[Closed] [Mature] Dancing After Death

[Tom Cooke]

Riverside in the Three Flowers

Evening on the 38th of Loshis, 2720

B
y the time they finished, he was smiling again. He had picked up his bowl after Aremu, drinking the rest of the broth gratefully. He wasn’t full enough to be in pain. He laughed softly and raised a hand to the lad behind, looking over his shoulder at turns as the dock became nothing but a gleam of lights on the water. In the humid night air, not unpleasant, he could feel sweat prickling at the small of his back, cooler than the breeze.

He remembered Aremu’s shudder, when he’d spoken; for a while – for the first alley they turned onto, and almost to Tsuh’aqay – he wasn’t sure what to say anymore. Perhaps he never had been. I see something, he’d said, with a ‘maybe’ thick and unwieldy in his mouth. What did he see?

I see you, he could’ve said, which was worse than a sweet nothing. I see you, dove, I see you and that’s all, now kiss me and let’s forget about it. He might have cursed under his breath. The alley walls played strange with the lapping of the Turga not too far ahead, making the sound bounce back and over itself, an etheric wash.

I don’t know what to say; let’s agree to disagree.

I see it, he’d said, and could no longer take the words back.

At Tsuh’aqay, Aremu drifted to the edge of his field and beyond, toward one of the lanterns swinging gently in the breeze. Tom stood at the end of the light, watching the back of his head and the bright strip of his amel’iwe, his right arm tucked in his pocket, feeling oddly helpless. He looked back over his shoulder and found himself looking at the chalked verse, though he could understand the Mugrobi no more now than he had on the way to the docks.

Aremu turned, then, and broke the silence himself. He came closer, joining him where the light began to blur into the dark. He felt the moment he met his field: he felt it, strange and soft at the edges of his nerves.

He felt the warm brush of a hand, unexpected, and his throat caught.

It’s all right, where we are, Aremu said, then: I don’t mean to push you.

“You’ve nothing to apologize for,” he said again. “This is important.” If he hadn’t known better, he’d’ve leaned up and kissed him right there; he wasn’t sure how Aremu would feel about it just now, and there were too many shadows to tell who might be watching, but he burned to do it.

Aremu’s back was to the lantern. His silhouetted face didn’t tell him much more than the back of his head had. He could see where the light prickled at the edges of Aremu’s hair, caught the curve of one ear; he remembered running his fingertips along it just an hour earlier, and almost shivered. He could see the slope of his cheekbone, and the tight muscle of a cheek. He could almost, almost, see his lips, but the shadows made strange shapes of them, and the gleam of his eyes was lost underneath his brow.

The hand that brushed his, though, he took. “I didn’t know you felt that way. That, I – never…” Or maybe I did, he bit back, or maybe it’s still too strange for me to understand.

He squeezed his hand once, and didn’t let go. He sidled up closer; he took a couple of winding steps down the path, away from one light and toward another, a pool spilling out on the stones not too distant. He eased them closer to the water, looking out over Aremu’s shoulder at the Turga, watching the dark spot of a boat at some distance.

What did he see?

“What will it mean, if I see it?” he asked, looking over and up. His voice was quiet and measured; his brow was furrowed, and there was a tiny frown on his face.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Late Evening, 38 Loshis, 2720
Riverside, Three Flowers

He felt the soft skin of Tom’s hand beneath his callused fingertips, freckles smooth against the skin and the faint prickle of hair against him. He knew the hair was pale red, though in the darkness he couldn’t make out the color, and couldn’t even make out the small, thin hairs; even the freckles were only dark on dark, with the time he had to look.

Tom’s hand turned over in his, and took hold, and for all that Aremu knew better, his fingers twined with the other man’s. Tom drew him along the path, over towards the lapping edge of the Turga, rainy-season high, washing up along the stones and leaving patches of damp behind, again and again. They went above it, shoes clicking softly on the stones, where if it had been damp – earlier that day, the day before – it wasn’t, any longer, not yet.

