, so he clung tightly to the lines of her body and tried to imitate her motions. Since they did not fall to their doom yet, he assumed he was acting correctly.

He was endlessly relieved when they transitioned from the rocky mountainsides to the more flat goat trails of the lower elevations, and finally into the forested stretch around Dented Peak. 

The sun was high by the time they reached the front gate. Vines reached upwards from the ground, straining for the sunlight past the shade of the enclosing walls. They fluttered in greeting as he and Tomasind dismounted.

Tomasind removed the saddle from her goat, and the moment she did, the goat sprung off. Instead of making for the gate, as Shahum expected, the goat instead scaled the sheer wall, hooves somehow gripping into the seams before the rough bricks until he was on top of the walls. Then he gave one last mocking glance before jumping to the other side. Shahum suspected the goat was showing off.

For her part, Tomasind seemed not at all disturbed or surprised by this behavior, and made no move to stop the goat or call it back. She turned to take the saddle back to the stables instead.

Shahum lingered in the courtyard, a hand passing over one of the vines. It was lush in color, fat and glossy, satiated. The root-king below, no longer under the strains of war, drank deeply of the mountain's water, and not needing to constantly regrow vines anymore, was instead beginning to grow them thicker and more sturdy. Shahum suspected the root-king would have to be moved before he displaced the foundation, and he made a note to consult with the others, and find a finer place where the root-king might plant himself.

If the Heed could be trusted not to cut back the vines, there was no need to keep the root-king within the walls, either. The mountain was fertile and stretched far, and any number of hidden vales or ravines could shelter the root-king. 

Shahum was working out the logistics of the move in his head when Tomasind returned from the stables and stopped next to him, looking at the vine he'd been inspecting. 

"Is this where Ixenkhi gets all those seeds he uses in his cooking?" she asked, startling Shahum out of his thoughts.

"I suppose so," Shahum replied, taken aback by the question. "The root-king grows things for us. Fruit, tubers. Some types of leaves that are edible. I would assume the seeds are just the same." 

"I didn't recognize them as anything from the mountain," Tomasind remarked. She smiled oddly then, "Does he grow flowers, as well?"

"Not... as such," Shahum replied carefully. "Should he?"

"Not as such," Tomasind replied, her smile growing more pronounced. "All this talk of food is reminding me that I'm hungry."

Shahum hummed in acquiescence. He required less food than most others, but he had discovered, over the years, that for many in the Overlord's army, they'd required more food than they'd been getting during the war. Though, considering the things they'd been eating back then, perhaps even what they were using as sustenance wouldn't qualify as any kind of food at all. The cloying blood-sweet taste of spinner honey still felt like it coated his throat, though he hadn't needed to eat it in years.

"Ixenkhi will be cooking," Shahum said, because at just about any time of the day, Ixenkhi was cooking. They had a great many mouths to feed, and Ixenkhi enjoyed the task. "You should go. I have some things to tend to."

Tomasind seemed disappointed--she'd likely thought to invite him along to eat, and Vixelandri would no doubt be making faces at him for not accepting any such invitation, but he truly did have things he wanted to attend to first.

"I'll see you later, then," Tomasind said, nodding at him before departing.

He watched her go, knowing full well that after she ate, she would go to the spinners' nest again. 

Shahum tried to consider some way in which to stop her, but it felt dishonorable to try after all she had said to him. He could not figure out the trick of it, how she changed his mind with a story. This had to be a type of magic too, some working to change the way he saw her, but he was not fully satisfied that she'd even changed his outlook the way she had wanted. Whatever she had wanted him to learn from it, he'd instead understood that if the spinners' nest truly disturbed her, she would have left, and not insisted on seeing it.

He didn't like this conclusion so much, because it implied that if she encountered anything else that she truly found objectionable, she would well and truly do something about it. He'd not reached whatever rung of understanding would have him anticipate the conditions under which she would leave, and though he hoped it would not be due to unfair judgment, he'd learned not to depend on any inherent sense of equity on the Aefwaelians' part.

Shahum was half-distracted and wholly dissatisfied as he climbed the steps of the entrance and strode down the halls. He passed the magelights, which always buzzed to his senses, moving quickly before their magic could cling to his skin, and he climbed the winding stairs that brought him nearest to the music room.

Candablera was plucking a melody on her harp as he came in, and she continued the song even as the other spinners straightened and turned their attention to him. But Shahum sat down on one of the sofas and waited politely until Candablera was done; if the spinners deferred to him, it was only because Shahum, in turn, deferred to Candablera whenever necessary.

The song finished in a long, vibrant note, and Candablera turned her attention to Shahum now as well.

"Do you find yourself satisfied with this alliance, my lord?" Candablera asked, and by her voice, Shahum could tell she spoke of the Heed, and Tomasind.

"Is there some reason I should not be?" he asked in turn.

Candablera plucked a sharp, chiding note on her harp, changing the meaning of the question.

"What did I do?" Shahum asked, surprised.

"You should not annoy your wife so early into the marriage," Candablera said.

"But what did I do?" Shahum repeated, this time leaning back defensively.

"You assumed the worst," Candablera replied.

Shahum huffed and leaned back in his seat, arms crossed. He suspected it made him seem petulant, but Candablera had the talent for making anyone around her seem childish by comparison; she could not help it, she was very large.

"We talked, she and I," Shahum said. "I... have a different understanding now."

"And what is it?" Candablera said.

"That I understand very little," he replied, dismayed.

"That is a start," Candablera said, and plucked out a high, clear note of approval.

Still wary, and increasingly curious, most of the denizens of Dented Peaks tended to keep close tabs on Tomasind's whereabouts. Whether she was aware of it or not, she could not have suspected the detail in which her circuit through the fortress was tracked.

Shahum found it useful, especially when corridors which were empty when Tomasind passed through them would turn out careful watchers emerging from the shadows and alcoves to report her passing. From the ceiling unfurled the moth wings of a banshee as she drew his attention, and told him in dry whispers that Tomasind was headed to the spinners' nest.

"Spega is there already," the banshee also reported, a disapproving curl to her lip.

Shahum thanked her and went to find Tomasind waiting for him, in the hallway just outside the spinners' nest.

"I trust my visit here is no longer objectionable?" she asked, and in Shahum's mind, Candablera's chiding note resounded.

He offered his arm.

"I'll join you," he said firmly.

"Of course," Tomasind said, taking his arm without protest.

The spinners were deep in their tasks, but though they did not turn to look Tomasind's way, there was a sense that their attention was on her nonetheless, dragged to her in the wake of her passing like the notice of small fish was drawn to a trawling predator. 

Tomasind's grip on his arm tightened before they passed into the final room with the cocoons, but she did not miss a step, even dragging him along when he tried to slow their pace. Once past the threshold, they stopped, but Shahum watched closely and could not see evidence of panic on Tomasind's face.

He couldn't fully conceive how she was so calm this time, when the last she was in the grips of a terror he would never have predicted this steely woman could ever display. Now, she was peering around the room with unflappable calm, back to being inscrutable and poised.

She released his arm to continue into the room, stepping slowly over gobs of webbing on the ground, and around the walls of webs that formed the cradles for the cocoons. She halted abruptly, and he stepped towards her, but she looked curious now, not panicked.

"Spega?" Tomasind said, looking to a spot down and between two cocoons.

Shahum knew Spega's appearance in the spinners' nest was not unusual. Her work had been vital for setting up the magic that grew things inside the cocoons, and even after teaching the spinners her methods, she still tended to gravitate to this room, and try to find ever new applications for the magics she had innovated.

But he also knew the other reason Spega came here.

She was curled on the floor in the shadow of a cocoon, and she rose slowly, unfolding herself upwards by sliding her back against the wall. It concealed her unsteadiness, though poorly.

"Oh, yes, I'm here too," Spega said slowly, and though she managed not to slur the words, the smell of elven brandy came off her breath, heavy and potent.

"Are you drunk?" Tomasind asked, bemused.

"Not at all, how do you figure that," Spega replied, and to belie her words, she pulled out a flask from between the folds of her robes, and took a swig.

Shahum tried not to outwardly show any disapproval, as he knew this would not be met with anything but scorn on Spega's part. Alcohol had never been one of the indulgences allowed in the Overlord's army, but Shahum remembered the things Viperion had imparted about it. That it was something people would drink to mark celebrations, or dull pain.

Yet in Spega, drinking seemed to have no purpose but to provoke stupor, a state which she chased with great tenacity once she got started. Neither celebration or balm for her pain, it seemed instead to be something Spega used to cause herself harm, and Shahum wondered, every time he saw her in the aftermath of one of her drinking fits, when she was wincing and squinting against the light, whether allowing her to do such things to herself was permissible. He was no tyrant, but having exhausted reason and emotional appeals, he was afraid tyrannical methods were all that was left to stop Spega from doing this to herself.

Tomasind did not seem to struggle with the same contortions of morality that Shahum was facing, because she swiped the flask from Spega's hand.

Her reflexes muddied by the alcohol, Spega took a couple of seconds to figure out what had happened.

"Hey--!" she began, expression pulling into a frown as she made towards Tomasind.

"You've had enough," Tomasind said firmly, taking a step back with the flask.

"I've had enough when I say I've had enough," Spega growled, and around her, the air pulled in like a loose thread bunching up fabric. The spell she was gathering did not even have time to form, because Tomasind did something--like cutting a thread and unraveling the whole thing--and the spell collapsed into itself, dispersing into sparks, unspent and inert.

Spega was at first confused, looking around herself dully. Shahum expected her to grow angry when she understood what had happened; but worse, her face crumpled into tired sadness, and tears gathered in her eyes, turning them glassy.

"I used to be-- I used to be better than even the elves had ever seen," Spega said, her voice pitching high with each word until it cracked. "A talent unmatched in my generation." A sob hitched through Spega, rattling her frame. "Now you're going to kick me out too!"

"You're not getting kicked out," Tomasind said firmly, and she handed the flask to Shahum, who fumbled to grab it as he understood she meant for him to take it.

Her hands free, Tomasind took Spega by the arms, dragging her out from the space between the cocoons. Like a wounded animal, Spega thrashed at first. Once she realized she was too addled and weak to fight Tomasind, however, she merely slumped against the shorter woman, and Tomasind put an arm around her in support.

Shahum skittered back a few steps to let the two women pass.

"Let's get you to bed," Tomasind said to Spega, but, Shahum suspected, more for his benefit. "We'll talk about this in the morning."

Spega said something unintelligible in response, her crying only growing worse.

Shahum stood and watched as the two women disappeared through the doorway, and then looked to the flask in his hand. He would not have thought to wrench it from Spega's grip, though Tomasind had not hesitated for a moment. Tomasind, he thought, must have known what she was doing, and he found himself grateful that she would know how to act where he was at a loss. If marriage was meant to be an alliance, as Vixelandri had called it, Shahum was glad to have aligned himself to someone who wielded such advantage in battles he knew nothing about.

Being outdoors and not wanting to find Hezig's window from the inside, and risk startling it awake by opening a window, Shahum made a sharp hissing sound instead. The hiss cut through the quiescent afternoon, and shot straight to Hezig's hindbrain.

Hezig blinked awake, looking around as it scratched at its upturned bat nose, and then finally woke the rest of the way as it noticed Shahum.

"My lord," Hezig greeted, still slow with sleep. It shifted its position on its perch, taking the posture of a gargoyle ready to fly down.

"No!" Shahum shouted, bringing Hezig up short.

It gave another slow blink as it recalled it could no longer fly. In the air, gargoyles were peerless. But they did not need to strike the ground very hard to die, and Shahum recalled the way their black-furred bodies would litter the fields after heavy battle.

"Ah," Hezig said, embarrassed as it settled back, and drew the scraps of its old robe tighter around it. Some of the shredded material tended to hang like wings. Shahum assumed that must be why it refused to wear anything different.

"There is a task for your gargoyles," Shahum said. "When you are free, find Ixenkhi, and he will explain."

"I will go at once!" Wingless Hezig declared with an overflow of enthusiasm, and moved once again as if to leap off the ledge.

"No!"

Shahum's day was spent in minor errands and inspections, the comfortable routine of trying to adjust to living life, and not merely surviving to the next engagement. The decisions he had to make nowadays, and the problems brought before him, were minor yet with expansive consequences, in ways that often had him trying to fit together the puzzle pieces of competing and complementary needs.

It seemed, some days, that anytime some minor adjustment was made for one person's comfort, three more issues resulted from it. He was beginning to see that there was no end to this kind of management.

And now there was an additional piece to his routine.

Tomasind crossed paths with him before he had even thought to find her, and fell into step next to him without hesitation.

"How often does Spega do this?" Tomasind asked with no preamble.

"It differs," Shahum said. 

Sometimes she would spend weeks senseless. Sometimes months would pass without Spega wrecking herself each night, and those periods tended to correspond to when she was absorbed into her research, investigating some new avenue of possibility that gave her hope that what she wished was attainable.

He was sure she always had the flask close at hand, however, as he had too many times glimpsed the quick movement as she stashed it into the folds of her robe.

"We disposed of the elven alcohol a long time ago," Shahum said, "but she has ways of making more. She uses magic to replicate food for us. Evidence suggests she knows how to use the process for drink as well."

Tomasind made a thoughtful noise.

"This means removing the temptation will be pointless if we do not remove the urge first," she said.

Shahum's heart leaped unexpectedly at the use of 'we', but cold crept in afterwards.

"Remove the urge?" he repeated softly.

"I don't suppose you tried speaking to her about it?" Tomasind asked, and looked to him.

Under her dark eyes, Shahum found himself floundering for a moment, the way he used to in the early days, when Viperion would ask a question and Shahum would know that he expected an answer Shahum had not been built to think of. The fact that she expected him to rise up instead of fall short only managed to put him through yet more convolutions of anxiety.

"I wouldn't know what to say," Shahum said, opting for stating the obvious rather than leave the question hanging for too long while he reasoned through what Tomasind was really asking.

Yet she seemed surprised by his reply, and then chastened.

"I suppose not many people would," she said, her lips twisting in self-reprimand. 

She shook her head, like shaking off the questions, and then slipped her hand around the crook of Shahum's elbow as they walked. 

He assumed this must have been a common human gesture. He'd not experienced enough of human society to recognize it, though he had noticed in the Heed village how casually they touched each other, especially on the arms, the shoulders or the back. 

He found himself drawn into these small gestures with the ease of long practice, and he wondered if they would ever come naturally to him, though he found the touch pleasant enough that his rising urge was to mirror this behavior. Tomasind's hand against his arm was a warm anchoring point; under her palm, under her skin, there was the hum of living magic that his own body hungered to absorb the way parched earth yearned for rain.

Viperion had called it the undrinkable cup. The magic that every living being had inside them, but that could not be pulled out without unraveling them to their core. If the Overlord had intended it as a curse on his own generals, or some way of controlling them through this need, he had chosen poorly. Unlike Elhoc, where every scrap of magic was hoarded through strength, and the air was dry of it, Aefwael was drenched in magic. It flowed like heavy rivers. The elves shed it in thick, cloying waves. The very ground was thick with it.

If Shahum closed his eyes, he could see Tomasind's own eddies in the stream of magic, but with her pressed so closely to his side, he would not have needed to do even that much. 

He watched Tomasind out of the corner of his eye instead, for all intents a man looking at the sun between his fingers, and found the sight easier to bear. Her eyes were looking forward, though she chewed on the inside of her cheek in thought, and so Shahum moved silently, careful to not even rustle fabric as he did, and judged his angles carefully.

He raised his free hand, and slipped it over Tomasind's fingers, covering them. He did not think she noticed the contact at first, but then she adjusted her grip, curling fingers more securely around his arm so that more of her hand came in contact with his.

Shahum felt ablaze, though he couldn't identify with what feeling precisely. Possibly it was something altogether new, and something only she could inspire. It was awful. And he didn't want it to stop.

Tomasind was surprised to discover that they had been headed towards her room the entire time. Shahum, realizing he could have simply walked her in circles for a time without her noticing, gave the door to her quarters a displeased look, and thought he rather must have looked like the riding goat did when it was glaring at him.

He expected Tomasind to slip off his arm, but he still teetered on the balls of his feet like a kite in the wind, snapped in opposing directions as he found himself having to accept this was the end of the walk, but also not wanting for it to be.

But Tomasind opened the door and turned towards him instead of stepping through.

"Do you want to come in?" she asked.

Shahum's voice dried up in his throat, because wanting and having were too many times opposite to one another in his life, but he still mustered a nod from some place deep inside where he nurtured wild hopes.

She tilted her head, gesturing for him to follow, and he did so quickly, before she could change her mind.

Her rooms were airy, and large windows poured light through wide, open spaces. Tomasind paused and put her hands on her hips, looking to the ceiling. Shahum followed her gaze, and saw only bare curtain rods.

"They removed the drapes!" she said, and then huffed amusement.

Shahum could see no drapes at all in the room, not even curtains at the windows, and assessed the wide open spaces between furniture that were perhaps not meant to be as exposed as they were. It made the room seem cavernous, half-finished.

"Would you like them put back?" he asked.

Tomasind tapped her chin thoughtfully.

"Not the same ones," she said, "but if I could get a few lengths of whisper-silk... I didn't realize how bare everything would look without those things hanging everywhere." She turned on her heel to take a panning view of the room, but she stopped as she faced him. "I'm sorry, I don't know if you have any interest in interior decorating."

Shahum shrugged.

"I understand making a place comfortable to live," he said.

"What about making a place yours?" Tomasind asked.

Shahum did not fully grasp the notion.

"It's already ours," he said.

"My, how proprietary," she said, and he was taken aback by the remark until he realized it was a jest and not a criticism. But her face drew into serious lines next. "I think what I mean is... a place can be yours and still not feel as if it is, until you change it in some way."

"Is that why you wanted the drapes removed?" he asked.

"No, those were just annoying. Look," she said, and took his hand, leading him to a nearby window. An armchair and a small end table occupied the space just adjacent to the window. A bowl of fragrant herbs occupied the small table, dried out completely, yet still releasing a soft floral scent into the air.