Tom’s head was turned; his gaze, Aremu thought, went past him, and he felt the urge to turn and glance out over his own shoulder, to look at the water beyond. What do you see, there? He wanted to ask, and he didn’t ask that, either.

Tom shifted a little at his side; Aremu glanced down, and caught the half-reflected gleam of lantern light in the other man’s eyes, a spark of it. In the darkness Tom’s face was all shadows; his thin lips were turned down at the edges, his frown echoed in the lines on his cheeks and in his forehead.

“I don’t know,” Aremu said, and it felt to him like honesty.

They walked a few more steps in silence; Aremu looked out at the stones beyond, at the riverbank washing steadily in the dark, and found he could answer, so long as he did not look so directly at Tom. “I don’t know what I’m missing,” he said, quietly. “I can put a name on it, but I don’t understand, and I can’t understand, what it would be like to have a soul.”

“I know that I am profane,” Aremu went on, quietly, “and that there are men devoted to the Circle who worry for they should lose the favor of the Gods if they offered me their blessing. I know that I cannot know truth, and that there are those who see in me a path to losing their own honor, who feel that my presence would stain them.”

“I worry that you don’t know the risk you’re taking, with me,” Aremu said, carefully; his voice strained, though it didn’t crack. Strangely, speaking the words aloud, he did not feel so much like weeping; they drained something from him which had built up behind his eyes, and it wasn’t such a bad sort of emptiness. “Not the risk to your reputation, but to your honor, to your relationship with the mona. I know that, too, I cannot understand, but I have eyes; I know how I am treated, and how I am seen.”

The street came to an end, of a sense; it climbed up, just a little, and turned inward, to run along the river a little further in than before. Aremu stopped at the edge of the climb, just shy of the pool of blue phosphor light from the pier which stretched out from it, looking at the waves splashing against the rock wall below.

Aremu said nothing else; Tom’s hand was tight in his still, for all, he thought, that he was doing his damnedest to talk the other man away from him. The thought ached, bitterly, and yet – better, he thought, for Tom to realize now, if he could not have realized months ago. It would only, Aremu thought, grow harder, if he continued to let himself believe.

[Tom Cooke]

Riverside in the Three Flowers

Evening on the 38th of Loshis, 2720

I
don’t know, Aremu said, and he nodded, looking back at the path.

For a space, he didn’t know if Aremu would speak again. Aremu went on, though, and he listened. The imbala’s voice was steady against the rush and slosh of the river, as steady as the Turga itself, and he thought he’d never heard any other man speak so steadily of lacking a soul.

Once, it sounded as if he was pushing the words out through a tight, aching throat, but he didn’t look over to see if there were tears on the other man’s cheek. He didn’t protest. He looked down at their feet and the stones, mostly, broken pieces fit tightly into each other, worn flat by flooding.

Aremu stopped at length, just beyond the wash of blue phosphor where the path wound up, and Tom drew in a deep breath. “Ah,” he said, letting it out, looking up. The other man was looking over, into the water.

That’s why they turned you out, he thought. Not like in Anaxas, where it’s simple fear, the same kind of fear I felt, the same kind of fear I still feel sometimes in Brunnhold. But they realized one day what you were, and they believed – they knew it true, because they were arati, and what your pain tells you means nothing, because you know nothing of the truth – they knew, like you do now, that you’d…

Stain, was the word Aremu had used. He’d never heard him use that word. Something in him cringed from it; he'd just managed not to shudder. He imagined ink spreading through water. Or white cloth.

“That’s what you were trying to tell me.” He took them on and up a little, into the soft blue glow.

At first it was just his hand in Aremu’s, fingers all knit up; then he brushed his shoulder against him, then let it stay there. Then he leaned, feeling the curve of Aremu’s muscles through their sleeves. Finally, he laid his cheek on his shoulder, feeling the warmth of him through the thin linen.

I’m sorry, he couldn’t say. I’ve always wanted to walk like this with you, even if we can never do it in the light. He shut his eyes a moment; he held onto his hand.