Tomasind inspected the space for a moment.

"There are these sort of... islands," Tomasind explained. "Parts of a home reserved for particular moments, or particular moods. Sitting by the window to drink tea, or in a cozy chair reading. You build your home around the activities you will engage in. Or around things that you find comforting."

Her hand came up to his shoulder, and pushed gently; he let her guide him, backing him up towards the armchair and pushing until he took a seat.

He leaned back in the chair, looking up at her, but she only looked back at him quietly.

The sunlight poured golden through the window, washing her in warm colors. He could pick out stray strands of gold in her brown hair. Her eyes, black in any other lighting, lightened to a dark brown, and her skin, which appeared the same shade of brown as her hair, took on a red tinge, like the ruddy earth of the mountain where it had been cleaved through and showed all layers. The elven clothing she wore gleamed in the sunlight, but rumpled and grass-stained as they were after the trip up the mountain, they yet gave Tomasind a solid presence; the opposite of ethereal.

It was hard to feel as hollow as Shahum suspected he truly was, when Tomasind's hand still pressed against his shoulder, but whatever reassurance he tried to derive from it was fragile, and quickly broken.

"What's your room like?" she asked.

"It isn't like anything," he replied.

One of Tomasind's eyebrows rose.

"I have no use for one," he continued. "I don't sleep."

The other eyebrow rose now. He didn't know if that was an improvement or not.

"Never?" she asked.

"I could, if it was necessary," he said. "But nowadays I don't."

"Alright," Tomasind said, matter-of-fact like she was running an inventory. "What else? Do you eat?"

"I suppose I could," he said.

"Bathe?" she continued.

"I disinfect regularly," he said. "I am quite clean."

Tomasind's jaw fell slack at this.

"Please tell me you don't bathe in iceroot cream," she said.

"It's diluted iceroot," he said, "and I don't bathe in it, I scrub myself using a cloth."

Tomasind pinched the bridge of her nose, looking for all intents and purposes as if she was experiencing great pain. 

"That's why you smell like an infirmary," she said, her voice muffled.

"It's perfectly hygienic," he began, and she shot him a look that had any other words die on his tongue.

"If you'd been human, your skin would have sloughed off by now," she said.

He shrugged awkwardly. The iceroot felt like freezing and burning at the same time on his skin, but he'd always assumed that was simply how one knew it was working.

She took his hand, and turned it over to inspect his skin, but whatever she was hoping to see--signs of burns or callouses--she did not find.

"I have bathing chambers right over there," she said, her voice turning low and inviting.

He looked over her shoulder, to the ornate wooden door to the other side of the room.

She continued looking at him, a small smile he couldn't interpret tugging at the corners of her lips. There was something in this conversation he was missing, though he was not sure what.

He would figure it out by the time she asked him to undress.

The bathing chambers were behind a wooden panel decorated with stylized fish and coral. Tomasind slid it aside to reveal a chamber tiled from floor to ceiling in turquoise ocean scenes.

There was a bathtub recessed into the ground, oval and large enough to accommodate several people, which Shahum took to be the primary feature of the room, but there were also numerous cabinets along one of the walls, and shelves laden with a variety of containers and small items. Shahum was beginning to wonder just how complicated bathing could get, that it would require all these accouterments. 

"You can pile your clothes there," Tomasind gestured to a chair in the corner, and the three hooks on the wall behind it.

"What?" he blurted out.

"You can't bathe clothed," Tomasind said off-handedly as she headed towards one of the cabinets, but then she paused after opening the door and turned to look at him more seriously. "You really can't."

"I'm not-- are you trying to give me a bath?" he asked.

"I'm not giving you a bath," Tomasind said, and picked out a folded cloth from the cabinet. She threw it at Shahum, and he caught it. "But I am drawing you a bath, and what you do about that is your choice."

He gave the bathtub a look, and then looked back up to Tomasind.

Without breaking eye contact, Tomasind reached for the faucet and turned it, and water sputtered out for a moment, in a brown cough, before settling into a steady stream.

"That can't possibly get me any cleaner," Shahum protested, scrunching his nose at the yellowish tint of the water.

"It's just good, clean mountain dirt," Tomasind replied. "It can't hurt you."

Shahum continued to look utterly doubtful about the statement, until she wrapped her hand around the faucet and did a bit of magic. He could feel it plucking at the air, subtle but unmistakable, and in the next moment, the water came out clear and clean out of the faucet. Satisfied with this, Tomasind leaned down to plug the drain, and water began pooling into the bathtub.

"Better?" she asked.

"I suppose," Shahum admitted grudgingly. He looked down to the cloth in his hands, turning it over. It smelled like elven perfumes.

Tomasind began rattling through cabinets, taking out various things and placing them along the counter that ran across one side of the room. There were mirrors on the counter as well, polished to perfection and set into elaborate gilded frames with tripods holding them upright. Shahum didn't truly understand the point of having so many mirrors if one had only one face to look into it, but he supposed that, just like the bathtub, this was because the bathing chamber was meant to be used by more than one person.

Shahum approached like an easily spooked animal, looking over the items Tomasind had removed from the cabinets as if he expected torture implements. She was reading the labels off bottles and small boxes, her brows drawn together in a stitch of confusion. It seemed even she did not fully comprehend the esoterica of elven bathing, and that was confirmed when he heard her mutter under her breath,

"How many bath salts does one person need?"

"Are the bath salts mandatory?" Shahum asked, hoping to cut through the confusion.

Tomasind made a thoughtful sound, and put the bottles down, instead opening a box and taking out several paper-wrapped items.

"Just soap, then," she said. "Which one of these smells best to you?"

These were soaps wrapped in the paper, then; Shahum sniffed, noticing how heavily they smelled of elf, and not quite liking any of the scents. Floral, fruity, too sweet and too much like foodstuff. 

"Which one do you use?" he asked, weighing a soap that smelled like something Ixenkhi liked to put in cupcakes against one that smelled like some rotting fruit they'd once had to clean out of some stores with broken enchantments.

Tomasind huffed a short laugh at that.

"Not making a perfumed elf lord out of you yet, are we?" she asked--rhetorically, he assumed--and squeezed his arm as she slipped past him and left the bathing chamber.

Shahum placed the soaps back into the box Tomasind had taken them out of, and then firmly shut the lid on it. Tomasind appeared again, this time with a different box, a bit battered, a bit water-damaged, its paint peeling. Not elven, he identified with some relief. Less of an assault on the senses.

When she took a lump of soap out of this box--not wrapped in paper--it smelled like herbs and pine. It smelled like the mountain.

"It smells like you," Shahum said.

"Ah, I believe one typically takes such remarks as compliments," Tomasind replied, plucking the soap from his hand to place it by the tub, in a recessed soap dish by the faucet. As she knelt, she brought her hand under the jet of water. "Is this warm enough for you? Come check."

"Does the temperature matter?" Shahum asked, wondering how much minutia could possibly go into the process of submerging one's body into water.

Tomasind shifted in place to give him an unreadable look, and Shahum assumed that meant his response had not been the correct one.

"It makes little difference to me," he added, a bit more defensively. He'd waded through frozen slush without missing a step, and trodden through flaming fields without losing a stripe of skin; short of boiling him alive, he doubted he could feel any sort of discomfort from water alone.

"We'll adjust as we go, I suppose," she said, rising to her feet to face him. She looked him up and down, and he wondered what she was measuring him out for. She took a step towards him, and he tilted his head to follow her movements, but her own attention was on his hair, and she reached out to brush her fingers along the length of it. Once, twice, thoughtfully. It tickled at his scalp, but her fingers slipped through it like silk, and he wondered if he correctly guessed the question on her mind. If he didn't care for bathing, how was his hair in such good condition? Ah, but he knew what happened to hair if he did not wash it. He had suffered no consequences for his scrubbing with the iceroot cream, and doubted he ever would. To Tomasind, however, one thing seemed related to the next, in a web of custom and obligation that he had never been caught in until now.

"Hygiene is a far more involved process than it needs to be," he muttered.

She did not look offended at this, however; only amused. 

"It must seem so, if you've never done it properly before," she said. "Now strip and get into the water."

He gave the bathtub one last baleful look before going to the chair she had indicated earlier in the corner. He stripped off his shirt in one smooth motion, dropping it over the chair's backrest, and then stepped out of his trousers, leaving these draped across the chair. 

Tomasind was turned around, rifling through her box of toiletries, and Shahum felt inexplicably relieved at this. He padded to the bathtub, and sank into the water. Though the tub was not yet full, as he sat, the water came up to his chest. The warmth was forgiving, and it sank into his muscles the way neither sunlight nor fire ever did.

He would have wanted to be more begrudging about enjoying the experience, but this was another thing he had not known was available to enjoy until just then, and the discovery felt illicit, as such things always felt since his defection. He decided to revel in it instead, the impulse petty, and the spite making it all the sweeter.

He moved to the smooth edge of the tub, crossing his forearms on the edge as he peered up at Tomasind. She turned around only when she ceased hearing the water slosh, and startled to find him looking at her. Considering he was the one exposed, Shahum couldn't imagine why she would be the one looking so vulnerable, but the moment broke some tension in the air between them, and they looked at one another as if seeing each other for the first time.