A stone wall rose up on the Turga side as the path wound higher, knee-high at first and then hip-high, and chest high not too far ahead. “You think,” he went on tentatively, easing away and looking up at Aremu, brows raised like a question, “I’ll begin to understand the risk, and see the – that path in you, that path to dishonor. And if I don’t, you still believe you’re that path.”

His hip ached. The night is young, he thought, sighing, and so am I, flood it, but this body isn’t. He stopped before the wall went any higher.

With a wan smile, he guided Aremu to it and sat down, and patted the stone beside him with his free hand. There was no one around; at this middling height, the wall blocked them from view of the pier, and the way was narrow. “Aremu,” he said, swallowing a hard lump, “you took me to a bar, and I didn’t get drunk.”

He let go of his hand, folding both in his lap. He shut his eyes; he steadied his breath.

“What I said I saw,” he said, scratching his jaw, “I – it’s not a stain. I know what I see, what I – feel,” he swallowed, “and I don’t believe it could ever mean that to me. I know it couldn’t mean that.”

[Aremu Ediwo]

Late Evening, 38 Loshis, 2720
Riverside, Three Flowers

There was understanding in the midst of all this; Tom’s hand was in his, still, tangled closer, and then the other man leaned against him, warm through the thin cloth of his long-sleeved shirt, warm against the coolness of the breeze of the Turga, which cut through even the amel’iwe draped over Aremu’s shoulders. Tom shifted against him, and he felt the press of the flat plane of the other man’s cheek, gentle against him.

That, Aremu wanted to say. If this is a goodbye, Aremu wanted to say, it’s a pretty terrible one. He knew it wasn’t; he couldn’t but know. His breath was more unsteady than he might have liked, caught in his chest, somewhere which ached and warmed, all at once.

It wasn’t so long before Tom spoke again, his words drifting through the blue light before them, out onto the Turga beyond.

“Yes,” Aremu agreed. I know it, he wanted to say; I know I am. All the evidence of my eyes – of my life – tells me I am. And yet, he thought, what did he know? It made a mockery of truth, he thought, to speak so, when what he knew was very little indeed, when he did not know what he was capable of knowing, especially when it came to these metaphysical matters. Better, he thought, to let Tom put it in his own words, to accept the truth the other man could find for them.

Tom brought them both to the wall which drew a line between the path and the Turga; he sat, and after a moment, thinking of lightning over the Mahogany, Aremu sat as well, one foot on the ground and the other lifted up, heel pressed against the edge of a stone which stuck out from the wall. He turned, slightly, looking at Tom, and waited, because he didn’t think the othe man yet through.

You took me to a bar, Tom said, and I didn’t get drunk.

Aremu blinked; he frowned, feeling it in the lines of his face, the familiar motions of it inescapable, and not in the least what he’d meant. I – the credit for that, he wanted to say, fumblingly, isn’t with me – you’re the one who chose not to drink – I didn’t… I don’t deserve –

The sentence was harder to finish than he’d thought. I don’t deserve the credit for that, he wanted to say, but Tom had not quite credited him, only drawn a line. I don’t deserve, he wanted to say, to be associated with that triumph, if you view it a triumph – they edged around it, he thought. He had felt the best he could do for Tom was to avoid it, to keep from drinking before the other man, as a general rule; he was abstemious by nature, and it did not bother him.

Tom went on, and Aremu was relieved not to have to answer, for he wasn’t sure how he could. Not a stain, Tom said, firm and unrelenting. What I feel, Tom said, and Aremu looked up at him, once more, at the long freckled scratching his jaw, watching the soft bobbing of his throat in the dark, just visible in the gleam of reflected light.

I don’t believe it could ever mean that to me, Tom said.

In the heartbeat after the words, Aremu thought he could have nodded, and accepted them for how they were meant, and let it fade between them, all this talk of what he was and was not, what he could never be and what Tom was. Yes, he wanted to say, of course; I know you love me, Tom.

I know it couldn’t mean that, Tom went on.