"Does the water suit you?" she asked.

He considered the warmth sinking into his body, and the coolness of the bathtub under his arms and against his chest, and the burning coals in the pit of his stomach that made heat rise up in him under Tomasind's gentle gaze, and then he nodded.

"What... does one typically do?" he asked slowly.

Tomasind's lips pressed together, but the way the corner of her mouth curled up, it seemed she was suppressing a smile.

"Enjoy it, for now," she said.

He wasn't certain how he ought to do that, but he moved away from the edge and sank his arms into the water, down to the elbow. The heat continued to be unexpectedly pleasurable. For some reason, he had expected this to be like fording a stream--a miserable experience, pelted by icy water and fighting against deceptive currents.

But even as the water climbed higher, it remained a tame thing, welcoming and comfortable. 

That still did not mean he understood what he was meant to do, however. How to occupy oneself, other than simply sitting in the tub. It made him feel slightly ridiculously, like a person not knowing what to do with their hands when they had no weapon on their belt, no hilt to rest a palm against. He remembered the feeling from the first weeks after he stopped carrying the sword.

He looked to Tomasind to discover she had removed her boots, and was working on the stockings next. Her skirt hitched high, he got a glimpse of knees and thighs, and immediately averted his gaze, seized by a sudden panic and the inexplicable urge to sink into the water up to his nose.

Tomasind approached the bathtub in bare feet, having removed none of her other clothes. Shahum did not understand why until she sat on the edge of the tub, and sank her feet into the water, arranging her skirts around her so that they did not dip into the water. She worked on her sleeves next, rolling them up past her elbows. 

Her legs were a paler brown than her arms or face, but her knees were callused as though she had spent much time on them, and there were scars marring the skin here and there: something that looked like teeth on one calf; an acid burn right above one knee, where it disappeared under the bunched skirt. Long, straight lines of scars that might of been made by blades or other sharp things, unidentifiable to Shahum beyond that. Under the water, they were not even visible; barely discolorations of the skin.

He looked away as he decided he'd spent too long staring. The water had climbed up to almost the lip of the tub, and Tomasind turned the faucet off. 

Without the burbling of the water stream, the bathing chamber felt cavernous and much too silent. When Shahum shifted, the rush of water then sounded much too loud. He raised a hand from the water, and the residual magic in it, whatever spell Tomasind had placed on the faucet to filter it, had sunk into his skin like the warmth of the water. But it had made the purple on his skin bloom darker and glossier, more like the wet petals of mountain flowers, and had not changed the pattern of colors much at all, save for making it more pronounced. He didn't assign meaning to any of the colors--it was a type of superstition to do so, and Viperion had warned him against it like he would warn against other traps of the mind--but it had rarely been a consequence of kindness before, and it felt different when it was something he allowed to be done to him, rather than a side-effect of battle.

Tomasind's hand came to his shoulder, quieting the echoes in his head.

She plucked the soap from its dish, and dipped it in water, turning it over in her hands to produce bubbles along its surface.

"Hold out your hands. And don't drop it, it's very slippery."

Shahum held out his hands as instructed, and she dropped the bar of soap into them. She was correct, it was slippery. It sprang out of his hands like a living thing and he had to paw around the bottom of the bathtub to recover it while Tomasind pressed her lips together and pointedly did not laugh at him.

He endured with all due dignity the soap, and the washcloth, scrubbing himself dutifully, and then Tomasind asked him about washing his hair.

He wondered if she would ask. Blood and gunk and the accrued debris of a battlefield was less easy to scour off of hair than skin, but back in the day, Wundig had spent every free hour developing complex preening habits that she insisted on passing on to him as well, with all the back-handed benevolence she'd so enjoyed displaying back then. He still had a steel comb and a hard bristle hairbrush she'd pressed on him, and a habit of using them each day because he could not think of any reason to stop. He had citrus juice from the kitchens, and the one type of elven oil he could tolerate because the scent was not overwhelming, and he suspected that these were not things one generally used to wash hair, but Wundig had always sworn by such substances, and he had always liked how glossy and soft they made his hair.

He explained all this without a mention of Wundig; knowing her by reputation was one thing. He didn't quite know how to explain to Tomasind the kind of creature Wundig was--or had been--around her own kind.

But after assuring her he knew how to take care of his own hair, Tomasind wound her fingers around his black locks, dragging blunt nails against his scalp, and the sensation sent pleasant tingles against his skin.

"I can tell you take good care of it," she said, and then traced a path along one of his horns, all the way to the tip. "And you polish your horns, too?"

That... was not a habit he'd gotten from Wundig, but he did. He liked the smoothness and shine of his horns in reflective surfaces, much like Wundig had enjoyed growing her mane of wild hair and investing so much time in its upkeep.

Before he could grow too self-conscious about his vanity, Tomasind made a thoughtful hum.

"They do look so very elegant," she said.

The words curled hot in his chest, settling behind his ribs. 

His hair was only long enough to reach his shoulders, but Tomasind took out one of the laces from the sleeve of her shirt and tied it up for him to keep out of the water. He allowed this, though he then turned his head from one side to the other, testing the unfamiliar weight of the knot at the back of his head.

"Sometimes," Tomasind said slowly, "I have to wonder how much your Overlord taught you about living before sending you off in the world to die for him."

"It depended," Shahum said. 

"On what?"

"On which generation we were part of."

The water had turned a milky-white with soap, and even after Shahum had scrubbed off and placed the soap aside, bubbles floated across the surface. He poked at them in distant half-interest as he spoke.

"The first generals were made before the wars even started," he explained. "They were... grown in a slower fashion. They had more time. It was only after the war started that each subsequent generation required more rapid deployment."

"Hm." Tomasind didn't sound too pleased, but she was perhaps thinking of what the generals had become in the last stretch of the war, and mentally backtracking from there how different they would have been in the opposite direction.

"I wasn't without instruction," Shahum said. "I was an acolyte to one of the first generals. He was... almost like a real person."

Tomasind looked at him strangely.

"Why 'almost'?" she asked.

"Because he..." The words lodged in his throat, because Shahum recalled Viperion in the twilight over a battlefield, licking the blood from his lips, and then later sitting by a window, holding a delicate crystal decanter, one side stained on the inside red after he tipped it into his mouth, identical looks of epiphany on his face in both situations as he discovered something new he liked, some new element he wanted to add to his persona. He collected habits like he was adding new twists to a performance, and that was never quite how Shahum experienced things, and never quite how Wundig had experienced things either. "He always knew what he wanted to be. Not the same way I do. He liked being a monster."

"But you don't," Tomasind surmised.

"I don't mind it," Shahum corrected, "but the choice is new to me. To all of us, here." He indicated the castle around them with a look to the walls. "I think Viperion might have been given a choice, long before everyone else, and made it for those of us who came after."

"Viperion," Tomasind repeated faintly, eyes growing distant, her expression growing grave in a way that made the lines on her forehead more pronounced.

She recognized the name then. He supposed she might. Viperion had been a legend to the enemy side just as much as to his own.

He wondered if they had the same stories of him. He hoped not, but he didn't know how to change the subject, so he stood up abruptly. Tomasind startled, and water cascaded down his body in a rush, the splash of it echoing against the tiles before the room fell into silence again.

Tomasind had to crane her head back to look at him, whatever line of thought she was following now scattered with a flinch.

"The water has grown cold," Shahum said, hoping the observation was not as inane and nonsensical as it sounded to his own ears.

Tomasind seemed to accept this as a legitimate complaint, because she scrambled back and rose to her feet, retrieving a towel and handing it to him to dry off. He hid his face in it for a moment, and hoped the flash of panic at the mention of Viperion had not been obvious. Dredging up those memories left him feeling more vulnerable than standing naked and wet in this foreign room.

But Tomasind did not intrude on the things he wanted left alone, and she handed him a bath robe before he could head for the chair and retrieve his clothing. He put it on, since he couldn't think of a reason not to.

"Would you like to try sleeping next?" she asked.

He tilted his head, trying to decide, and she reached out and untangled the lace from his hair as he did, pulling it out and letting his hair fall back around his shoulders. She carded her fingers through it, smoothing out the tangles. It was a delicate touch; he wished she would be more firm.

As if to demonstrate what he wanted--or maybe out of some irrational need to turn the situation around--he reached up and sank his hands into her own hair, fingers delving deep into the dark mane, sliding along the back of her head to cradle the shape of her skull, then curling gently just to feel the hair go taut, and stopping when they met resistance.

Tomasind's eyes went half-lidded, like some pleased animal when it was petted the right way, and her hands went to his wrists--not to pull his hands away, but to hold them steady. The tips of her fingers rubbed against the skin inside his wrists in a mirror of his own fingers against her scalp, and a sigh left her lips, like she had found rest. His thumbs brushed against the warm stretch of skin under her ears, and though her hands were rough, there were still so many places where she was unexpectedly soft.