Aremu’s breath caught again; he shuddered, and his hand tightened in the fabric of his pants, and then released. For all the other man’s voice was soft – tender, Aremu would have called it – there was a certainty in the words and phrasing, and for all he turned them over he could not find a hole to poke in them.

What I feel, Tom said, then.

“What do you feel?” Aremu asked, quietly, because that, at least, he knew how to answer; the rest of it was too strange to put together. Love, he thought Tom would say – or else – he didn’t know how to ask, any more directly, nor how to tell Tom that there might, after all, be something inside him to feel. Not a soul; he knew it couldn’t be that, but a something, after all.

[Tom Cooke]

Riverside in the Three Flowers

Evening on the 38th of Loshis, 2720

H
e felt Aremu settle in beside him. When he opened his eyes, it was to the shadows across the narrow street. The building opposite was caught in a wash of blue light, stucco stippled with shadows. There was a zigzag flight of metal stairs leading to a door one a floor up, looking recently-made.

He studied the wall. The stucco was wearing away on one side at street level, where the path started to slope down. Maybe he was in a ghoulish cast of mind; it looked to him like flesh peeling away from muscle and bone. The stone underneath was mottled dark brown and grey, creeping with old stains.

Hints of green caught the light, gleaming, spilling between the cracks between stones, crawling along the base. He stared at them; he almost squinted. With his poor eyes, they were just hints.

His hands were tight where he’d folded them together; he tried to loosen them. In the corner of his eye, he saw Aremu’s hand in the tan fabric of his lap, stripped of color in the dim phosphor light. The fingers curled, tightened against his thigh, then loosened.

He thought he’d heard Aremu’s breath catch.

The other man had said nothing, before that. I know, he’d wanted to say, I know. Honor’s not the same as goodness, or even sobriety. Aremu, he wanted to say, how else can I tell you you do good things for my head? It’s not elegant and it’s not honor, but I’m Anaxi, and I’m a tired, dead man; that there, that’s how my love is shaped.

He’d moved on from it, anyway. He’d heard Aremu’s breath catch, he thought; he’d gone on anyway, but in the silence that followed, whispering with the Turga lapping at stone far below and behind, he began to wonder. He glanced down where he could see Aremu’s shoe in the shadows, propped against an uneven stone.

What do you feel? came Aremu’s voice, quiet and strangely intent. He couldn’t read it. He glanced up and over, but he couldn’t read the line of his cheekbone, the line of his lips in profile, the set of his brow in the dark.

What do you see? he might’ve rather expected. You, he might’ve said, all of you, even what you tell me you lack; if you weren’t – if you hadn’t – you wouldn’t be you, and we would never’ve – he didn’t know.

There was something in Aremu’s voice he couldn’t read.

I shouldn’t’ve said it, he wanted to say suddenly, something creeping at the back of his neck. I don’t know how you feel about it; I don’t know what you call it, and it never seemed right to ask.

He swallowed tightly. “I feel you,” he said quietly.

With my hands, he tried to say, first. With my heart. He reached for Aremu’s hand, fingertips brushing the linen of his trousers, finding the fine bones along the back of it, the skin warm and smooth, broken up with its familiar bumps and lines here and there.

He willed himself not to search for anything else; he didn’t ask himself whether he felt it now. “I don’t know if I disturbed you, with what I did back then. In Dentis,” he said. “I –”

He found himself looking at a patch of fresher stucco opposite, messy and broad, about the height of a man. A plastered-over door, he thought absently. He looked up at the stairs again, studying the shadows.

“When you’re casting, you’re not… exactly yourself; the mona, they – you feel full of them – I felt you come in, behind me, before I heard you. I was so happy you were there with me, I reached out without thinking.” His fingertips were still hesitant on Aremu’s hand, wondering if this was another caprise he was forcing.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Late Evening, 38 Loshis, 2720
Riverside, Three Flowers

Aremu watched Tom; the other man’s eyes were focused across the street, on the old building there with moss creeping up in the wake of the river. He looked down, once, as if at his own sandal-clad foot and the smooth-worn stones beneath.

Only when Aremu spoke did Tom glance up and over; again, there was the distant hint of light in his gray eyes. It was easy, Aremu thought, almost, to see his face here, when it was all shadows; it wasn’t so dark as to make him invisible, and in the dim Aremu could find the slope of the other man’s nose, the sharp planes of his cheek, the lines of his jaw.

I feel you, Tom said. Aremu looked down, seeing the other man’s fingertips coming over the back of his hand, stroking the skin and scars lightly. Of course, he wanted to say; I understand. For once, he didn’t take it for anything less than what he thought it was. It mattered to him, too, their physicality; they had always been good together, instinctive, and tonight – perhaps, he thought, for the first time since – he felt as if they’d finally found that again, for all he’d never minded the searching.

Tom went on, and spoke of Dentis. Aremu frowned, looking over at him; Tom’s gaze was fixed across the street again, firmly, as if he were searching for something. Someone, Aremu thought, and he shifted to look as well – but Tom’s hand was still on his, and Aremu thought if he’d seen anyone, he would have pulled away.

I reached out, Tom said.

I feel you, he said.

Aremu felt it like a shiver down his spine. He ran his tongue over his lips; he shifted, uncertain. His hand turned over beneath Tom’s, and held on, more tightly than he’d meant to.

“It’s been named a nexus,” Aremu said, slowly, speaking the word aloud. Nexus. More than once he had thought of how to tell Ahura, if he should tell Ahura – but he had never felt her, in that way, and he had never quite known how to say it. Nexus, he might have told her: iqidi, he thought, or else dzar, or perhaps tsúzeqaqa, though the last had never quite felt right to him. Nexus. He didn’t know enough to translate it, and he had let that stop him.

“There’s a professor at Brunnhold,” Aremu went on, “Harper Moore, who devised an experiment to detect them. I can’t… feel my own, but I’ve…” his throat moved in a silent swallow; he shifted against the stones, “felt them in others,” he said, finally.

I haven’t wanted to speak of it, Aremu wanted to say; I haven’t spoken of it, for all that… I’ve known about it, he didn’t want to say, since Roalis. I don’t know what it means; I don’t see how it can mean anything.

“Not a soul, I think,” Aremu said, more evenly now, finding his way back to more familiar territory; these were only thoughts spoken aloud, and he found he could bear the speaking, “but something, where I thought I was empty.” He exhaled out the last of his breath, feeling it tickle against his nose and lips.

He shifted, looking down at his hand wrapped around Tom’s; he looked up at the other man, uncertain, and cleared his throat. “I don’t know what it means or if it matters; I didn’t know how to tell you,” he said, quiet, a little helpless. “I didn’t feel it, when you… caprised me, in Dentis,” the word didn’t seem right, but he wasn’t sure of a better one. “Reached for me,” Aremu said, instead, softly.

He trailed off, there; he wasn’t sure how to go on, or what to say. He looked at Tom, frowning still, a trace of breeze whistling off the stones, rustling lightly both their hems.

[Tom Cooke]

Riverside in the Three Flowers

Evening on the 38th of Loshis, 2720

A
remu shifted as if uncomfortable, and there was the quiet sound of him licking his lips. He shut his eyes, waiting for it. The hope bled out of him at once; he’d yanked the rug out from under his own feet. He should’ve taken his hand away.

I am not, he wanted to insist, I am not a man who lays hands on another man without…

He blinked his eyes open when he felt Aremu’s hand turn underneath his. Their fingers knit together again, and the other man squeezed – held tight – his eyes widened slightly, searching the frown on Aremu’s face, searching the eyes that’d been on him for a while now. He could see them in the phosphor light now, shot through with gleaming blue reflections.

Nexus, he repeated after Aremu, not quite giving voice to it. That doesn’t sound very Mugrobi to me, he wanted to say.

His brows lifted, when Aremu went on.

Moore. The name rang a bell, but nothing about – passivity; specs, he thought, or film, or radio, or some newfangled thing like that. Then, he supposed this kind of research, even if it were well-lit, wouldn’t be plastered all over the Great Library’s desks and aisles and carrels in flyers and cards.