He wasn't sure what was meant to come next, save that it felt like something surely must. He went as gravity took him, leaning down until his forehead was pressed against hers. This felt right, and he held this moment for as long as it would stretch. For a while, it was quiet in his head.

Morning caught Shahum passing through dawn-gray halls, and slipping into the kitchens. As Tomasind was not with him--she'd still been sleeping when he left, tangled in a blanket with her face pressed into a pillow--most of the denizens of Dented Peak did not disrupt their routines to avoid her this time.

A gaggle of gargoyles were hanging from the light fixtures, gnawing at bones that they had already stripped of meat, and crunching them loudly as they made an attempt at the marrow as well. They chortled greetings as Shahum passed them, and Shahum nodded in acknowledgment, deftly ignoring the bone splinters that rained down over his shoulder, except to brush them off like dandruff.

Two spinners were moving efficiently through the kitchens, though they were not there to eat. Instead, they assisted Ixenkhi, and efficiently handed out plates and bowls of food. Some took the food and left: a mournful banshee walked in, her moth wings pulled tight around her like a dress, and departed as soon as a bowl of broth was handed to her. 

But others clustered around the table to eat, making for an effusive group. Some one-off chimeras were hanging off one side of the table--literally in the case of one with vulture legs, perched on a corner. But they sat as well as their anatomy permitted, straddling the bench, or sitting turned around, and shoveled food in their mouths with the speed of ones used to fighting for scraps, hunched around their plates even in spite of their apparent camaraderie.

On the other side, a couple of draconids were making good time on devouring an entire side of beef, claws and teeth stripping the meet off efficiently, though somewhat messily. They grinned at each other when they noticed the spots of red juices on each other's faces, and licked it off, cleaning one another with a doting tenderness that was almost mammalian.

Wingless Hezig was there to eat as well. It was sitting on the ground, sharing a bowl of something that might have been bits of meat in some kind of sauce with a couple of ratscallions. The ratscallions, though not much taller than a ladle, were endeavoring to use spoons. Wingless Hezig merely stuffed his maw into the bowl, lapping enthusiastically at the sauce.

Shahum cleared his throat, the sound enough to draw the attention of everyone in the room. The buzz of conversation and the clatter of crockery stopped in a wave as every head turned to him, though the sound of chewing still continued for a few seconds longer.

"If anyone wants to go to the Heed village," Shahum said, "be ready until noon. The wagon will be in the courtyard."

With this, he nodded, and departed. Conversation bubbled behind him as he left the room.

Not all the denizens of Dented Peak availed themselves of the kitchens, and so Shahum had a few more visits to make to ensure word got around. He went to the basement, where the gargoyles' rookery was, and then to the portrait gallery, where Handover and his coterie of fellow artists hung out.

Handover seemed especially pleased to hear of the pending visit to the Heed village. He'd been at the wedding, as well. He'd even thought to bring a gift, though the magical little stone he'd created for the occasion had almost been eaten by one of the younger Heed children.

"I shall have to make another little trinket for the Heed," Handover said, tapping his chin thoughtfully. He had a gargoyle's face, and the upturned bat-nose to match, but he was a chimera, much more humanoid than the gangling, smaller gargoyles. He even had much taller legs, though he insisted, for reasons he described as 'aesthetics', to use a cane, despite not being injured in any way. 

Perhaps he didn't see the legs as a good trade-off for being unable to fly. He had always been a sullen and taciturn presence during the war, and never quite happy about being forced into manufacture for his talent with shaping magical artifacts. Shahum had never quite known what to make of him back then, but had been content with Handover just following orders. Now, Shahum still did not know what to make of him, except given how much Handover had taken to poking around the castle and changing things, he was giving Shahum a great deal more to worry about.

"We'll leave around noon," Shahum said.

"Lovely, just time enough for something small," Handover said, already turning to his fawning followers. 

The other chimeras had been silent around Shahum, but began to whisper excitedly as they put their heads together with Handover. There were half a dozen of them, each having scavenged the elven wardrobes in the place for the gaudiest garments they could find, and their enthusiasm for the 'aesthetic' was what united them all.

Shahum didn't entirely understand, but if they wanted to spend their time in the portrait gallery, with the cold, judgmental faces of elves staring down from every frame, well... that was at least something to do.

His next stop was in the music room, where Candablera and her spinners were already deep into their play session for the morning. Delicate notes echoes down the hallway, from a lone instrument.

When he walked in, he was surprised to find Tomasind playing a flute.

He didn't know the music room even had a flute. None of the spinners ever showed an interest in woodwinds.

Shahum stood in the doorway for a moment, staring into the room as Tomasind continued playing. She was turned away from the door, and she was reeling off a wailing tune that put to mind the whistling of wind through foliage. The spinners were listening in rapt attention, their heads bobbing up and down slightly. Through the veils, he could see very serious expressions, of assessors lending all their discernment to a task.

He considered turning around and waiting outside until they were done, but even as he thought it, Tomasind's playing trailed off in a long, steady note that faded into silence. As she finished, she turned around to him.

"Come in, then," she said, quirking a smile, "we don't require a doorstop."

"I'm interrupting," he said.

"Nonsense. Come in and close the door behind you," Tomasind instructed firmly, and he found himself obeying. 

He had only come to tell Candablera of the trip to the village, and have her pass the word to any interested spinners, but now that he was here, and Tomasind was as well, he had to conclude she would have informed Candablera herself, and so he found himself at a loss for a reason to be there.

"Do you play any instruments?" Tomasind asked suddenly.

"I don't," he replied automatically.

"Would you like to learn?" she said next.

He opened his mouth to say no, but that would have been a reflexive answer as well, and he cut himself off a moment before forming the word. Before, he would have said a general does not have time for such pursuits. But what did they have these days, but time? He frowned in thought, considering his answer.

"I don't know," he said carefully, and even just admitting his uncertainty felt like a grand rebellion against a role that previously allowed no such weakness.

Tomasind's face lit up with delight, for some reason.

"Would you like to find out if it's something you'd like?"

"Before noon," he said suddenly, and Tomasind blinked in response. "As long as we're done before noon," he elaborated. "When the wagon will be ready. For us to leave. For the village."

"Ah," Tomasind made a pleased little sound, and then patted the sofa next to where she was sitting. "We have time, then. Please sit."

He looked over to Candablera, who was holding a tea cup in one pincer, as gently delicate as anything, considering how disproportionately small the cup was compared to her--it was akin to seeing someone balance a thimble on their fingers--but Candablera seemed to have no objection to his presence, and so Shahum sat as indicated. The other spinners, three of them spread out around the room, had instruments already in their laps, and pretended to give great care to their tuning at that moment.

"Will you have some tea?" Candablera asked.

"No," Shahum said.

"One does have tea when one is a guest," Candablera added lightly.

"Yes, thank you," Shahum corrected himself.

Tomasind looked as if she were barely restraining a smile.

"It's nothing," she replied to Shahum's quizzical look. "Nothing at all."

With the villagers clustered around the wagons as they were, Shahum couldn't see the full selection of goods for sale. But some of the villagers had already gotten their hands on some of the available items. Sitting on top of a stout fence post, one of the villagers was testing out a whetstone on a hand scythe, and by the sounds it made against the blade, dragging out something like a low musical note from the metal, Shahum guessed that whetstone must have been a new purchase.

Belatedly, Shahum recognized the villager with the scythe as Brackand, the man who'd seconded for him at the wedding. Brackand looked up from sharpening his scythe to notice Shahum as well, his face pulling into almost comical surprise.

"What, what!" Brackand shouted, and it registered less like a question, and more like a call to attention, because other Heed villagers whipped their heads around towards the sound. "Chieftain's back!"

A shout of greeting rose up from the gathered villagers, unorganized but certainly cheerful, and a scattered few of the Heed broke off from the crowds to come up to Tomasind.

Surprisingly, a few came up to Shahum as well. Brackand clapped a hand on Shahum's shoulder, and Shahum tolerated this gesture as typical male interaction for the Heed. It didn't hurt, though given how large and thick Brackand's arms were, Shahum would not have been enthused about fielding a hit in earnest from the man.

"Got tired of your fancy house up the hill, eh?" Brackand asked with a toothy grin.

Nearly no part of that sentence was accurate. He'd hardly describe a fortress up a mountain that way, and he doubted he would ever be tired of it, as such. But Shahum appreciated that Brackand would make the attempt at banter with him, and was loathe to leave the effort unrewarded.

"Yes," Shahum replied, with his blandest, most serious expression.

Brackand burst into laughter, louder than the short exchange warranted. Shahum appreciated this as well, though. It was a signal to the other villagers that joking was permitted.

Tomasind, far from being swept away by the tide of Heed gathering around her, hooked her arm around Shahum's, pinning herself to her side such that he would have to follow along. Shahum threw a look back at his people, to check that they would be fine, but the spinners had already dispersed, and Vixelandri and Elsind were chattering about something while making very emphatic hand gestures. Handover and his group were brimming with excitement, but not getting into any trouble as far as Shahum could discern.

Trusting for now that no disaster was imminent, Shahum decided to let the rest find their footing by themselves as well. The atmosphere in the village was light and cheerful, and though he suspected the Heed were the type to snap into combat at a moment's notice, he also didn't sense any impending violence.