Brunnhold, he wanted to repeat still, dumbfounded. The next second: of course, Brunnhold. Experiment. Aremu hadn’t spoken the name with mistrust or disdain, but he couldn’t read the other man’s slow, even tones, not in this. He wondered then, for the first time, how Aremu had come to know of such a thing.

Dentis, then? he wondered, though he felt himself overstepping with his curiosity. Uzoji and Moore? He shook it off. Uzoji’s business, he’d said, and he’d no wish to skirt too close to the King’s business, nor step on Aremu’s privacy. Aremu had gone to him for trust.

Not a soul, I think, Aremu went on, and his brow furrowed. He’d veered away from those strange, slow tones, and into a more familiar cadence. This, Tom thought with a mixture of chagrin and helplessness, this, Aremu sounded more comfortable with.

That was what kept him from asking: empty? Was I empty to you, once? He felt it; it stung, but it was weak and brief. This wasn’t about him, and he thought by now he knew something of what Aremu’s response would be. It was an empty thing to say.

His eyes followed Aremu’s down to their hands. He ran his thumb over Aremu’s, gentle and rhythmic. How long have you known? he wanted to ask. Others? Can you feel –

Aremu glanced up before he did; he heard the familiar clearing of his throat, and then – he met his eye, frowning. Caprised, Aremu said first. Reached out, then.

I didn’t feel it, Aremu had said. He ran a hand through his hair and breathed out through his nose, a soft echo of Aremu.

“I, ah, I didn’t know how to ask, either,” he murmured. “I thought I might’ve crossed a line, by caprising you without asking or warning. I’m not – I wasn’t – used to what I can do and what I can feel now, and it was the first time I ever… I had never caprised anyone before; I couldn’t figure out how, before that.” He swallowed. “I’ve felt it for a while, but that was when I realized.”

It was still washing through him, bit by bit.

“Nexus,” he repeated quietly, finally. “I was – very curious,” he admitted, feeling a prickling in his cheeks. “It’s a part of you.” Every part of you matters to me.

He studied Aremu’s face. He didn’t ask himself, still, if he could feel it here. He wanted to, and he chid himself.

“You didn’t –“ You didn’t have to tell me, ever, he thought to say, but he thought it sounded too much like, You shouldn’t’ve, or might in the other man’s ears. “Does it trouble you to talk about it?” he asked instead, tilting his head. With me, he wondered.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Late Evening, 38 Loshis, 2720
Riverside, Three Flowers

Tom’s thumb stroked over his hand, soft against the bumps of his knuckles, the lines where the bones stood out, just a little, against the skin. He was frowning, Aremu thought, and he felt as if he had overstepped – as if he should have spoken earlier, as if he never should have spoken – as if the window had closed, or else had never been open.

Tom sighed, and Aremu read an Ever’s worth into it, and let them all go when he began to speak.

Your first, Aremu wanted to say, absurdly, coy; he nearly did, though he bit the words off for fear of interrupting Tom. It brought a little trembling smile to his face, all the same. Your first, he still half-wanted to say, grinning, as if to nudge an elbow into Tom’s ribs; he thought the other man might have found it funny. He didn’t; such jokes, such levities, always seemed foreign to him. He rarely thought of them in time, and even thinking of this one, he could not be sure, quite, if it was how he meant to speak.

He did not, Aremu thought, want to be taken for trivializing the accomplishment of Tom’s field, which had come so far these last months. Words seemed to leave his mouth and take a shape of their own in the air, and he could not control what they looked like in the end, or how they felt. All of this was sharp, viciously, brutally sharp, and he still felt rubbed raw by it; he did not know how he could be sure his words would soothe Tom, and not irritate him further.

Surely, he wanted to believe, surely – if he were so profane, so bad as so many believed, then Tom’s having caprised him would have… he wasn’t sure how to put words to it. He remembered, still, tenderly and fondly and a little afraid, what it had been like to sit in the midst of the other man’s spell circle, all those lines traced out around them.

Surely, he wanted to believe – but he knew better. That path, Aremu thought, to dishonor. If Tom didn’t see it – if Tom, he let himself think, would never see it – he knew it was there, still; what good would it do to behave otherwise?

It’s a part of you, Tom said; Aremu found he was still smiling, though it was a small, strange, fragile thing, and he could not have said how long it would last.

“No,” Aremu said, slowly; his brow wrinkled a little, though it didn’t fade. It troubled me, he wanted to say, but I think I’ve made my peace with it. It’s strange to think there’s something which… exists, in me, unknown, which none of them know about. I don’t think it matters; perhaps there’s something in me that wants to, but I know better than to hold out such false hope. Not about my own profanity; not about my soullessness; there’s nothing to be gained for me in such pretenses.

This, Aremu thought, wasn’t a pretense. He sat there with Tom’s hand in his, with the wash of the other man’s sage-soft field all around him, and Tom looking at him through soft, dark eyes. This, he thought, with a little prickle of something he couldn’t quite find it in himself to name, he could trust.

“… You feel me,” Aremu said, then, very quietly; he found his face easing, again, some tension sinking out of his shoulders. He swallowed, looking at Tom. “Can you feel me now?” He asked. Their hands were still joined together, tightly, in what space there was between them. He wasn’t gripping quite so hard as he had been, but he held on, all the same, not in the least wanting to let go.

[Tom Cooke]

Riverside in the Three Flowers

Evening on the 38th of Loshis, 2720

I
can,” he replied. He was smiling now tentatively; he was studying Aremu’s face.

The question had been simple, and he hadn’t asked more. It’d been an easy one to answer. Yes, he could say, matter of fact: he felt it. Like something in the corner of his eye that’d always been there, familiar to the point of certainty, but that he’d never cared to turn his head and look directly at.

There was a tiny smile on Aremu’s lips, unsteady at the edges like a line from a wavering pen. He couldn’t’ve said everything that was in the other man’s eyes; he could guess at some of it, for a change, but much of it was still in the dark. If it hadn’t been mad to say, he’d’ve said there was something like amusement – something like the look a man gets when he’s just about to tell a joke, when he’s got himself tickled over something – just moments ago, and that was the strangest thing of all.

It was contagious. He found himself on less unsteady footing, or perhaps it was that he’d exchanged unsteady footing for no footing at all. This, this was an utterly foreign landscape.

I didn’t hurt you, he kept thinking anyway, picturing that amused little smile. Tentatively, tenderly relieved.

“It’s,” he started; he paused. Aremu was still holding his hand, still watching him.

He asked himself if he saw more in Aremu’s eyes than just that question, but there were no answers. He felt selfish for his curiosity, and strange for the strength of it.

He’d told him in the fall, in the study, what he’d felt to be his qalqa. The opening of doors he’d thought then, even asking Aremu into the bath, even asking him into the ward to sit quietly and breathe, Aremu would’ve rather left shut. Would’ve rather – he remembered the word profane on his lips, and the smell of sick in the air. Would’ve rather seemed an understatement.

He felt the breeze ruffle his hair; he heard a clatter and a man’s shout somewhere down the pier, distant from where they were hidden, echoing off the water.

The study seemed as far away as anything Anaxi, but this was still a side of Aremu he’d never seen or guessed at. It was a prickle of the unknown, a ripple on the skin of very deep waters.

“I’m so used to it being there,” he went on tentatively, “it’s… hard to describe, without reaching out again. It’s always just felt like you were near me.” He smiled softly. “But there’s something very familiar about it; I can’t think of why.” He shut his eyes, trying to focus on what he could feel, and sucked at a tooth.

It wasn’t a field; fields, he knew, were made up of the mona, specific mona that stuck around when you’d called them enough. It didn’t feel monic, but when he asked himself what it did feel like, it slipped his grasp. It wasn’t a force, like a push or a breeze. He asked himself if he could feel Aremu in it, and he couldn’t’ve said.