"Ever met a dwarven merchant?" Tomasind asked, drawing Shahum's attention back to her.

"Several," he said, because the dwarves had actually used the pass several time, and had gotten the notion that they should ask his permission first.

"One more, then?" Tomasind grinned.

He nodded, and the gesture must have come across too serious, because Brackand laughed again. Still, the man ran a finger along the edge of the scythe with admiration.

"Good haul, this one," Brackand opined. "Mayhaps you'll find some things for your own house, eh? Some nice... soap dishes? Handtowels?" Brackand's eyes squinted in thought. "What is it that households like that even need, anyway?" he muttered, the question more to himself.

"A doorstop, but we could just invite you if the need becomes dire," Tomasind replied, and waved her hand at him to move out of the way.

Brackand laughed again, and moved aside. Shahum gave an apologetic look at Brackand as Tomasind dragged him along, but the man looked amused instead of insulted, so perhaps Tomasind had a better grasp of banter.

The dwarven merchant was not in the thick of the crowd, as expected. She was instead berthed behind one of the wagons. An awning had been unfurled from the roof of the wagon to create some pleasant shade, and she had set up a small travel desk and a stool for herself. Her ledger was open, and her pen was poised over a line, but her attention was all on Vivasind, who was in the process of explaining the qualities of good goat wool.

On the whole, the dwarven merchant was not so different from the others Shahum had met. Her copper wire hair was tugged into an elaborate knot that imitated some elven hairstyle, and the rivets in her ears were clearly some kind of enchanted elven gemstones, but even with these concessions to luxury, the rest of her attire was made for the road: blue-dyed leather, the color turned dull by the dust of the road, a traditional leather apron over her practical shirt and trousers, and her bronze skin polished to a shine. Given that there were no green spots of oxidation on her, she must have been young, though it was often hard to tell exact ages with dwarves.

Her eyes were dark holes, but two pinpricks of light, like flame, shone from inside her skull. At the moment, she sighed and let out a puff of steam.

"Yes, yes," the dwarven merchant said, "but I don't have a buyer lined up for the stuff, so it would be a waste to buy it now."

"Oh, she's not trying to sell you uncarded wool, is she?" Tomasind asked, just as exasperated as the dwarf.

The merchant straightened in surprise. There was something like a grind of stone against stone as her head turned towards Tomasind, and the lights in her eyes were stoked brighter with interest.

Vivasind gasped, putting a hand to her chest as if insulted.

"How dare you!" she declared, and in the next moment she threw herself bodily at Tomasind.

Shahum had a split second in which he was about to intercept Vivasind, a reflexive instinct to step between, except for the fact that in that precise moment Tomasind began laughing, and he changed the motion into a step aside, releasing Tomasind's arm in the process.

Vivasind slammed into her cousin bodily, but instead of toppling her to the ground, she instead clamped an arm around her shoulders, pulling Tomasind's head lower so she could viciously ruffle Tomasind's hair.

Tomasind reacted by elbowing Vivasind in the stomach.

The roughhousing did not go on for long, but it did last just long enough for Shahum and the dwarven merchant to make eye contact and confirm that neither one of them knew how to act in this situation.

"Anyway," Vivasind said, as she released Tomasind and straightened her clothes, "that was good timing."

"Evidently," Tomasind said, smoothing down her hair. She nodded to the dwarven merchant. "Tomasind-heed-Arping. Chieftain to the Heed."

"Arbrindra of the Swivels," the dwarf introduced herself, with a polite incline of the head. "At least we're not standing on ceremony."

"Banish the thought," Tomasind replied. "Now..." She stepped up to Arbrindra's desk, and sat down cross-legged in front of it. Given the relative size of dwarves and humans, this brought her at the same head height as Arbrindra sitting down at her stool. "What have my kin been trying to buy off you?"

"I have an inventory list, of course," Arbrindra said, offering a page to Tomasind.

Tomasind took it and gave it a skim before humming in consideration.

"Shahum," she said, and he almost snapped to attention.

"Yes?"

"You should see what your people might want off the wagon. No use making two separate transactions," Tomasind said.

"Ah. Well." Shahum looked over his shoulder, and then back to Tomasind. "Is this barter, or is the purchase made with currency?"

"Always room for barter," Arbrindra said, "as long as you have something interesting to offer."

"Whisper-silk," Shahum said. "Spider-cotton, maybe some ectic wax if you have uses for it. Gargoyle eggshells."

There was a beat of silence. The fire in Arbrindra's skull was not louder than the crackle of a burning heart, but its sound was a constant background noise.

"Well, I know what whisper-silk is," Arbrindra said, the fires in her eyes now turning from red to yellow, "but you've got me about spider-cotton and ectic wax. Never heard of either of those, and I was sure gargoyles gave birth to live young."

"They do," Shahum said.

"Then what are the eggs for?" Arbrindra asked, frowning. Her eyebrows were delicately sculpted along the edges, but still thick and expressive, a deep red against the burnished yellow of her bronze skin.

"Did you want an intact egg instead?" he asked.

The fires in her eyes went from red to blue, so Shahum took that as a yes.

But Arbrindra turned to Tomasind, her expression pulling into something cold and serious.

"Do you know what all that stuff it?" Arbdrindra asked sternly.

"Oh, I've a few ideas," Tomasind replied, giving Arbrindra a wry look. "It's not anything you've traded in, I take it."

"I don't think it's anything anyone's traded in," Arbrindra said. She turned a page on her ledger, and ripped out a blank sheet. 

"Well, at least we know where to start our negotiations, then," Tomasind declared, looking delighted. She laced her fingers together and stretched her hands, popping her joints as though getting ready for a punching match.

Vivasind poked Shahum's arm to get his attention. 

"Come on, now," she said, "looks like the ledgerdames are going to be at it for a while." 

She tugged him by the arm, and Shahum went along, leaving Tomasind to her task.

Handover did not have quite the sway that the dwarven merchant's trade goods did. For an eminently practical people like the Heed, the tools and books and household supplies brought in by the wagons were far more attractive. They were tangible, understandable things, made of sturdy materials and decorated in metallic lattice patterns.

But Handover would not be the manufacturer he was if the things he created couldn't compete with a bunch of dwarven music boxes and flint-lighters.

He had brought down from Dented Peak an enchanted kaleidoscope, and a trap of whispers, and something that was a sort of musical instrument, though it looked like a misshapen tuning fork. It sang at different frequencies depending on the magic used on it.

Shahum had heard from Viperion about that kind of instrument back on Elhoc, but it had been during an explanation about how the very scarcity of magic in Elhoc allowed such an instrument to work. In Aefwael, magic being so abundant, such things tended to snap. Quite dramatically, at times. 

Viperion had a lurid tale he would tell, of measuring instruments brought from Elhoc exploding when set to measure ambient magic levels in Aefwael. If Viperion was to be believed, that was how the first gorgonid general became a casualty of Aefwael, long before the war started.

How Handover managed to make such an instrument not only work, but produce pleasing sounds, was a mystery that Shahum was content to live with. And while the Heed adults were debating the relative benefits of gardening hoes, the children, at least, were enraptured with the little things Handover had brought.

Handover stood proudly peacocking as the tiniest of the Heed clustered around his offered objects and shouted amazement. The unabashed admiration was making Handover's retinue fawn over him as well, feeding into Handover's glowing pride even more.

Well, Shahum supposed it was something to keep Handover busy and out of trouble. At least until one of the children did something alarming with one of the offered objects.

At a casual glance around the square, Shahum picked out Spega, her arms crossed and her face twisted in stiff discomfort as she stood apart from the crowd, in the shade of a small tree laden with green fruit. 

"Who's the wallflower?" Vivasind asked, as she followed Shahum's gaze and spotted Spega as well.

"That is--Armella," Shahum answered, recalling the elven name that Spega used.

Vivasind snorted.

"No, it's not," she muttered. 

"No," he conceded, "but it's likely what she'll tell you." Then, seeking a change of subject, "I don't suppose you would know where to find a woman named Mamma Bevven?"

"I don't see how I could avoid knowing," Vivasind said. Her eyes turned bright and amused as she scanned over the village square, and then tilted her chin in a direction. "Next to your tall scaly fellow, over there."

Shahum indeed spotted Ixenkhi, holding a large cauldron as an old woman wagged her finger at him. By the way Ixenkhi was nodding, grave and with his face set in serious concentration, she was not scolding so much as lecturing. Well, as long as he was learning what he needed.

"This will be a curious day," Shahum said.

"Oh, I think it'll be hilarious too," Vivasind agreed, though he hadn't even meant it that way. He suspected she had a different grasp of the situation than she did.

Arbrindra helped him to his feet, but Spega and Tomasind were crouched on the ground, around the thin, suffering form of the elf who would have been long dead.

Yet, the chest of the creature expanded with inexplicable breath, and though its lips had shrunk and retracted so much that they no longer covered its teeth, words hissed out of the creature's mouth.

"Oh, my..." a voice as dry as dusty stone ground out, "what have you children done..."

Slowly the elf removed a bracelet from his wrist. He inspected the tarnished metal and the still impeccable gemstones, and then, once he was done, he dropped it. It thunked against the carpet with finality.

"My name," he said slowly, as he removed another bracelet; inspected it; dropped it, "is Grachion. I am protector of this household." Thunk.

His clothing was reduced to nothing but rags: perhaps once fine, but rotted away to threadbare material. The jewelry had once been fine as well, easy to tell even when it was reduced to little more than pretty rocks. Grachion dropped it all in a pile next to his armchair.

They had taken him to the nearest room they figured would be adequate for receiving guests, which both Shahum and Tomasind decided to be the spinners' music room. Candablera offered no objection, and in fact seemed pleased to be looped into the happenings, considering how rarely she left the room. She took this tacit acknowledgment of her importance with all the grace of a queen ensconced in her throne room.

Now she sat in her usual corner, with a cup of tea and a general air of interest regarding the proceedings.

"I assume you have questions," Grachion said, looking at the general assemblage and making an encouraging hand gesture. His eyes were gemstones too--not the same type as his jewelry, but faceted diamonds that seemed to have been placed into his skull at some point during his lifetime. Twin black motes inside the diamonds, like pupils, moved to indicate the direction of his gaze.

Tomasind and Shahum looked to one another, where they sat on the sofa. Arbrindra occupied another one of the armchairs, grinning with excitement, but apparently content to observe, and Spega merely paced the edges of the room with a scowl on her face; she was, by the look of it, thinking deeply on something.

"Are you dead?" Candablera asked, stepping neatly into the silence, but startling everyone else as she did. Still, it was not as though anyone else was asking anything. All heads turned to Grachion, expecting an answer.

"Not the first question I expected," Grachion said. "A bit indiscreet, wouldn't you say?"

"How would I know?" Candablera replied. "I am not familiar with the common mores of your society."

"That... hm. Yes, fair enough," Grachion relented. It was hard to tell any change of expression on his mummified face, but there was a certain downward pull to his eyebrows that implied dismay. His fingers tapped against the arms of his chair, a slow rhythm keeping time with idle thoughts.

"So are you dead, then?" came Tomasind's inquiry.

"Well. What do you think?" Grachion turned it neatly around. "Would I be sitting here talking to you if I were dead?"

For a moment, everyone looked at Grachion, but then every head in the room turned towards Tomasind, instead.

"Living people, you see," Tomasind said slowly, "do not spend centuries in tombs."

Grachion made an abortive sound in his throat, as if he was about to say something-- he might have even opened his mouth to speak, but for the fact that the shriveled skin of his face left him with a perpetually open mouth.

His fingers stopped their tapping for a while; this could not be the direction Grachion was expecting the conversation going, because his enthusiasm for it was draining visibly by the second.

"I see how that could muddy the waters," he admitted in the end. "Very well, then. We are best served by clarity in this situation. I am not dead in the typical sense. My essence is preserved, though the... accouterments of living are currently in an unfortunate state." He gestured to his desiccated body.

"Ah," was Tomasind's reply.

"You see, there are certain schools of magic that elves practice," Grachion began, "which may preserve an elf indefinitely."

"Like the Sidewinders. I'm familiar," Tomasind said.

Grachion's tapping fingers picked up in speed by an infinitesimal degree; the only sign of aggravation Grachion revealed.

"Goodness. The Sidewinders. All the way out in the desert. Hadn't even considered you'd be familiar with them," he muttered. Then, he shook his head. "Regardless, to answer your question, no, I am not dead. And the fortress is not to fall whilst I am between its walls and still alive. Is that a magic you are also familiar with?"

"It has been mentioned," Shahum replied.

Grachion actually sighed. He seemed put upon to be treated with far less awe than he thought his mere presence deserved. 

"How am I meant to educate you," he groused, "if you keep claiming to know these things?"

"Oh, are you meant to educate us?" Arbrindra asked with keen interest. "I'd be interested in assessing your competence at the task."

Grachion's diamond eyes settled on the dwarf, met her own glowing sparks. She was smiling at him, which did not strike him as being in a respectful manner at all. 

"Condescending little thing, aren't you?" Grachion bit out coolly.

"Is that what your professors usually said to you?" Arbrindra returned mildly. "Not a surprising insight into elven education, admittedly."

Tomasind rapped her knuckles against the nearby side-table, like a judge banging a gavel to order silence. Grachion realized he had lapsed into petulance, and harrumphed as he broke eye contact with Arbdrindra. For her part, Arbrindra could not have looked less repentant.

"There's no need to antagonize him," Tomasind said. "He is our guest."

Grachion actually stiffened in his seat, all elven indignation from head to toe, evident even in his dried out state. "I beg your pardon? A guest?" he said. "I have been here long before any of you, and were I to leave, there would be nothing left for you to inhabit."

"Pardon me, I will not stop anyone from being rude to you in your own home, then," Tomasind replied.

Grachion peered at her, narrowing his diamond eyes, the dark motes of his pupils growing darker. Tomasind stared back at him with her perfectly regular stare, the same bland, impassive expression she used on anyone at all, and in the face of this great equalizer, Grachion harrumphed again and decided to pick his battles.

"I do not think," he said, tone low and discontent, "that you fully understand my importance."

"You are the root that keeps the tree upright," Spega spoke from the other side of the room. Eyes turned to her in the startled moment of silence that followed, and even Grachion leaned forward in interest, as though the words had caught onto something vital, but under the sudden influx of attention, Spega grew sour and defensive, her shoulders hunching up. "Stupid way to make yourself important, just letting yourself be bricked up in a basement."

Then she turned around with a huff, pretending to inspect an old music stand with a flute propped onto it.

"You people make it sound like I got myself hurled into a pit," Grachion complained. "Nobody here understand the honor my position entails, do you?"

"No," came the reply from Tomasind. 

"Not really," Arbrindra piped up. Shahum shook him head, Candablera took a sip of her tea, and through the whisper-silk veil, it was hard to tell how much she cared, much less how much she understood.

"I ought to leave," Grachion said darkly, "See what you'll do without me here."

"Move down the mountain," Tomasind answered bluntly. She turned to Shahum, "I hope you wouldn't mind living with your in-laws."

"I suppose," Shahum drawled, "if that is how it needs to be. It would save us travel time to the rest of the Heed."

Tomasind nodded, like it was a perfectly sensible thing Shahum had said, before turning back to Grachion.

"Do you want to leave now, or in the morning?" she asked.

"You can't be serious," Spega blurted, whirling around as the music stand she was inspecting so thoroughly suddenly became far less interesting than the proceedings in the rest of the room.

"Why wouldn't I be?" Tomasind asked, still holding Grachion's gaze like she was expecting his answer.

"It isn't right," Shahum said slowly, "for someone to be imprisoned here at out expense. We could leave instead."

"Or that," Tomasind agreed. "Which would you prefer, Grachion?"

The entire room was poised to hear the answer. Spega was still sputtering in a corner, but Candablera and Arbrindra were merely watching in silence, as though this was some entrancing mummer's show taking place for their entertainment.

The one most distressed seemed Grachion--not by his face, which in its dried state barely had enough give to form expressions. But his hands, previously laid on the armrests of his chair, now bent back at the wrist, frozen in the middle of a recoiling gesture. His jaw might have dropped, though his mouth being perpetually open concealed just how much.

"That is absurd," Grachion sputtered. "You wouldn't--!"

"They would," Spega whispered with horrified realization, and that, more than anything, shook Grachion.

"What childishness," Grachion said, looking profoundly offended. "To simply abandon your domicile as though it were nothing. And for what, to spite me? To spurn someone who knows better than you?" He slumped back in his seat, shaking his head. "Childish, childish," he repeated mulishly.

Neither Tomasind nor Shahum seemed particularly affected by Grachion's insults, but Grachion himself turned far less cooperative after that.

He made no indication he wanted them to leave, at any rate, or that he wanted to leave himself; instead he demanded the best guestroom, which was as good as saying he intended to stay.

The decision came about by itself to allow Grachion his space for now. Arbrindra was disappointed she did not get to poke him further. Spega, by contrast, was relieved.

But they did not get to talk to him again by the next day, when another elf showed up at their gate.

"Strangers," Shahum said eventually.

Tomasind nodded, understanding. She disentangled herself from Shahum to step forward and meet the newcomers by the gates, her back straight and hands folded before her where they could be seen holding no weapon. Shahum retreated towards the shadows along the nearest wall, where the glare of the sun cut them darkest.

The three elves came atop their preferred type of mount, something closer to a gazelle than a goat, with spiraling horns that Shahum was surprised more of them didn't poke their eyes out on. The elf at the front of the triad was bedecked in finery, their hair so black it was shading into blue, and their skin a fine alabaster sheen, but more striking than anything was that they were covered in dozens upon dozens of emeralds connected by delicate silver chains, held in place on clothing and hair by pins and clasps. The effect was striking, but looked like they were wearing a very embellished fishnet more than anything.

The other two elves, likely guards or retainers, were not weighed down by impractical jewelry, but compensated by the ceremonial complexity of their armor's patterns, layered leather in fanning semi-circles.