Familiar, he wondered. If he followed that train of thought, it slipped away, too. He’d an impression of Ezre, a vague memory of sharp pain in his hand, but that didn’t make any sense.

He opened his eyes. “You can’t feel it?” he asked. “How long have you known?” He trusted him to turn it aside by now, if it were a question he couldn’t answer.

He thought of lodestones suddenly, of a lecture he’d attended not too long ago at Away’qexo. Ancient arati compasses.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Late Evening, 38 Loshis, 2720
Riverside, Three Flowers

Tom didn’t hesitate; he didn’t, Aremu thought, have to think, or to make an effort. He was not so easy with it, or so he thought; sometimes in Laus Oma or Western Port he thought he felt them, but he never quite found himself sure.

Tom was smiling, too, a little hint of it on his lips, tucked into the corners of his eyes, and warm in the steady, firm grip of his hand.

Aremu shuddered; he couldn’t have said why, exactly. He ran his tongue over dry lips, the faintest brush of it. If he were honest with himself, or as close as he knew how to be, Aremu thought, part of what had kept him from speaking of it to Tom was the fear the other man wouldn’t feel it, or would feel it only in the wanting to.

It hadn’t been only that fear. He was, Aremu thought, still, cautious of making too much of it. It was, after all, almost certainly nothing more than some strange leftover scrap of what he should have been, and meaningless. At the same time, there was – something, he thought, even if it was only a scrap, and it was something Tom could feel. He struggled with it, even now, the desire to grin like a boy warring with the knowledge that being solemn – straightforward, not denying it, but not celebrating it either – was how he should behave.

It was, too, that he hadn’t known how to bring it up, or at least he could let himself believe that. It had seemed to him awkward and strange to do it suddenly, to come out of nowhere and say to Tom that – there might, in the end, be something to feel in him, after all.

He was still smiling; despite all of the fear and uncertainty, despite the knot of anxiety somewhere in his chest, it couldn’t seem to touch the smile on his face. Tom was smiling too, and that only reinforced it, as if – as if, Aremu thought, finding his widening a little fraction, they were reflecting one another.

He hadn’t needed more of an answer than that; he hadn’t expected one. He wasn’t sure what to ask; he couldn’t have described what he’d felt, when he’d felt it.

Tom went on, all the same, and Aremu listened, soaking up every word, letting them wash over him and fill them up, and clinging to them in his memory, as if he could hold them forever. Familiar, Tom said, thoughtfully, sucking on a tooth in that old familiar gesture, the one that looked more than anything else as if he should, still, have a head and a half of height on Aremu, and a bushy beard in which to hide his frown.

“Not my own,” Aremu said, after a moment. I don’t think, he wanted to say. He thought – he wasn’t sure. He knew, of course, that a galdor could feel their field; it doesn’t seem to be like that, he thought to say. His throat moved in a swallow, and he shifted, frowning, thinking it over. He wasn’t sure – he didn’t think Tom needed the answer, per se, or at least that he wasn’t asking, really, about the timing.

“Some seasons,” Aremu offered, instead; let Tom think it Dentis, if he wanted. It wasn’t quite inaccurate, he thought, because he had known before but he wasn’t sure he had believed. It didn’t seem right to him to betray that he had known earlier, for all that it stopped far short of mentioning who had told him.

“It was hard for me to accept,” Aremu said, after a moment; he shifted, slightly, against the stones once more, glancing at Tom; his leg lowered, toe resting against the ground, “or, at least, to know what to make of it. I’d never heard of such a thing here, and I…”

He shifted, quiet; thoughts bubbled up, thoughts he almost hadn’t known he had. He frowned, looking down at the ground, and then back at Tom, and felt the smile tug at the corners of his lips once more. “I don’t always feel them,” he said, shaking his head slightly. “I went for a walk in the Liar’s Market my first week in Thul Ka, and… a few times, perhaps, I thought I felt… perhaps it was that it was too noisy, too busy. I don’t know. I still don’t know what to make of it all, I think.”