The one in the emeralds took a look around the courtyard, their eyes sliding over Tomasind as though she was another feature of the architecture, despite the fact that she was standing just before them. But their survey was not all that careful, being more affectation than precaution, since they missed Shahum standing in the shadows of the wall.

"Can I help you or are you only here to impede traffic?" Tomasind asked.

The elf snorted in the face of this rudeness, keeping a jovial air as they finally looked down at her.

"Fetch me the master of this place," the elf said, "and there'll be a pretty gold coin for you."

Shahum felt a distant, unexplained pang of offense at the elf's words, though he couldn't put his finger on what the insult might have been. He had a keen instinct, however, that he was witnessing some kind of disrespect. Tomasind, for her part, gave the elf the same level look she gave to everyone when she was assessing how to react to something they did or said. It was the kind of look that didn't get parsed as friendly by most people, but Shahum had heard Vivasind call it her 'thinking face'.

Slowly, she extended a palm out.

"Gold first," she said.

The elf laughed, a dry, unamused sound, and gestured to one of their retainers. The one on the left reached into a pouch, and flicked a gold coin in Tomasind's general direction, if only just barely. Regardless, her hand shot out and caught it out of the air with remarkable speed.

She inspected the coin. She, in fact, took a very long time inspecting it, turning it over and over, enough times that Shahum could see the smugness start to drain off the elf's face and be replaced with frothing outrage. Then, once the elf's patience had been properly strained, Tomasind brought the coin to her mouth and bit on it.

The elf inhaled sharply, outrage finally boiling over.

"Good enough," Tomasind said, sounding begrudging in a way that was making the elf's face crumple into unpleasant lines.

Shahum suddenly understood the appeal of watching comedy plays.

"The master of the household, if you please," the elf gritted out.

"I am the lady of the house," Tomasind replied.

The elf's anger sputtered out into blank surprise. "You," the elf said, voice lacking any inflection.

"Me," Tomasind said, unruffled.

The elf opened their mouth to say something, closed it again, opened it once more. An incoherent little noise escaped their throat, before they finally gathered themselves to speak actual words again.

"You didn't mention that before I handed you the gold."

"More the fool you, then," Tomasind replied. "What do you want?"

The elf did not glare--in fact they reached out and pressed fingers to their brow like they were smoothing out wrinkles, or trying to tamp down on their exasperation with the human--but they were silent for a few long seconds before they finally looked to Tomasind askance and replied.

"I am here on behalf of a relative," they said eventually, visibly trying to look unaffected by all the blatant disrespect they'd just endured.

"Hm." Tomasind made a non-committal sound, looked around the courtyard. 

She might have been ready to indicate there were no relatives of the elves there, though Shahum was sure as much as she had to be that they were here about Grachion. He was still debating whether to step in when she turned to the elf again to answer.

"What errand did your relative send you on?" Tomasind asked.

"Why, reparations, of course," the elf replied smoothly. "For death incurred."

"For death," Tomasind repeated, her tone just as flat as the elf's has been earlier. "And who died?"

"None other than my honored father," the elf said, a hand going to their chest dramatically. Their decorative chains clinked together in a musical tinkle that mismatched the somber air they were trying to adopt. "Grachion, Third to Hold the Fields of Essorris, once pillar to his household."

"He's not dead," Tomasind said. "He's clogging up my best guest room."

The elf's face did not go through any new convolutions at this news, because the elf had, in fact, been locked in place by shock.

"...Pardon?"

"Grachion. He's not dead."

"He's-- No, I think you mistake me. The elf I speak of--"

"The one you bricked up."

"Th-that's a disrespectful way of describing--"

"Was disrespectful to brick someone up in my basement," Tomasind barreled right on over the elf's sputtering.

"It's hardly yours!"

"Too late for you to claim that. You already acknowledged me as mistress of the house."

The elf was working their way up to wheezing mad again. Shahum, seeing the way the elf's retainers were leaning forward in interest, probably thinking that if they cut Tomasind down there'd be no witnesses to say their master had acknowledged anything of the like, slunk out of the shadows and approached.

The three elves were instantly on alert, three pairs of eyes turning to Shahum like dogs sniffing the air and catching the scent of wolf. Very well, the war was not that far behind, especially for those with as skewed a sense of time as elves. But as Shahum meandered through the vines towards Tomasind, she shifted on her heels towards him, to make it all the clearer that they stood together.

"Have you any business with Grachion?" Shahum asked.

The elf and their retainers looked Shahum over with mild distaste, before their attention returned to Tomasind.

"You keep strange servants," the elf remarked.

"That is my husband," Tomasind returned.

The elf fell silent. Shahum didn't think elves were all that concerned about offering insult as they were about receiving, but that last exchange was apparently what finally put a cap to the entire conversation.

"I will return another time," they said, and steered their gazelle back out the gate with no further farewell. 

When the clink of jewelry and armor, and the thud of hooves against hard-packed earth finally grew distant, Tomasind snorted softly.

"They'll be back once they've had a hard think about what to say next," she informed him.

"Is this a matter for concern?" Shahum asked.

Tomasind shrugged her shoulders, but the smile she gave was rueful.

"A bit late for them to be concerned about Grachion, isn't it?" she muttered under her breath.

On the contrary, when Shahum and Tomasind decided to drop in on him that morning, it was evident he'd made himself comfortable. A fire was crackling in the fireplace, an armchair had been dragged towards the wide open windows, a few books were littered across various surfaces--one old tome was open face-down on the bed, and Tomasind put its spine out of its misery by picking up the book and using the attached bookmark before closing it.

Grachion himself ensconced himself onto the sofa, leaving only the chairs for his visitors, lest someone decided to cuddle up next to him on the sofa, and with the amount of dust he was shedding, Shahum suspected anyone would have found that an unlikely prospect.

"Aren't you a bit dry to have open flames in your room?" Tomasind asked, gesturing to the fireplace. She walked around the room with the critical eye of an innkeeper dealing with unwanted patrons.

"You say that as if I am made of kindling," Grachion sniffed. "Strong magics keep my body whole, if not entirely hale. The tether that keeps my soul inhabiting it is not so easily severed by damage."

"The fingers you need to turn pages on books are not so immune to severing, I suspect," Tomasind replied.

Grachion did not dignify that with a response.

He brushed some dust off his lap instead. He'd plundered the wardrobe for a resplendent robe: sky-blue, with birds in flight embroidered in silver thread along its hems, so lustrous that they seemed to move in truth at every change of light. It gave Shahum a bit of a headache to look at it, actually.

Tomasind did not take a seat, and so neither did Shahum. She stood behind one of the available armchairs, leaning against the backrest. Shahum lingered near the window, which looked out into the courtyard partially. Just a good enough view to have seen any drop-ins.

"I understand," Grachion said, "that I have had callers this morning." 

"They came to ask restitution for your death," Tomasind replied. 

This seemed to take the wind out of Grachion's air of self-importance.

"I am not dead," he said, sounding genuinely incensed by the notion. 

"They left when I pointed that out," Tomasind said.

"Just like that?" Grachion asked, now outright offended. "Am I worth nothing to my family but the coin of my lifeprice?"

This question was either posed rhetorically, or had a specific answer that someone was meant to give. Some reassurance, and assertion of Grachion's inherent importance, Shahum guessed.

Instead, Tomasind tilted her head one way, then the other, and shrugged, "I suppose so."

Grachion visibly bristled at this, offended to the very core of his desiccated being.

"They will be back eventually, of course," Tomasind replied.

"I do not require them to return," Grachion said. He shook his head and made a wide gesture of dismissal with his hand. "I've no need of them, and you may tell them so. Until they have understood the error of their ways, I see no reason to accept their visitation."

"I'll tell them so," Tomasind agreed.

It was not until they were out in the hallway that Shahum spoke.

"I take it this means Grachion is here to stay," he said.

"Until his family tiff is resolved," Tomasind agreed gamely, "and with elves, who knows how long that may take?"

Shahum did consider the question, turning over the notion of years and years in his head. He segmented that steady unfurling of time before him into goals now: how long it may take for merchant wealth to accumulate, for dwarven architects to come in and shore up the foundation, how the steady passage of months might inure his people to the Heed and vice versa, like two stones rubbing against one another until their shapes fit into one another seamlessly.

It felt foreign to him, the notion of having time enough. In wartime, he had always run up against time as an enemy, a dwindling resource, a force of nature always in opposition to him.

Tomasind's hand was in the crook of his arm, a gesture now so common that he had scarcely noticed. When he slowed his steps, she did so as well. He took her hand into his, and she turned to look at him, expectant.

And then he stopped.

"Yes?" she prompted, perhaps thinking he had been meaning to say something.

"I think," he began, and stopped again. What had he been meaning to say? It had to be something. He felt the urge bubbling up in him. He wasn't certain there were words to it. Actions, perhaps?

He leaned down and pressed his mouth against hers--fleeting, testing. 

Yes, this felt like what he'd wanted to do, he decided, and kissed her more firmly the second time. Her hands came to cradle his face, and his arms slid around her waist, and it was beginning to feel more and more accurate that this was what he wanted. Was accurate the word? ...He stopped thinking about it.